Category: Business

How to Save the US Post Office

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It turns out that the USPS makes much of its money from junk mail, and
Zac Bissonnette has a brilliant way to use this to make the big banks bankroll the Post Office, which is a good way to support Saturday service, and its flat rate for anywhere in the country:

Almost daily, I receive at least one pre-approved credit card offer from a big national bank that received bailout money from U.S. taxpayers. I hate big banks, and I hate bailouts, and I really hate it when my bailout money is used to send me junk mail I didn’t ask for and don’t want.

………

Instead, a grassroots bailout — this time, of the post office. This time, paid for by the bailed-out banks. We can do it. Here’s how: From now on, don’t just throw out those credit card offers. Instead, put the paperwork in the “postage will be paid by addressee” envelope (first removing anything with your name on it) and drop it back in the mailbox. You’ve just transferred the cost of mailing that letter from the not-so-needy Chase/Citi/Bank of America to the oh-so-needy USPS. Who needs Robin Hood when we have postage-paid envelopes?

The U.S. has 307 million people. If each person received an average of just one credit card offer a month (most adults get more than that, while children get none) and mailed it back to the bank without a signed application, at a cost to the bank of 44 cents postage, U.S. consumers could transfer $135 million a month from the banks to the Postal Service.

Truth be told, the net for the USPS is less than that, but it’s probably at least a dime, since much of what we pay is for maintaining the the postal infrastructure.

I’m not suggesting that you use it to send a brick, that would be abusive, but it is a good way to generate some additional revenue for your Postal Service.

It also has the advantage of raising the cost to junk mailers to sending you this crap, which might make them send you less crap.

US Aerospace/Antonov Out of KCX Competition

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Rather unsurprisingly, they missed the deadline, which is not surprising, since they seemed not ready for prime time.

Equally unsurprising is the fact that they have filed a protest with the GAO.

The cynic in me wonders if that was not the intention the whole time, to kinda file, and then use a GEO protest as a way to generate some ransom money.

Then again, now that the details have come out, the messenger showed up at the gate at 1:30, was delayed there, and then given bad directions by the gate guards, resulting in a 2:05 stamp, 5 minutes late, perhaps it is incompetence, or maybe the USAF had enough of this crap, and decided to play some hardball as US Aerospace claims.

Pass the popcorn.

You might as well watch. Your tax dollars are paying for this.

It’s Not, “Not So Bad,” It Sucks

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It appears that lawmakers on both the state and federal level are starting to look at the salaries of senior executives for tax-exempt organizations.

What I love is the quote from M. Cass Wheeler departing CEO of the American Heart Association:

“If you peeled all that [outrageous supplemental pension and other provisions] back, you’d get to a base salary less than $600,000,” he said.

OK, so your base is almost 1½ times that of the President of the United States of America, and you are doing charity work, and we are supposed to be OK with that.

No, we aren’t.

Neither should we be OK with hedge fund managers making over a billion dollars a year, but for non-profits, we are subsidizing the donations that pay their salary.

Enough.

I would note that the most egregious examples are in “not for profit” hospitals, which would imply to me that these institutions are “not for profit” as a fig leaf.

News of the Unsurprising

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It turns out that one of the reasons that executive compensation has been skyrocketing lately is that compensation boards game the system to maximize pay for the executives, who, after all, hired them in the first place.

Imagine that.

I would remind everyone that the pot for wages are not infinite: When they get 7 or 8 figure paychecks, it means that everyone else there gets less.

I once figured that Michael Eisner’s compensation at one point in the mid 1990s, $550,000,000.00,* or about $73.45 a second, would have added about $6.00/hour to the pay of every Disney employee, which in turn would likely have saved money through reduced turnover.

It doesn’t matter to them though, they just want to make more than the next CEO.

*For that, he did some rather wooden dialogue with Mickey Mouse on the Wonderful World of Disney. For that kind of money, the mouse should have been able to do him like Marlon Brando did Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris.

This is a Stupid Idea

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Boeing is proposing a C-17 variant with a 4 foot narrower fuselage, the theory being that if it is too expensive to operate, this model will be a bit cheaper, though it won’t be able to carry (1) Abrams tank or (2) Bradley IFVs, though it could carry Stryker class vehicles.

Unless this is some sort of idea to get some more pork through the US Congress, this is a stupid idea.

While the reduction in takeoff weight, as well as an increase in installed thrust, it will still be outperformed by modern turboprops, and in terms of economy per ton mile, low wing commercial freighters will be cheaper to operate, as well as being about 50kts faster.

It just doesn’t make sense.

The Kimberly Process is a Bad Joke

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The process, intended to prevent the sales of diamonds that are mined by entities, largely guerrilla armies, who systematically violate human rights, better known as “Blood Diamonds.”

Well, the Kimberly Process has now allowed Zimbabwe to sell diamonds from its Marange diamond fields.

Not only has the diamond mining there been rife with allegations of human rights abuses, included killings and forced labor, but the proceeds go directly to support the cronies in Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF:

Zimbabwe has been denied formal approval for its Marange diamond exports since evidence began to emerge around 2008 that the military had overrun the area to take control of the fields and organize smuggling of diamonds across the nearby border with Mozambique. Human rights activists say they suspect that profits are being used to finance the political and military elite around President Robert Mugabe.

Seriously, any certification of diamonds by the Kimberly Process, or the World Diamond Council, are simply not credible.

Motivation, and What Works

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It Sounds good, but is it true?

I know that American, or more accurately Anglo-Saxon, management styles suck. We have no better examples than the economic meltdown, the collapse of 2 of the big 3 auto makers, BP, etc.

The overpaid masters of the universe model is a failure, and I would argue that it was eminently foreseeable.

Certainly the ideas and techniques suggested here are worth a try, and in any case, the cartooning on a white board is worth the 10 minutes 48 seconds.

H/t The Big Picture

You Know, This Might Explain Why We Aren’t Seeing a Real Recovery

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US businesses have accumulated $1.84 trillion in cash and cash like assets, and they have essentially stuffed their mattresses with them.

So instead of investing in new plants and equipment, or in product or process improvement, they are holding onto cash, because they are concerned that the banks, the ones that we the taxpayers bailed out to the tune of trillions, will cut off their credit.

A Contemptible Excuse for an Educator…

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And a contemptible excuse for a human being.

And no, I am not referring to DC schools chief Michelle Rhee, who by all indications subscribes to a similar policy, but rather New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein, because all he thinks that all that has to happen to fix schools is to make teacher’s jobs crappier:

Klein told Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute last week that the D.C. contract is marvelous and in fact ground-breaking. ‘This deal slayed The three dragons. Seniority. Lockstep pay. Tenure. It got them all.’

(emphasis mine)

I understand that management does not like labor unions, and does not like the protections that union contracts afford to workers.

So I can understand how an administrator might see a weakening or destruction of a labor union as a step on the road to school improvement, or at least a step on the road to making his job easier.

That being said, what Mr. Klein is saying here is that crappifying the teacher’s working conditions is The Only Thing that is required to fix schools. That is what he is saying when he talks about the three dragons.

School reformers view education like investment bankers, and other chief executives, view their jobs: They have no obligation to work for the stake-holders, children and teachers for schools and the shareholders and employees for businesses, they simply have to work for their own personal benefit.

It’s not about education, it’s about making things more convenient for administrators, you see.

I can’t speak to whether or not Michelle Rhee holds the same opinions as her one time mentor Joel Klein,since she hasn’t explicitly stated that she holds this view, as Klein clearly has.

My guess is that she holds these views, particularly since she went out of her way to ensure that millions in private funding for the DC schools was dependent her continued employment as the Chancellor. (Scroll down past the snark about her fiancee.)

This is why, when I hear people like Rhee and Klein talk about accountability, or when I hear someone like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sing the praises of charter schools (which, by the way don’t outperform public schools), I roll my eyes.

The culture of American management for the past 30 years or so has been to maximize personal gain at the expense of both the enterprise the society as a whole, and I guess that this is just a reflection of this warped value system.

While it is a revolting and reprehensible development as a nation-wide trend, it’s just plain evil when our children, and their ability to become thoughtful citizens to the alter of executive expedience.

Viacom Case Against Google Thrown Out

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The judge said that the safe harbor provision of the DMCA indemnifies Google, and granted Google’s motion for summary judgement, and dismissed Viacom’s lawsuit against Google/Youtube.

My guess is the fact that Viacom was itself posting illegal material to Youtube as a pretext for the lawsuit had a lot to do with this.

I will note that the author, Greg Sandoval quoted an “expert” from the libertarian group the PFF saying that it would be overturned without noting that both litigants funded the organization.

That’s just sloppy.

OK, This is Weird

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I just got a call from Caterpillar regarding whether I got my proxy statement, and how I would be voting on the measures their annual meeting, which is tomorrow.

It appears from reading the proxy statement, that they are worried about push-back on their executive compensation/bonus package, though it might be that they want to beat back a change to their board election procedures: It’s currently triennial, and there is a motion to make it annual, or a shareholder proposal for an independent Charmain of the Board.

I’ve gotten snail mail on such things before, but getting a phone call is a new one for me.

People Who Piss Me Off

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Got a telemarketer calling on a pre-recorded message, with no caller ID, saying “Press 1” for an operator to refinance my house.

I talked to this guy, who refused to tell me the name of the company and contact information, but said that the loan officer could once I gave him information.

Eventually, I threw out bogus numbers, got to the loan officer, asked him questions, explaining that giving him financial information to someone required that.

While I was doing this, I was filling out the FTC’s complaint form, and when I got his phone and url, I had all I needed.

I confirmed that we had no prior business relationship, and he said that my number might have expired from the FTC’s Do Not Call List, which, was a lie, since the number never expire.

Here’s hoping that the rat bastard gets cited and fined.

I’m Not Sure if This is Real, or Just a Corporate Pissing Contest…

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But Google is ditching Microsoft® Windows® completely. No one in the enterprise is going to be allowed to have it on their company machines anymore:

Google is phasing out the internal use of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system because of security concerns, according to several Google employees.

The directive to move to other operating systems began in earnest in January, after Google’s Chinese operations were hacked, and could effectively end the use of Windows at Google, which employs more than 10,000 workers internationally.

“We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,” said one Google employee.

“Many people have been moved away from [Windows] PCs, mostly towards Mac OS, following the China hacking attacks,” said another.

New hires are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system. “Linux is open source and we feel good about it,” said one employee. “Microsoft we don’t feel so good about.”

Obviously with a bit more than 10,000 employees, one would assume that there somewhere around 20K licenses floating around, which is a small part of Microsoft’s market, but it’s also a poke in the eye.

Obviously, Google will move its employees to its online apps Google Docs at some point in the future, which might be a greater threat to Bill Gates’s revenue streams