scottsimpson.net

These people need to lay off Martha Stewart. Sure, what she did was wrong, but what’s being overlooked is the fact that no one was actually hurt. Should the Domestic Diva and those that assisted in the alleged stock hullabaloo be punished? Absolutely, if they’re guilty. Should they be incarcerated? No. I doubt these people will run around scrawling ‘at 60′ on walls and plants and little old women. Financial crime should be punished financially. If someone abuses stocks, they should be barred from trading. If they abuse a bank, they should have no access to banks. We have the same policies for cars (license taken away for infractions), so why not for crime? The way I see it, our system is mostly set up that way already: for crimes where someone’s freedom is taken away (murder, extortion, rape, etc.), the offender’s freedom is likewise taken away. However, the same is not true for drug and financial crimes. Pardon me for waxing leftist for a minute, but what exactly is the point of locking up an otherwise upstanding and productive person for having a small amount of nonprescribed pharmaceuticals? A kilogram of heroin, take it away and process it for medical use. Hospitals could save millions. We’d empty the prisons (and let natural selection start to work on those chronic addicts to pharmaceuticals) and have space for people that actually need to be there.. and probably at a lower cost, too.

This brings me to gripe number two with the prison system: education. It is generally assumed that all persons shall have access to education. I disagree with this sentiment for those in prison (convicted of heinous crimes). If the aforementioned otherwise productive individual is sitting in prison awaiting an appeal, let him read stuff. If the inmate killed three people, it’s dark room time. What’s that? It’s cruel and unusual? Yeah, well so are rape and murder. We, as a society, need to get over this ‘fix everything by throwing money at it’ philosophy and actually start enforcing things. $100,000 per year per prisoner will not make crime go away… this is proven by the fact that we still have crime. It was noted in a book I read that there’s a direct correlation between the cost of law enforcement and the incentive to break the law. As law enforcement becomes more costly, there is a greater incentive to break the law, if even on principle to show that it can be done. This is evident on the global stage as well.

But until I’m elected President of the Banana Republic (or other small productive nation), I guess I’ll just have to be content with writing acerbic blogs.

General

A 23-year SBC employee, Belous went through the last CWA strike against SBC — a four-week walkout in 1983. “It almost killed me,” she remembered. “I’m praying it won’t be that again.” (full story)

There’s a simple way to avoid getting ‘almost killed’… don’t strike. Why don’t these people ever learn? Strikes were effective in the heyday of labor unions, when organized labor was an effective tool to protect workers against management. But anymore, unions seem to do more harm than good. It seems rather strange to me that the same people that complain about wages not being high enough pay hundreds of dollars per year into organizations that supposedly get them more money. That’s called a pyramid scheme.

There was a time when unions were useful. Very few are useful today (teachers unions, etc.) The entire concept is flawed (or does no one else see a little bit of a conflict in people whose entire job consists of labor organization… and are often paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for management jobs … just like the ones they’re trying to destroy… not to mention the corruption that runs rampant) unless the organization is addressing an issue that is truly major (huge cuts, like removing all medical care or huge salary slashes in times of fiscal prosperity)

Striking is useless and serves no purpose. It hurts the company (read: less income equals less profit equals less money to pay workers) and it hurts the consumers (during the insipid grocery strike I still went to VONS, despite being called various names by the monkeys picketing outside). One of the VONS picketers was drinking a Starbucks. There’s nothing wrong with that, unless you’re holding a sign that complains about low pay. But back to SBC.

SBC workers don’t really have a public to strike in front of. Very few people that I know regularly visit the central offices. Very few people will respond to the call to boycott the SBC service if the negotiations fail. Drop my internet connection because some other people are whining? I think not. I’ve been experiencing latency issues lately, but I think that’s due in large part to these inane spam viruses more than anything else. It’s certainly not a labor issue. (modems and routers work just as hard when nobody’s watching or paying them)

In sum, I have one thing to say to most union strikers: shut up. If you approach your conflicts with management in a sane, civil manner, rather than resorting to puerile threats of striking and boycott (it’s technically blackmail… ‘pay us more or we’ll break our contract with you’), you might get more than you bargained for and, imagine, people might actually support you. Justify your demands for pay increases in a reasonable way. Rationalize your opposition to minute increases in insurance co-pays (you know, most likely it isn’t that the company is out to get you … have you considered the concept that maybe their costs have risen because of factors beyond their control? Imagine there’s a strike in a medical supply warehouse… and hospitals can’t get the tools they need at the same price… they’re forced to raise their prices to cover their higher costs, and boom, the cost of health coverage goes up.) I once heard of a group striking because their insurance co-pay price went up a dollar. That’s just juvenile.

There is concern that SBC tech jobs might be outsourced to India. God forbid a company maximize profitability. Supporting workers that aren’t working can get expensive, and in Mill’s Utilitarian theory, it would do more people more good if a US company paid two people in India to do the work of one person in the US.

I used to wonder why 1940s-era Germans went after labor organizers (in addition to Catholics and Gypsies, and others). Now I know.

General