If I Were King

I’ve greatly admired Google since the day my Kiwi friend Bruce Hoult suggested trying it as a replacement for an aging Alta Vista. My search behavior comes close to monogamy, although I’ve occasionally dallied with others. I predominantly used the home-town favorite, WebCrawler, for ages, then was lured by better results at Alta Vista, and finally Google. Google’s product was good, but so was their soul as far as I could tell. They rose above the grasping machinations of Redmond’s empire (and their bloated MSN portal), they were never tacky like AOL or Yahoo!; they didn’t need to play any game but doing their job well every day, and it seemed like they didn’t particularly want to. “Don’t be Evil”, said the corporate mission statement, and it wasn’t hard to believe.

Every once in a while, however, word came out that they had caved in to some stupid request from the US government to hand over search data, just like the DoJ-frightened Microsoft and the ever-clueless AOL. Somehow they managed to redeem themselves, at least to a small degree, by being a bit less accommodating then the other search engines. But it really worried me whenever I heard of their Chinese operations. When they setup shop there four years ago, they did so under an agreement to censor certain subjects on google.cn. As Victoria used to say, “We are not amused” by such things. In fact, I was disgusted and disappointed.

It’s one thing to fall in with the US government, it has to work within certain limits. It is also recently run by those that aren’t exactly mental giants, recalling a president that obviously didn’t delight in reading and left the impression that he didn’t know how. The Chinese are not limited by any legal restraint, any historical sense of decency in power, and they’re not stupid. Neither China nor the rest of the world are well served by an amoral regime that is unchecked by anyone.

Yesterday, Google announced “A new approach to China” on their official blog. Finally motivated by a series of attacks against their systems last month, Google has “decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn”. It’s a tough call whether the people of China are better off with a censored Google or none at all, in the short term. In the long term, however, it’s definitely in the interest of the people of China that their government not be allowed to pretend that it is a legitimate and mature member of the community of modern nations.

It’s a risky bet. China has gotten their way until now, and the other companies that have gone along with the statist thugs in Beijing (Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Cisco spring to mind, but there are dozens of other co-conspirators to censorship in the world’s largest country) may all decide to take advantage of Google’s absence. It won’t even slightly surprise me if they do. On the other hand, I would be delighted to learn that Ballmer is abashed at the comparative venality of coöperating and steps up to join them. Google has more to lose here than anyone else, and they’re willing to make the bet.

They’re are worse things than censorship, slavery and murder for example. But those are illegal and we don’t need anybody to take a stand against them. Censorship is profoundly evil and damaging, and we need champions to continue to highlight it. Thank you Google!

According to Obama Weighs Tax on Banks to Cut Deficit in today’s New York Times, the Obama administration is considering a significant tax on large banks to help close the current deficit. Needless to say, the banks aren’t exactly thrilled at the prospect, pointing out that most of them have already paid back their bailouts. While true, this amply demonstrates that the big players in the financial system still don’t get it, not that we were holding our breaths expecting them to. Leaving aside the obvious fact that government does not always tax based on direct relationships, if they did we would see taxes on the poor to pay for poverty relief, the major element here is that the costs of the irresponsibility of the financial institutions do not start and end with the costs of directly keeping those institutions afloat. One suspects that the bailouts for the banks and brokerages represent a tiny fraction of the damage that was done. Even when the US Treasury has been made whole, the American people won’t have been. If a tax on the financial industry can help cover some of the other costs of the recent economic crisis it will be a good step; if the administration conjures up some way to structure the tax so it eliminates the high-risk strategies that got us in this mess, that’s better.

In A Pound of Cure, published in the July/August MIT Technology Review, Andy Kessler challenges the possibility of addressing the cost of health care without addressing the motivations of the health-care industry. He references the recent Dartmouth College study that suggests, based on analysis of 4,000 hospitals, that eliminating 30% of the resources committed to Medicare patients contributed nothing at all to the outcomes of the patients. He doubts that the $19 billion for health-care IT projects included in the $787 billion Obama stimulus package can accomplish anything.

Elsewhere I have stated my opinion that fully 50% of all health care spending could be eliminated with a combination of electronic records and diagnostic software. Electronic records would make it easy to use data-mining software to evaluate the success of different treatment regimes for various ailments. (If a patient knew there was an 80% probability of success with a $1,000 treatment and an 80% probability of success with a $1,000,000 treatment, which one would they choose?) Diagnostic software would help focus diagnosis, eliminating billions in wasted tests.

But as Kessler points out, the health-care industry makes more money when it consumes more resources. The bias of practitioners with an economic stake will always be to spend more. There are few, if any, practitioners with no economic stake.

This is, and will remain, a stubborn problem. If I Were King it would be no different. Better health insurance will not help, that just means that each patient has more resources available. The only thing that has a chance is a combination of patient understanding of the costs and benefits of different options, and an economic stake in choosing among them.

Should we spend a million bucks to keep Mom on life support for another six months? What if that means that nobody in the family will see a dentist for the next ten years? Clearly there are times when heroic (read: expensive) efforts are worthwhile, and times when they provide no more benefit than burning the same amount of currency.

We need better understanding of the costs and benefits, which open electronic records will enable, and then we need to empower patients and families, consulting with health-care professionals, to make judgments about the resources to be used. The industry’s motivation will always be towards growth in spending, I see no reason why we can’t cut that spending in half in the next ten years.

In an article in today’s New York Times entitled Iran Stepping Up Effort to Quell Election Protest today, Nazila Fathi and Michael Slackman said, “The nation’s leadership cast anyone refusing to accept the results of the race as an enemy of the state.” I can live with that.  I cannot accept the election results released earlier this month, there’s no way I can even believe them. I am proud to be a declared enemy of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I’m not sufficiently informed on Iranian politics to know if Mir Hussein Moussavi is really a huge step forward over the raving, intransigent incumbent, but the people of Iran certainly think so. I’m not certain that the US should take a strong position in support of Moussavi, the risks of appearing to meddle in local affairs are too great. But when the electorate knows the results are fraudulent, because they’re the ones that cast the ballots, the government that refuses to honor the actual ballots cast loses all legitimacy.

They are, in essence, no longer a government but a gang of thugs wearing uniforms. The police forces dispatched by such a government have no moral standing, and that includes the vicious Basij militia, only moreso.

The one thing I believe the US government should do, and I would welcome all other legitimate governments to do the same, is to identify every internet project that assists users in getting past government censorship online and providing cash, technical support, and backup equipment to make sure that there is enough bandwidth for all those that need to communicate when the authorities try to block it.

I also think the Iranians disappointed in the outcome of this election should simply arrest the police. There may be a lot of Basij terrorists (a more apt term than “militia”, I suggest), but their numbers have to be small in comparison to the population. No matter how well armed and macho any individual Basiji might be, with three or four Persian women clinging to his back he’s going to go down. Strip him of his weapons, tie his hands behind his back, and stash him in a warehouse somewhere.

With a quarter of the cops taken out of service, the rest will be cowering in the station houses or burning their uniforms and denying they’d ever heard of the units that issued them. The current government would be gone within days.

If I Were King it would be grossly offensive to me if my security forces were treated in such a way, but it would be my first obligation to rule in such a way that it would never be necessary.

In a recent post, Republicans, Obama soften court debate, the Swamp summarized the most egregious comments by the right wing about Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the high bench:

Conservative Republicans have attacked Sotomayor over the comment, with radio’s Rush Limbaugh calling her a “reverse racist,” former Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado saying it appears to be a racist comment and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich suggesting that if a white male had said something similar, he’d have to withdraw from consideration for the court.

Are these people really as stupid as they seem? Here’s her actual comment:

I would hope that a wise Latino woman, with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Well, duh! The American legal system is the domain of white males. Yes, there are ethnic minorities practicing law, and some females, but that’s a recent development. Through the history of American history and English Common Law before that, most laws have been written by white male legislators and interpreted by white male jurists. The law texts have been written by white male professors, and that’s who has taught most of the courses at law school. These white males have predominantly been upper class property owners. So even a Latina or a black woman practicing law today has been steeped in a legal system that is culturally white, male, and propertied.

Anybody who brings additional perspective is likely to “more often than not” reach better decisions. Sure, there are white males that have spent time in the Peace Corps, struggled out of disadvantaged families, or overcome handicaps. They get extra points as well. As long as the members of the court are qualified (they know the law, understand the rules of logic, and can read and write the English language); the greater the diversity of background on the bench, the better justice will be served.

If I Were King I’d do exactly what Obama has done here. I’d take every opportunity to increase the diversity among federal judges. I’d probably be harder to please in some other ways (to my mind, logic trumps the letter of the law, for example) but that’s where I’d start.

Well, the Obama administration has announced that our cars are going on a severe diet. Environmentalists are elated. It seems that Detroit is as well, because the new national standards will preempt any state standards.

As we’ve noted before, Detroit should have developed much more flexible manufacturing processes long ago, they shouldn’t need a single national standard to shoot for.

Further, the politics of this move are absurd. What is the logic of a democratic government requiring manufacturers to build the products the public wants least? If the public wanted more fuel-efficient cars, it would simply buy them. Deciding that they should have more efficient cars and having the government eliminate the models they prefer so as to not tempt them, is a bizarre approach to responsibility. Another word that comes to mind is inanity.

If I Were King, I should tell them to eat cake, and to visit their favorite bakery in whatever car they choose to own, maintain, and operate.

President Obama, in his commencement speach at the University if Notre Dame yesterday, said he supported a “sensible conscience clause” for medical professionals to refuse to perform abortions, and presumably other procedures, which they found to contradict their ethical and moral beliefs.  The exact terms of such a clause weren’t stated, but despite my normal belief that the convictions of the individual should guide their own actions rather than external considerations, I have to oppose this.

That is not to say that a doctor shouldn’t be able to hang up his shingle and define his practice in any way that suits him. If a surgeon opposes abortion and decides to open a practice specializing in ophthalmology, of course he shouldn’t be expected to perform abortions. But if that surgeon went to work in a clinic that provided abortions, and then refused to perform them while drawing his salary, then that doctor should suddenly, and without ceremony or honor, find himself unemployed.

In previous invocations of this concept it has been suggested that pharmacists should be able to refuse to fill prescriptions for drugs of which they disapprove, notably the “morning after pill” abortifacients. But what if a pharmacist was of the opinion, apparently held by many otherwise-sensible persons, that ADD is not really a disorder and that treating it with drugs is wrong? Should that pharmacist be able to refuse to fill prescriptions for Ritalin or Concerta or any of the other drugs that make life with ADD manageable? The answer is no.  Federal law requires most drugs to be dispensed by pharmacists, and as such they are, in effect, a public utility and must not be able to impose their own standards on who can or can’t make use of their services.

I can certainly see a case for professional standards being maintained by physicians.  To say “I do not believe in abortion after the first trimester and therefore decline to seek the training to perform procedures to handle later cases” seems completely reasonable.  But, If I Were King, it would most certainly not be acceptable for someone to take a position that required certain work and then to refuse to perform it.

Congress is turning its attention to abuses by credit card issuers (i.e., banks) and taking steps to reign in the most egregious of these. Most notably, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) drafted H.R. 627, the Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights Act of 2009 with an effective date of twelve months after enactment or 30 June 2010. Apparently the Federal Reserve Board needs five months to draft rules to implement the act, which should take any reasonable group of people an afternoon – even if the group included attorneys. And the banks claim that they need time to make changes to their systems.  Stuff and nonsense! If I Were King, I’d allow 30 days, becuase I’d be a very generous and lenient monarch.

I’d allow certain exceptions, of course. Any card issuer could be granted additional time to comply if their IT staff (and here I’m talking about programmers, not the suits who wouldn’t know a variable from an array or define “third normal form”) would come to the throne room and explain why they couldn’t have these changes coded by the weekend.

Okay, it is unseemly for companies struggling to survive in the current environment to be spending a fortune on fancy retreats and corporate jets to fly executives to them. This would be an excellent time for management to actually look at the costs and benefits of using chauffeured cars and executive jets. From the outside, it seems likely that these expenses have gotten out of line, so it’s important that those in charge actually run the numbers.

Is it absurd to pay tens of millions of dollars for jets, and ongoing staff costs for pilots and limo drivers? Probably not, at least in the general case. If an executive is making phone calls during his drive to work, something that may well be illegal soon if he’s driving the car, the company very well may come out ahead to send a car around every morning. Anybody who has dealt with commercial air travel recently knows what a huge chunk of time is involved in flying anywhere, and how unlikely it is that the time spent can be used for much of anything other than opening the airline peanuts. At a certain level, it may be economically sound to spend the money and protect the executives’ time.

Even if a straight cost/benefit analysis doesn’t pencil out for the jets in terms of executive salaries saved, it’s entirely possible that the CEO’s job simply can’t be done without them. In the case of the CEO, each company only has one. If it is important that the CEO spend time in the field, and make public appearances, it’s quite possible that adding the time for commercial air travel will simply result in more days worked than there are in a year.

We don’t know the numbers and the tradeoffs. It’s not our job, it’s the job of the managers in each company. Do we really believe that the requisite analysis is consistently done? No, we don’t, and we thing this is an area that needs to be monitored by the directors. On the other hand, we’re pretty sure the news media and the federal government aren’t equipped to do this analysis either. It definitely isn’t a good sign when the country’s CEO starts lecturing corporate CEOs on the point, not when he has a bigger retinue than any titan of industry, and his executive jet is a 747 known as Air Force One.