Outsourcing Notes

 I posted these thoughts in 2004 at the original Hootsbuddy's Place. 

We speak in respectful tones about that primordial soup from which profits flow, the marketplace. Great numbers of people worship at that altar...probably more than worship in old-fashioned religious venues. When the numbers are good, the news announcer reading the results often has happy background music playing, something like "We're In the Money". If the numbers are down, the music might be "Stormy Weather". It's as much a part of our culture as sports and popular foods to rejoice when the "Market" is good, and gloomy if the report is "down". At some level everyone, even those who will never see a stock certificate, some of whom will never guess that there is a cap on social security taxes every year for people earning over a certain amount...everyone feels connected.

It's not fashionable to ask where profits come from, however. It's like asking if someone has had cosmetic surgery or was fortunate enough to come into a lot of money following the recent death of a loved one. We want the dealership from which we get our car to be profitable enough to keep up with the warranty service, but we don't want any profit to that dealer from our purchase, and we sure as hell don't want to pay dealer prices for service. Profit is what happens when a company makes a good deal with someone else. When I have to make the same deal, however, they are taking advantage of me.

Not everyone thinks like this, of course. There are lots of people who cheerfully pay a dear price to be the first or latest in their peer group to see a movie or own a certain fashion or travel to some wonderful destination. Big tips, ostentatiously bigger than the norm, are sometimes found by delighted service people who don't care that they say more about the ego needs of patrons than the quality of their service. And I think there are a few people who take a balanced view of profits and don't get disturbed about their contributions to someone else's profit.

In the face of all this resistance on the part of customers, clients and patrons to cut them out of reasonable profits businesses are forced to be imaginative about being able to report ever higher profits. The word "bubble" comes to mind first, because that is the easiest track to profits in the short term. We have seen it many times, from the famous tulip bulbs to the California Gold Rush to the explosion of dotcoms. In the end the bubble bursts (hence the term) but there are what I would call "serial bubbles" (see "serial monogamy") in real estate, fashions, entertainment and advertising. I heard a couple of weeks ago that insurance stock prices go up when a hurricane hits because historically that is when premiums go up, not only to cover "losses" due to weather, but improved profits as well. Why do insurance companies jack up the prices at just the time that their policy holders can least afford to pay more? Because they can.

A few years ago, and to some extent continuing today, the phenomenon of "mergers and acquisitions" yielded breathtaking "profits". When two companies in the same line of work merge it is a win-win situation (except for the people whose jobs are sacrificed for the deal) because the new, stronger company has one less competitor in the marketplace (whew!) as well as a more efficient operation, because the payroll departments, accountants, ad agencies and other support operations can be performed by one department instead of two. All this improved efficiency translates into profits.

Speaking of accounting, now there is the toolbox from which a lot of profits can be made to flow. When they get the cooperation they need from operations there is practically no end to the profits that can result. Just ask the people at Enron how easy it can be.

Have you noticed that so far that nothing has been mentioned about productivity? That is my point. The only real source of profits haas to be that something has been produced. Moving the furniture around does not produce anything, unless you are paid to be an interior decorator. Mergers might squeeze a few cents from the economy of scale, but they real improvements, if you can call them that, is that there is more to report for profits because fewer people are being paid.

This brings us to the notion of outsourcing, the ultimate job eraser. Outsourcing has had it's bony finger in nearly every business enterprise in the marketplace. I would like to advance the notion that corporate reliance on outsourcing is tantamount to an admission of failure. It is easiest to see in something like janitorial work, the bottom of the economic ladder by most standards. Very few organizations today directly employ the people who literally clean up behind them. The reasons are easy to grasp. Nobody wants to take out the trash, clean the restrooms and refill the soap dispensers, so it is eaasier to pay an outside company to do that job than go to the trouble to hire and train someone and hold them accountable. And don't even mention the benefits that the would expect. After a few years they could get to wanting a vacation like everyone else. Next thing you know, they might even want to be getting ahead in life and someone would have to be trained to replace them. Imagine that.

I'm trying not to sound cynical, but I'm not trying very hard. I have watched for years as the idea of people skills and management accountability have become less and less a part of business life. Few supervisors are trained to spell out their expectations in language that is clear but not judgemental. Even fewer are trained to be the patient coaches they have to be if they are to develop their subordinates into more than robots. For the past few days I have been thinking that outsourcing is the contemporary successor to mergers as a generator of false profits, because in most cases the end result neither improves the service nor generates any new value to the owner/stockholder.

And the social consequences of jobs being lost....don't get me started.

Ten days later I left this comment. 

After all these years the link survives.

This post was about ten days ago. Today is September 30. And already I run across a link about the "internet bubble" and its consequences.

The writer begins by arguing that by going public before earnings are possible a new company is really just raising venture capital (VC) from the market rather than from the customary private sources. In time, he says, the marketplace may do better at assessing new business ventures than the private sector.

>> After the excesses of the Bubble, it's now considered dubious to take companies public before they have earnings. But there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that idea. Taking a company public at an early stage is simply retail VC: instead of going to venture capital firms for the last round of funding, you go to the public markets.

>> By the end of the Bubble, companies going public with no earnings were being derided as "concept stocks," as if it were inherently stupid to invest in them. But investing in concepts isn't stupid; it's what VCs do, and the best of them are far from stupid.

>> The stock of a company that doesn't yet have earnings is worth something. It may take a while for the market to learn how to value such companies, just as it had to learn to value common stocks in the early 20th century. But markets are good at solving that kind of problem. I wouldn't be surprised if the market ultimately did a better job than VCs do now.

>> Going public early will not be the right plan for every company. And it can of course be disruptive-- by distracting the management, or by making the early employees suddenly rich. But just as the market will learn how to value startups, startups will learn how to minimize the damage of going public.

Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first software as a service company. Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo in 1998, where it became Yahoo Store. In 2001 he started publishing essays on paulgraham.com, which now gets around 25 million page views per year. 

Notes on earth and mud homes

This Thread (October, 2021) caught my attention for reasons that will be obvious. 

Gus Willard Van Beek (1920-2012, Dept. Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution) on the thermal properties of traditional earth and mud homes, citing a 1970s experiment in Iran. Stellar result from the "free dug at site material".

A preliminary understanding of how soil and earth works as a building material can be easily tested digging a hole and measuring the temperature therein. (Photo of the authors at a site in Egypt.)

In the late 1950s James Marston Fitch and Daniel P. Branch measured temperatures in traditional adobe homes in the U.S. Southwest. You really do not need air conditioning in a house built like this: the interior temperature is stable. (Example of a traditional home below.)

Back to the Van Beeks, who visited the traditional beehive homes in Fah (a village near Aleppo), in Syria, where they found the new concrete homes of the villagers very cold even in April and apparently unusable in the summer heat.

Wrath of Gnon is a substack with a wealth of information and links I simply don't have time in my life to add to my already overloaded list of interests.

Will Bunch Opinion -- Philadelphia Enquirer

 File copy of a Will Bunch op-ed, Philadelphia Enquirer

The question is no longer Donald Trump’s criminality but whether America will care | Will Bunch

America still had the naïve ability to be shocked back on Nov. 16, 1973, when a rambling then-President Richard Nixon stood up before 400 Associated Press journalists. Wallowing in the Watergate scandal, the 37th president joked morbidly about his plane crashing before he could be impeached, then uttered these famous words: “‘People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”

Quitting before he could be impeached and pardoned by successor Gerald Ford, Nixon never had his day in court. Some 48 years later, a Watergate-style investigation and accelerating probes in both New York and Atlanta have the nation now asking whether their ex-president is a crook. And with each passing day, new revelations about Donald Trump’s involvement in Jan. 6 coup plotting or other misdeeds are raising the stakes.

In 2022, the real question for a frazzled, exhausted America is becoming less whether the 45th president was a crook, but more what are we going to do about it?

This may sound like a weird thing to say about a man who’s been through a handful of business bankruptcies or divorces, two presidential impeachments and finally getting unceremoniously booted from the Oval Office after just one term, but last week might have been the worst week of Trump’s 75-plus years on Earth. Consider:

— Remember the possible “smoking gun” in the House Jan. 6 investigation that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago? Now, thanks to an 8-1 Supreme Court ruling requiring the surrender of key documents, we’ve seen the draft presidential order in question — and you can smell the gunpowder. On Dec. 16, 2020 — or two days after electors in state capitols teed up President Biden’s victory — the draft circulating in Trump’s White House called for declaring a national emergency in which U.S. troops would be deployed in seizing ballot boxes, putting the 2020 election in the realm of a corrupt banana republic.

— The Washington Post and CNN reported that Trump’s personal attorney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was a key architect and an organizer of the scheme in which Republicans in five key battleground states won by Biden sent forms to the National Archives and elsewhere falsely claiming they were the “duly elected” electors, for Trump. The tallies were part of a scheme by Trump advisers for Vice President Mike Pence or Congress to somehow invalidate Biden’s victory at the Jan. 6 certification.

— From Georgia came news that the district attorney for Fulton County, home to Atlanta, has asked for a special grand jury that would investigate “possible criminal disruptions” in the 2020 presidential election in the Peach State. That would surely include the notorious tape recording of Trump, one of the planet’s most powerful people, hectoring GOP functionaries to find him the 11,780 votes to undo Biden’s surprising victory in that state.

— A fresh report from here in Pennsylvania captured the ongoing efforts — again, of dubious legality — to keep alive Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. An investigation by The Guardian ties allies of Trump former national security adviser Mike Flynn — also a key pusher of the plan for POTUS45 to declare a national emergency — to unsuccessful efforts in the Keystone State to dig up dirt on Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick and Sen. Pat Toomey and force them to back an audit of the 2020 vote count here.

— This week also brought a reminder of one reason why Trump was so eager to cling to the presidency -- to beat down other probes of his alleged wrongdoing. New York Attorney General Letitia James released a stunning overview of the Trump Organization’s pattern of possible fraud that grossly overinflated the value of multiple properties owned by the ex-president’s firm. James wants to question Trump and his children Donald Jr. and Ivanka in a civil case that appears to overlap with a criminal investigation in Manhattan

Wow, and you thought you were having a bad week because you had to pay $9 for a Chipotle burrito! Seriously, the big picture for Trump right now is this: The House January 6 Committee — along with overlapping probes like the one in Georgia and continued investigative reporting — is closing the circle on a criminal conspiracy. It was hatched the moment Biden was declared the election winner — with roots planted deeply in the Trump White House — in an effort to overturn the result, right up to the unlawful disruption of Congress and its vote certification on Jan. 6.

While Trump ultimately would not (or more likely could not) declare a national emergency, other arguably unlawful acts — including attempted election tampering in Georgia and the submission of fraudulent electoral slates — that are tied to the wider conspiracy did occur. When these other efforts failed, the plotters — with a verbal push by the then-president, monitored from “a war room” at the Willard Hotel — encouraged and then failed to call off the civilian violence in Capitol Hill that left five people dead or dying, and injured scores of cops. What’s more — much as happened with Nixon during Watergate — Trump’s imploding moral position around the Jan. 6 coup is causing a reexamination of his other actions, including the long-dubious practices of his multimillion-dollar business empire, in a harsher light as well.

As I noted in a recent column, nationally televised hearings — with probably some in prime time — by the House committee this spring offer the potential to lay out Trump’s alleged crimes in a compelling, understandable storyline, and thus turn public opinion more harshly against the 45th president. That, too, loudly echoes Watergate, but this is also where the plot diverges.

There’s a huge, obvious difference: Nixon was the incumbent president in 1973-74, and the Watergate investigation sullied his reputation at the same time that other problems — gas lines and rising prices at the pump, the loss of U.S. prestige at the end of the Vietnam War — dragged down a sitting POTUS. In 2022, Trump’s crimes will be exposed against a backdrop of declining — at least for now — popularity of his Democratic replacement in Biden. New evidence of Trump high crimes and misdemeanors will be competing against a surely loud argument that probing an ex-president is just a witch hunt to distract from inflation, or COVID-19, or other Biden woes.

And also unlike the early 1970s, when Watergate sparked unrelentingly negative coverage in the newspapers and on the three TV networks that were the only places for folks to get their news, Trump’s sins will be whitewashed by an army of megaphones from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to talk radio to your uncle on Facebook. In a world of reality-based critical thinking, one looks at the criminal conspiracy roadmap teed up by the House committee and wonders how Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department could fail to make a felony case against Trump and his inner circle. But in the bitterly divided and arguably broken America that we actually have, Garland — whose timidity so far has failed to match the fierce urgency of now — could be easily cowed by politics to avoid the messiness of criminally charging a U.S. president for the first time.

But while I’m quite worried about the Garland factor, I’m even more worried by this: In a year when the fate of U.S. democracy is at least competing with the price of burritos and mask mandates in public schools for the attention of voters, there is the very real possibility of learning in prime time that our president was a crook — and then doing nothing. And that feels like it could be the actual fatal blow for our American Experiment.

Let’s face it, either way it will not be pretty, nor will it go down as smoothly as Watergate, with pundits crowing that “the system worked.” If Trump is indicted for his crimes, it’s not a wild fantasy to imagine a Jan. 6-level response, especially with the added gasoline of racism against the prosecutors in Fulton County, Manhattan and New York State who all happen to be Black Democrats. If, for example, that grand jury in Atlanta does charge Trump, it’s not hard to think that caravans of GOP voters from the red-clay foothills of Georgia or Alabama will pour into the cosmopolitan city to block his arraignment. It’s possible to see the blueprints of a true civil war.

And yet the much greater fear is that — after an ex-president’s efforts to block the peaceful transfer of power and stage the first real coup in American history is laid out in chapter and verse — a depressed, divided and utterly demoralized nation elects to do absolutely nothing about it. That, too exhausted to make the hard choices to save our democracy, we will simply wait for the comet to strike.

The late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom we paused ever so briefly to honor this month, said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” I can’t help but wonder if America will begin to end if we choose silence about the criminality of Donald Trump.

Career advice from a successful chemist

This twitter thread delivers excellent career management advice.

Derek Lowe is a medicinal chemist working on preclinical drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry. Lowe has published a blog about this field, "In the Pipeline", since 2002 and is a columnist for the Royal Society of Chemistry's Chemistry World.

I've been asked to talk about how I ended up doing what I'm doing for #YoungScientistNetworking, so here's the story! I've been at this a while, so it's sort of a long tale by now. (1/20) 

I grew up in a small town in NE Arkansas, and was always interested in all sorts of science (astronomy, biology, chemistry and more). I knew that my path wa going to take me somewhere else, but I had no idea where. (2/20) 

When I got to college, I wasn't even sure I would go into the sciences! I had always liked history and literature too, but I decided it would be be easier to have my own library at home than to have my own lab, and became a chemistry major. (3/20) 

I went on to graduate school, figuring I needed the PhD for whatever it was that I was going to do. At the time I always saw myself going into academia - probably at a smaller liberal arts school, like the one I graduated from, Hendrix. (4/20) 

But I became a bit less sure about that after watching academia in action and up close. Grad school was pretty stressful, and I watched young professors fighting for tenure (not always successfully!) who were putting in the same hours I was. (5/20) 

As I completed my degree, I looked for post-doc positions - partly to make me more hire-able, and partly as a holding action while I figured out which way to go. I didn't have my own grant money, so the search was producing mixed results. (6/20) 

Another professor in the department had just landed a Humboldt Foundation faculty grant to go to Germany, and he suggested I look into that for postdoctoral funding. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. (7/20) 

I ended up in Darmstadt for a year doing research, learning German, and traveling around on the weekends (those less-severe European lab hours were very welcome after my PhD!) But I still wasn't sure where I'd go after that. (8/20) 

Job-hunting season came along (it was all print ads, no online postings in 1989), and there really weren't any open academic positions at the sorts of liberal-arts schools where I could see myself joining the faculty. By that time, I had friends who were in industry. too. (9/20) 

I hadn't thought as much about that path, but reports from my old labmates were actually pretty good, and I applied to a slew of biopharma companies (there were a lot of open positions at that point). (10/20) 

I might as well have tossed all those letters into a pond. There were postmarked from Germany, and I don't think anyone read enough of the cover letter to see that I was coming back to the US at the end of the postdoc! Near-zero response. (11/20) 

So I retooled as soon as I got back, with a US address and phone # (and on 8 1/2 by 11 paper instead of A4) and sent off another big pile of CVs. This time there were some bites on the line, to my relief. I ended up with interviews, and two pharma "finalists". (12/20) 

I joined Schering-Plough in the fall of 1989, doing CNS research, and enjoyed it very much, as it turned out. But within a few years, after some organizational changes, I realized that I'd probably be happier somewhere else. (13/20) 

There was a period in the mid-1990s where there were just no biopharma jobs out there. I waited that out, and on the next upswing answered a headhunter call that ended up sending me to Bayer, in CT, in a group targeting metabolic disease. (14/20) 

That went fine, until things stopped going fine for Bayer. Taking their big statin drug off the market and then doing a more-expensive-than-expected takeover of Schering AG led to the closure of the whole CT research site by early 1997. (15/20) 

By this time, I'd been writing the blog for a few years, and more people had heard of me. That helped in the job search, and I ended up landing a position at Vertex up in the Boston/Cambridge bio-hub. We moved the family in hopes we wouldn't have to again. (16/20) 

The Vertex job was very interesting and challenging, but after 10 years a series of management changes and re-orgs turned a lot of positions over, including mine. So I moved on to my fourth company, also in the area, and that's been great. (17/20) 

Over the years I've become more of a chemical biology person and less of a traditional medicinal chemist - I wanted to try to get at some of the underlying issues of target selection, for example. But there are so many puzzles in this business; take your pick! (18/20) 

My advice? Get to know people, at your company and others. Get to know other fields of research outside your own. Watch for how your own field might be changing, and learn the new technology as it comes along. Don't limit your perspective. (19/20) 

Try to offer something to an employer that's useful, valuable, and that they can't easily get more cheaply somewhere else. Keep your eyes out for what those things might be, and you'll be fine! (20/20)

Web comments about a historic photo

Comments responding to this historic photo are more interesting than the image.

In Romania those times the ration was much lower than what this photo shows, for reference 100g butter/person… and meat wasn’t even on ration, you could go to queue 5 hours in case the shop got some twice a month, but most of the times it would run out before you get to the till… Though you could get as much sweets as you wanted if you were happy with the “only one type of candy” 😊 Good old days!

Wasn’t it also one egg per person and month?

I’ve heard stories from a friend from Romania and it was horrifying. I remember 1980’s in Yugoslavia and we have rations too but not that extreme like in Romania.

As I remember it was 3-4 eggs, but there could be slight differences depending on which part of the country you lived maybe….

~~~

I had a classmate from Sepsiszentgyörgy at high school, she told the class at one of the very first lessons in September 2000, that she went to primary school in the morning as a child to line up in front of the store. She had been standing there for 2 hours, it wasn’t her turn, so she went to school with a stomach upset. A couple of my classmates listened in disbelief, but unfortunately that was the case.

                                                  ~~~

did you live in Poland in the 80’s? To think I grew up in the 80’s in UK and didn’t want for anything. We always had plenty food and lots of non essential food too. I always think of rations as something that was during ww2. Not in the 80’s when I was a kid/teenager. This shows how lucky I was

No, it was during the Soviet Union rule over the Eastern Europe in the 80s. SU fell in 1991 and practically in 1989. The things started to get better since then. Very quick luckily.

did they still have there ration card? My nan did,she would swap her cigarette rations for sweets as she didn't smoke. They sounded harsh times.

Russian rationing in the '90s is due to the fall of the Soviet Union and because their economy collapsed.

                                                ~~~

The problem was that even with "card" you couldn't buy it anywhere...

Actually, vodka was the best currency at that time. Without it, you couldn't buy anything except what is listed here.

Still works today. I mean…would you do me a favor for 20 PLN? Nah. Would you do me a favor for a bottle of vodka? Sure, my friend, what is it that you need? 😀

                                                ~~~

In socialist Yugoslavia, I and everyone I know had all the food we wanted + Italian clothes. My friend in Australia from Poland says there were rations and long lines, but everyone had a way of working around them. Life is always more complex than what we see on FB pics

absolutely! In Hungary there were also no rations or long lines and you could by as much you needed and could afford. I really dislike the distorted picture it’s given to this audience from whom most can’t think for themselves.

Suzana Sukovic We had money but no prducts, now You have products but no money. PP (purcasing power) of Yugolsavia citizens was bigger than today PP of Croats or Serbs.

An there werent any homeless people in Yugoslavia 😉

Comments and replies to this image are endless. 

What I have transcribed is just what has been posted during the last few hours!

Origins of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)

Two outstanding links provide a coherent backstory explaining how the Revolutionary Guards came to be. Because of it's status in Iran, that group is widely thought to be organically Iranian. But Kyle Orton's paper a year ago together with a current Middle East Forum article by Oved Lobel clearly trace the origins outside Iran.

In fact, many of the trainers at the Taleghani Center were part of the global Soviet proxy network, including its communist satellites, clients, and Arab protégés, for which Iran would become temporarily responsible during the 1990s while the reborn Russia found its footing. From Libya, Syria, and the erstwhile People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, all the way to Cuba, the Palestinian factions, and North Korea, the Islamic Revolution became a component part of the Soviet "anti-imperialist" nexus. This Islamic Comintern helped create, entrench, expand, or guide terror groups across the gamut and globe.[35]

The roots of this supranational revolution date back to the Iraqi religious center of Najaf, where a multinational group of Shiite clerics formed the revolutionary Islamic Da'wa Party around the time when Khomeini was based in the city.[36] Exiled from Iran in the early 1960s for an abortive Islamic revolution, Khomeini refined and popularized his concept of Islamic government; he built his militant clerical networks and alliances in Iran and across the region while his acolytes from the entire spectrum of the Iranian opposition—Islamists and Marxists to Liberals—were being trained in PLO camps in Lebanon by 1970.[37] This vast depository of revolutionary activity and ideology cross-pollinating in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and Iraq was ultimately subsumed, co-opted, or destroyed in concentric coups by Khomeini once he officially took power in 1979.

This is a remarkable paper. It is long, detailed and densely documented (68 endnotes)

Conclusion

The collapse of the Soviet Union almost instantly brought down its global client network and communist fronts. Excising the Islamic Revolution from the Iranian state would do the same to its organs throughout the region.

Often dubbed the "resistance axis," the IRGC is no ordinary national army but the vanguard of a multinational Islamic revolution—a supranational monolith whose nerve center is located in Iran. As such, it is no more Iranian than Hezbollah is Lebanese or Ansar Allah is Yemeni. IRGC indoctrination materials do not mention Iran, and its members are referred to as "mujahedeen"—warriors of God—rather than as Iranian soldiers, as it trains a multitude of local proxies and allies in a fully-integrated, transnational network across the region. Occasional pragmatic feats notwithstanding, the Islamic Republic has never moderated its long-term ambition to substitute a broad theocracy for the existing regional (indeed global) political order.

In this it has been helped by the Soviet Union and now Russia, with which it shares both allies and clients as well as the overarching goal of destroying U.S. influence in the Middle East. Far from a recent partnership of convenience, the Russo-Iranian alliance is ideological and has existed since at least 1989, though even in its infancy the revolution owed much of its power and ideology to the Soviets and their global network. Just as Hezbollah and PIJ/Hamas cannot be compartmentalized as Lebanese or Palestinian issues, so Russia cannot be dealt with as a separate problem from the Islamic Revolution in the Middle East.