Jeffrey D. Tharp's Blog, page 30

The profit motive…

About once a day you can count on President Biden tweeting about evil oil companies making money hand over fist while “excess profits are going back to their shareholders and their executives.”

As much fun as it is to watch the president attempt to turn “profit” into the next dirty word, I respectfully suggest he’s out of his damned mind on this track. I mean it’s not as if oil companies are chartered non-profit organizations. The whole point of investing in a company is the expectation that you’ll receive a return on that investment. The board and corporate executives would probably have some legal liability if they weren’t actively trying to return value to shareholders. The shareholders are the ones bearing the risk that accompanies running a business after all. 

I know that POTUS and his Twitter account like to pretend it’s just the 1% getting dividends… but according to a Gallup report dated May 12, 2022 the number of Americans who hold individual stock shares or who are invested through mutual funds or IRAs is in the neighborhood of 58%. That number probably ticks up a bit if you account for the various and sundry pension plans that also invest widely across the whole market. Even without accounting for pension funds, that’s a majority of Americans who stand to gain when businesses profit, dividends are paid, or stock is bought back by the company. That large percentage of Americans being “in the market” in some way would seem to indicate their belief in the power of growth and profit. 

Maybe the big buy backs and dividends would be moderated a bit by a political environment that was more encouraging of entrepreneurship, of R&D, or of exploration. As it is, Big Energy doesn’t have much incentive to spend money on those things under an administration that would very much like to kill off their entire sector. Companies tend to invest when they have a nice stable regulatory environment, rather than when the government keeps threatening to yank the rug out from under them.  

Our president, it seems, wants to have it both ways. He wants the cash cow to fund the welfare state but he also wants to butcher it and sell off the pieces. Having said that, if President Biden were serious about any of this, he’d be working with Congressional leaders to cut off federal subsidies to the energy industry and the broader system of subsidies in general instead of Tweeting about it every afternoon. I’d be the first one on board if he made that pitch. Until then, I’d appreciate it if Mr. Biden could give it a rest with trying to demonize the profit motive. 

Another chicken dream…

I had chicken for dinner last night. As happens more often than not under these circumstances, my subconscious treated me to yet another of what I’ve fondly come to think of as “chicken dream.”

This one featured a very vivid sequence in which I was driving the Jeep along the edge of a park or maybe a town square. It was tree lined and bucolic and filled with protestors wearing red shirts. As I passed, rolling slowly, they began spilling over into the street. One of the red shirts, armed, and now standing in the middle of the street leveled a rifle (hunting, not assault). I have a stark recollection of staring down the open barrel – its bore looking like an ever-widening maw – and then instinctively popping the clutch and knocking the unknown rifleman out of the way.

Rather than fleeing as would probably have been advisable in a real-world mob scene, dream me pulled to the curb on the next block, locked the Jeep, and checked into a hotel. The next morning the protestors were gone, but so was the Jeep. The entire square looked pristine and as if no one had even the audacity to walk on the grass the day before.

I was getting decidedly surly looks from townspeople who were gathering in small groups of two or three people, whispering as I passed. After scouring the surrounding streets for the Jeep, my dream self gave up, commenting “Well, I guess I just live here now.”

And that’s where I jolted awake in the very early hours of Tuesday morning. My inner self was more than happy to go along with the crowds, running down an armed bandit, and choosing to stick around overnight for no apparent reason – but even in a dream state it couldn’t get past the idea that I’d voluntarily live in “downtown” anywhere.

I’ve said it before, but I really do need to stop having chicken for dinner. It truly makes for some of the dumbest dreams.

Communicating intent…

Halloween is fine as holidays go. It generally lacks the feasting that’s kind of the hallmark of my favorite holidays, but stacking three of those in a row over sequential months is probably overkill. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Halloween, but gods do I loathe the celebrants who can’t seem to abide by the rules of the road.  

I don’t like people coming to the door at the best of times. Jorah absolutely loses his shit when the doorbell rings, or a car door slams, or he hears voices he can’t identify. The same set of inputs send the cat fleeing to the deepest corners of house to burrow in. George, to his credit, is happily indifferent. Still, that leaves three out of four residents of this house who just don’t want to deal with it.

I do all the things you’re supposed to do when you’re not participating – cut off the porch light, the driveway lights, and even the landscape lighting. Still they came. Two years ago, I even extinguished the itty-bitty light in the doorbell. They still came. Last year I went so far as pulling all the blinds and reduced the interior light to the bare minimum needed to keep reading. Still they came. 

Today I made sure all of the above was done before dark and even added blackout curtains to the side light windows next to the front door in an effort to block out any ambient light that might make its way to the front of the house. By 7 o’clock this evening it will be pitch goddamned black in my front yard. The house is going to look like a hole in the woods. There’s not a thing about it that’ll look inviting. Still, I expect, they’ll come… and stand in the dark utterly confused when there’s no doorbell to ring. Short of posting sentries at the end of the driveway, I don’t know how else to convey my intent. 

Simply wanting to be left alone in peace in your own home shouldn’t require this level of effort. A thinking person could have picked up on the signs when I turned the porch light off… so I suspect what we really have is at least some number of people wandering around feeling awfully entitled to other people’s time and attention. Basically, behaving the same way they do the other 364 days of the year.

In conclusion, if you wouldn’t encourage your darling children to take candy from a stranger in a van, you probably shouldn’t encourage them to visit my blacked-out house. 

I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed…

Inconsistency makes me just a little bit crazy. This week, I’ve seen two heavily commented on social media posts that were, for lack of a better term, triggering. 

The first, from the NRA, was a post singing the praises of an Iowa school district that had decided to allow some portion of its teachers to carry a firearm inside the school. I don’t have any deep philosophical problems with that if people are willing and able, but I was amazed at the number of far-right commenters arguing that all teachers should be armed or that it should be required in all school districts. I suspect that a fair number of them were the same people who over the course of the Great Plague were busy calling out teachers as groomers, screaming bloody murder about “unsuitable” books in the classroom, and raging that teacher’s sole purpose was to indoctrinate impressionable young minds into a vast leftist conspiracy. Suddenly, teachers are the last, best guardians of their children. If that’s not inconsistent, I have no idea what is.

The second post, once again related to guns, was a bland piece stating emphatically that only the police should have “high powered” weapons. The comments are exactly what you’d expect – agreement right down the line from precisely the same people who during the Great Plague shouted themselves hoarse that the police couldn’t be trusted and should be defunded and disbanded.  Either the police are a trusted agent to apply state sanctioned force or they’re not. The alternative illustrated by this particular meme seems to be that the police are wildly untrustworthy, but absolutely should be armed well beyond the ability of any citizen or group of citizens to resist their power. I can’t be the only one that sees the logical conflict here, right?

Given the level of engagement with both of the subject posts, I can only assume that applying even some cursory analysis to ideas isn’t something most people do regardless of where on the political divide they fall. That probably shouldn’t be surprising at this point… and I’m really not surprised in any traditional sense of the word. I’ve long since given up on the vast mass of people being anything other than dumber than dog shit. 

None of this sad tale of woe is a surprise, but it can’t help but be a disappointment.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. Blue Falcons. From time immemorial there have been Blue Falcons. They’re the kind of people who would step over their own sainted grandmother or cheat their best friend if they thought it was a chance to get ahead. The ranks of the great green machine are thick with them to some greater or lesser degree. The worst of them, the ones who create a lot of smoke and heat but not much light, are the staff schmucks who think they’ll gain the barest marginal advantage by selling out someone down the hall over an issue that could have been remedied with an email. Being a buddy fucker isn’t a good look, friends. Even if you gain a nominal advantage temporarily, the taint will be on you till the end of your days.

2. Weekends. The problem with the weekend is whole vast swaths of the population are off at the same time. I found myself unavoidably out on Saturday afternoon to do some business with places that don’t obligingly open their doors before 7 AM. To my never-ending horror, there were people everywhere. Traffic backed up at every light. It’s goddamned nightmare fuel. Maybe I need to find a gig where I can take two sequential weekdays off instead of Saturday and Sunday… because weekends are absolutely not relaxing when I have to subject myself to the crowd.

3. There’s been a wave of “climate protests” across Europe. The most recent spate of “protestors” feature assholes damaging and destroying art across the continent who rank right alongside the Taliban scum who blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas or the ISIS fucks who destroyed the Roman theater at Palmyra. At best they’re petulant little shits throwing a temper tantrum because their ideas can’t draw support on their own merits… but in my estimation they’re domestic terrorists who should be delt with as such.

Can do attitude…

So hey, what we’re going to go ahead and do is pile all of you guys back in this room with no windows or moving air so you can spread disease and shout over one another to have conversations, participate in online meetings, and make phone calls. Oh, and by the way, those nice noise cancelling headphones that you’ve been using for years and make working elbow to asshole with everyone else sitting in cubicle hell tolerable are also now contraband… but don’t worry, we’re going to replace them with piece of shit one ear call center headsets that are a-ok.

We’re also going to rip the microphones and cameras out of your laptops so you’ll need to go ahead and use external devices when you’re teleworking to get those functions. No, I’m sure that won’t be in any way a pain in the ass. They’re one step away from explaining why it’s a feature and not a bug.

One of the real perks of working here at this center of excellent excellency is that even when you can’t imagine being able to drive morale even lower, someone finds a way. If there’s a way to make working conditions even slightly more unpleasant, we’ll get after it with gusto. We’re organizationally resourceful like that. It’s the kind of “can do” attitude we like to see.

The part of this whole sorry state of affairs that I’m going to enjoy most is that six months from now someone is going to wander through the area and comment that everyone seems angsty and hostile. If they’ve got a day or two to talk it over, I’ll be happy to give them the full list of how and why… with examples and annotation. 

A sad bloody hash…

A million years ago when I was a teacher for about 30 minutes, I was a dues paying member of the local union. I don’t remember how much the dues were, but it must have been pretty nominal if I was willing to part with it when I was making something like $2,400 a month. Part of the deal there was that the union was responsible for negotiating our salary and benefits package. Outside of that, my engagement with them was pretty minimal.

For most if not all of my career as a cog in Uncle’s great green machine, I’ve also been nominally superintended by one union or another. The difference here, of course, is that none of these unions are able to negotiate pay or benefits or much of anything that really makes a strong case for sending them money every other week. In 20 years, the total number of times I’ve needed anything from a union is precisely zero point zero. Other than the few run-ins I’ve had with them complaining about me for taking up whole swaths of the parking lot with giant tents every April there for a few years, I simply haven’t had any reason or desire to deal with them.

After three weeks of wondering why no one has heard anything about when or if the new and improved telework program will be rolling out, I finally decided to reach out directly to the leadership of our local union. I sent over a perfectly professional inquiry about why we hadn’t heard a word about it, what the holdup is, and when it’s expected to be resolved. It’s certainly not as if it isn’t a point of conversation around the water cooler every single day at this point.

I’ll be honest here, I got the sense that the union official who responded either didn’t appreciate the specific questions, didn’t appreciate being questioned in general, or maybe he’d just gotten tired of being asked the same thing 100 times a week. His response did throw in one of my favorite old saws that anyone who’s been around more than a few days has heard – that “we train to standard, not to time.” You can roughly translate that to mean it’s going to take as long as it takes, so quit asking.

As a professional planner I consider it one of the worst possible approaches to doing anything. In my universe, time is part of the standard. A 100% solution delivered months after it’s needed is every bit as bad and often much worse than a 50% solution delivered on time. Neither one has the desired effects when and where they’re needed. Any good planner should tell you they’re working to both time and standard, not one or the other as if they’re mutually exclusive, unrelated factors.

Basically it was a very polite invitation to go fuck myself, which I’m not especially offended by… other than wishing people would just say that up front rather than couching it in euphemism. He made his point. I made mine. I doubt either one of us feels better for the experience. As a non-dues paying employee, my opinion doesn’t carry much weight to the union’s internal deliberations, but that doesn’t mean for one moment that I’m not going to voice them whenever I feel it’s appropriate… and I haven’t seen or heard anything yet that would convince me our “representation” hasn’t made a sad bloody hash of the whole thing. 

Towards a more curated experience…

A weekend with virtually no news seems to be precisely what the doctor ordered. It was a helpful reminder that there’s enough going on within my span of control to absorb every bit of free time I want to have on any given day. It was kind of great to focus in on those things rather than spending a lot of time focused in on external issues.

My news and media brown out only lasted until I sat down with a computer terminal in front of me this morning. Then I was greeted by headlines warning that “Poll reveals staggering polarization ahead of midterms,” “Fundamentals flashing red; Last pillar of credit crumbles,” and, of course, any number of stories highlighting Donald Trump being his normal, beshitted self. None of those are apt to keep one’s blood pressure down, but what else would anyone really expect on a Monday morning?

I like to imagine I now have all the all the input I need to start scaling back on the amount of hard and soft news I’m consuming on a daily basis, but breaking the habits of a lifetime is probably something of a slow burn. Even if it were possible, I’m not sure I’d ever want to wander through the world completely unaware of what’s happening – if for no other reason than it would create a whole lot of white space when it comes time to sit down every day and do a bit of writing. Short of turning this space into a blog focused on petting dogs and cats, reading books, and highlighting the occasional home cooked meal, keeping a bit of a grip on current events is probably inevitable. 

In any case, I think what that leaves me with is a strong desire to begin curtailing how engaged I am with broad-sourced news coverage – maybe a little less Drudge and a bit more heavily curating Google News to spit out coverage on more tailored issues. It feels like a good idea… and I have no idea if it’s the kind of change I can make work for the long term. 

Ponder, dwell, and worry…

This week has been a lot and I’m tired. Not so much physically as mentally. I’ve expended too much mental energy on stuff that I have no control over and in my estimation that’s almost always a mistake. Being, by nature, someone who ponders, dwells, and flat out worries, it’s an easy enough trap to fall into.

Between ongoing Russian fuckery, the UK having a crisis of confidence, the steady drumbeat of the US midterm elections approaching, and various other bits and bobs, the world is a busy place filled with any number of things that could literally or figuratively maim, mutilate, or kill a guy. Each and every one of those topics is an area worthy of the big thinkers of our time. Even they, in their collective wisdom, probably couldn’t arrive at a collective resolution. I don’t tend to believe in unsolvable problems, but I absolutely believe in problems that can’t be solved until everyone involved wants to solve them. We’re nowhere near that point on so very many issues of great import – and so, completely unbidden, my mind tends to dwell.

This weekend, I’m going to treat this problem the best way I know how – by dramatically reducing my consumption of content from the electronic and print media for a couple of days. I won’t bother to proclaim a news blackout because I’ve never been successful at making one of those stick. I can, however, make intentional choices about what sites I visit and links I follow.

Add in a healthy dab of physical exhaustion from jumping into the fall yard work and that’ll be just about what the doctor ordered to even out the keel. By Monday I should be ready to dive back in and, if nothing else, look at the same old issues with an at least partially rested frontal lobe.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. COLA. Retirees are getting an 8.7% cost of living adjustment for 2023. In contrast, active employees are on track for a 4.6% general pay increase. In my head it feels vaguely like those two figures should be reversed, or perhaps they should be on par. I mean a raise of 8.7% for managing to simultaneously be retired and stay alive is good work if you can get it, but it sends a bit of an odd message to the people who are still schlepping to the office and actually doing the work.

2. Planning. I spent a good portion of the last month working with my advisor to make plans and tweak accounts to make sure I didn’t run afoul of the IRS in 2023. I see yesterday that the IRS has now updated their income brackets for next year due to this year’s inflationary pressure. Those updated brackets imply there are probably a few other changes coming in the next few weeks that could very well have made the last month’s work mostly or wholly unnecessary. Sure, it would be nice to have a little more cap space for IRAs and 401ks next year, but it also means I could have kicked my own planning down the road for a year or two before needing to make changes in how we do things.

3. The union. We’re three weeks past returning to the office under a pre-plague telework agreement that allows for working from home no more than two days a week. It’s also been three weeks since personnel not covered under the union contract were rolled up under their new agreement that allows them to work from home three days each week. In these last three weeks, there has been absolutely no communication from AFGE Local 1904 about why they’re continuing to hold up this benefit for the rest of us. I have no idea what they’re thinking, but they’re making management look downright reasonable, accommodating, and open handed. We’re rapidly approaching a point where I’m going to be willing to pay some dues so I can show up and be an antagonistic bastard at every single meeting they have.