Fleecing Uncle Sam

Or as Jason Kottke put it, "CEOs Are America's Real Moochers":

Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers International union, writes about a Institute for Policy Studies report called Fleecing Uncle Sam. One of the most eyebrow-raising details is this:

Of America's 100 top-paid CEOs, 29 worked schemes that enabled them to collect more in compensation than their corporations paid in income taxes. The average pay for these 29: $32 million. For one year.

And from the report:

All seven of these firms were highly profitable, collectively reporting more than $74 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits. However, they received a combined total of $1.9 billion in refunds from the IRS, giving them an effective tax rate of negative 2.5 percent.

The seven CEOs leading these tax-dodging corporations were paid $17.3 million on average in 2013. Boeing and Ford Motors both paid their CEOs more than $23 million last year while receiving large tax refunds.

Total bullshit.

Agreed. And the depressing thing is the incoming Congressional class is the least likely to do anything about it in the history of Congress.

Apple Has Lost The Functional High Ground

Marco Arment, writing today what many of us within the Apple community also feel:

The problem seems to be quite simple: they’re doing too much, with unrealistic deadlines.

We don’t need major OS releases every year. We don’t need each OS release to have a huge list of new features. We need our computers, phones, and tablets to work well first so we can enjoy new features released at a healthy, gradual, sustainable pace.

I fear that Apple’s leadership doesn’t realize quite how badly and deeply their software flaws have damaged their reputation, because if they realized it, they’d make serious changes that don’t appear to be happening. Instead, the opposite appears to be happening: the marketing-driven pace of rapid updates on multiple product lines seems to be expanding and accelerating.

Chris Pepper Responds to Paul Graham on Programming Jobs

Gruber linked to this yesterday and it got my attention.

Chris Pepper:

The immigrants I interview and work with are not 100–1,000 times as effective as US Citizens, which is the implication I get from Paul’s article: that the US has plenty of non-great programmers, but we need to recruit outside our borders to find enough great programmers. Immigrants are not hired with an understanding or expectation that they will be twice as effective as US candidates. We hire immigrants (and employers deal with the costs and paperwork) because we need people to do lots of (often basic) jobs, and there are simply not enough qualified candidates — whether programmers, system administrators, or other tech types. […]

But be honest. H-1B visa demand is not high because companies are striving for excellence. The visas are being used to preserve the existing labor market (salary levels) rather than paying higher salaries as dictated by supply and demand.

The entire H-1B Visa argument has been complete bullshit for years. Take this long stanging lobbying effort by all of the established companies in Silicon Valley coupled with the Apple/Microsoft/Twitter/Facebook/Everotherfuckingtechcompany actual god damned conspiracy to wage fix that they're now being sued for in court, and it starts to paint a picture. It paints a picture of companies who are willing to cut their own employees off at the knees to eek out another 3% profit margin at the end of the year. And when you have Paul Grahm write these whiny posts where he tries to legitimate this argument into something than what it actually is, which is the rich just trying to get richer, then it no longer becomes "just business". Its mean, spiteful, and evil.

Fuck that guy.

Year In Cities 2014

It is my sixth year of keeping track of which cities I've slept in over the past year. I've done this for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. Credit for this idea goes to Jason Kottke who I noticed doing this first and liked it, so I decided to do it too.

The rules: One or more nights were spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days

  • Warrenton, VA*
  • Wirtz, VA*
  • Lafayette, IN*
  • New Orleans, LA
  • Hastings on Hudson, NY
  • Cary, NC

I increased from five last year to six this year.

Sony's Reasoning Doesn't Make Sense

A rough timeline of the Sony fiasco is this:

  1. Sony's corporate network is compromised. Much-gossiped-about embarrassing emails and other corporate dirty laundry leaks. Embarassing for the company, and for the top executives that are made to look juvinile and petty, sure.

  2. Hacker's further threaten Sony with "911-style attacks" (which sounds like a load of bullshit to me) and the five major theater companies in the country back out of the theatrical release on Christmas Day.

  3. Sony pulls the film's website, and cancels the release.

  4. Many, many independent theatres publicly state they'd be happy to show the film.

  5. Many express interest in seeing the film due to heightened publicity about the whole ordeal and say Sony should release the film on iTunes/Netflix/other online method.

Sony is now saying the film's release is now over, ignoring points #4 and #5, as if they don't exist.

  1. Today when asked about the story, President Obama, during his last press conference of the year before Christmas, states that he thinks Sony made a big mistake by backing down. Should have released the film.

  2. After the President weighed in, the CEO of Sony sprung into action. Largely avoiding making statements to the press all week other than short press releases, all afternoon the CEO of Sony has appeared on news and radio programs (CNN, CNBC, NPR, etc) attacking the President for his comments and blaming the theatres for the film cancellation.

It seems to me that nothing in the word is holding up Sony from releasing the film. They're relying on the cowardice of the movie theatres as a crutch to lean against to shift the blame off of their own cowardly executives who are afraid of holding on to their jobs so that the hacker's don't release more embarrassing emails. They are perfectly capable of showing the film in independent theatres or releasing it online - they just don't want to do so as they'd rather dump the film and keep their jobs.

Cowards.