In Desperate Bid For Relevancy, Another Group Of Third Way Democrats Launch Organization
Will Marshall, a big supporter of Joe Lieberman, came to my attention when he was blogging at the Bull Moose (frequently called the Bullsh%$ Moose) blog.
He is the president of a “think tank” that was affiliated with the DLC, and his solution to everything is for Democrats to act like Republicans.
Photo of the Day [via @marshalljulius] pic.twitter.com/3V1ZHV5zcF— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) August 6, 2017
Banksey would look at this graffiti, and be profoundly impressed. 
The problem is spiders, which produce the material in very limited quantities, and their cannibalistic proclivities mitigate against high intensity farming.
Well, it looks like the DoD is trying to get silk genetically engineered worms to produce spider silk an alternative:
The U.S. Army is upping its investment in genetically engineered spider silk for body armor. Last year, the service paid almost $100,000 to Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, which makes spider silk that can be produced at scale — with silkworms. On Wednesday, the company announced that the Army will move to the second phase of the contract and will look to Kraig to produce a customized strain of the silk for “high-performance fibers for protective apparel applications.” That is: flexible body armor made from genetically engineered spider silk. The total contract amount would reach $900,000 if parameters are met. Army representatives said that interested in the material purely from a research perspective, for now.
Kraig Biocraft injects spider DNA into silkworm eggs, enabling the worms to produce its custom silk. The researchers describe the process in this 2011 PNAS paper.
Spider silk is much tougher than regular worm silk, and about half as tough as Kevlar. But it’s far more flexible, (3 percent elasticity for kevlar versus nearly 40 percent for spider silk.) The Army believes that the energy absorption of the material could be much higher than kevlar (as determined by multiplying the strength of the fiber by the elongation.)
It’s also much more elastic and flexible than kevlar. But getting enough spider silk to clothe an Army is a tall order. The crawly arachnids don’t produce silk in high volume and when you crowd spiders too close together, they eat each other. The quest to produce spider silk in hosts other than spiders has led researchers to use a variety of other methods such as yeast, e. coli bacteria and mammalian cells.
There is also the fact that the techniques for handling silkworms, and harvesting the silk, have been known for thousands of years.
It is also far less alarming than the prospect of an escape of motherf%$#ing mutant spiders.
The Pentagon on Monday criticized Turkey’s plans to purchase a Russian air-defense system instead of investing in NATO technology.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in talks to get Russia to supply Ankara with its latest S-400 surface-to-air missile system.
Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis said the Pentagon had concerns over its NATO ally’s purchase of the Russian technology because it might not work with other equipment used by the 29-nation alliance.
………
The S-400 system has a range of about 400 kilometers (250 miles) and is designed to shoot down enemy aircraft.
The Patriot has a range of about 160 km (200 miles), significantly less than the S-400, and unlike the Patriot system, it was designed from the start to be a part of an IADS (integrated air defense system), which means that integrating it with (Russian) short range missiles and AAA is easier and more straightforward.
Incorporating NATO standard IFF (identify friend or foe) into this system is not rocket science. (Pun not intended)
US and NATO doctrine has always been about air superiority being the primary way to protect the troops on the ground, the Russians, and the Soviets before them, relied far more on an IADS, and so have applied more resources to these systems.
Because of this, their systems are more capable than western systems.
The Pentagon is freaking out because some of the generals are worried that a comfortable retirement as a consultant at Raytheon are jeopardized.
Kushner to Interns: Trump Team Too Disorganized to Collude With Russia
You know, this is a pretty convincing argument.
Between Scaramucci and Flynn, these guys couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery
………
Favoring the military over alternative tools of U.S. foreign policy remains one of the few consistencies within the current administration. Internal documents have proposed folding USAID into the State Department and “zeroing” out development assistance programs that do not advance specific U.S. political or strategic objectives. With few civilian appointees in either the Departments of Defense or State and unprecedented levels of “authorization,” the uniformed services enjoy tremendous operational discretion with few civilian counterbalances either inside or outside the Pentagon.
The trend of shifting foreign policy funds towards programs with an explicit security focus long predates the Trump administration. A third of all U.S. foreign aid funds, $17 billion, goes towards military aid and security assistance, making it on its own the fourth-largest foreign aid budget in the world. Moreover, management of this security assistance money has migrated away from the State Department to the Pentagon. A recent Open Society report shows that, whereas in 2011 the Defense Department directed only 17 percent of all security assistance (compared to the State Department’s 80 percent), by 2015 the Defense Department’s share had increased to 57 percent and the State Department’s had dropped to 42 percent. Officials wearing digicam rather than pinstripes are delivering an increasing percentage of U.S. assistance.
While the broad potential problems with this trend have been well–explored, in this article we focus on a concrete implication by looking at an important component of U.S. assistance: the training of other states’ militaries and security personnel, known as foreign military training (FMT). As in the case of Egypt, this training can empower its uniformed recipients to participate more in their home countries’ internal politics, up to and including coups.
………
According to the U.S. government, in fiscal year 2015 approximately 76,400 students from 154 countries participated in U.S. foreign military training, costing $876.5 million. Colleagues have recently argued that this sort of security assistance rarely achieves its stated goals of contributing to U.S. foreign policy objectives through “helping allies and partners improve their defense capabilities and enhance their ability to participate in missions alongside U.S. forces.” In contrast, we argue that in some cases, security assistance does have a profound effect, albeit in ways unintended by the donor. By strengthening the military in states with few counterbalancing civilian institutions, U.S. foreign military training can lead to both more military-backed coup attempts, as well as a higher likelihood of a coup’s success.
………
This might seem counterintuitive since the training provided to these officers is designed to encourage liberal values including respect for civilian control, a norm central to the U.S. military’s own identity. Moreover, the United States normally cuts security assistance when a coup occurs, which should deter military officers from attempting a takeover.
We argue, however, that the norm most likely to be transmitted by U.S. training is one to which foreign military officers are already receptive: a professional identity independent from that of their own government. The U.S. military’s distinct professional culture is largely based on Samuel Huntington’s notion of “objective civilian control.” This ideal precludes military interference by in politics, but it also generates a strong, separate corporate identity. Huntington himself recognized that, in countries that are not solidly established democracies, the more professional the military considers itself, the higher its temptation to intervene in political affairs.
This has been known for years. The unsavory reputation of the School of the Americas, which led to its renaming in 2000.
At the Virginia Tech, researchers have dressed up a card seat to evaluate public responses to unmanned cars:
Tech blogs went crazy over the weekend after a new self-driving car was seen rolling around Arlington, Virginia.
Unlike vehicles from
Even more intriguingly, the car appeared to be genuinely autonomous: there was no-one sitting in the driver’s seat. Typically, a human overseer is required in the testing phase to make sure that the car doesn’t go wild and run over a marching band, but somehow this car had managed to find a loophole.
………
But still a question remained. Who was behind this breakthrough new technology? How were they solving the problems that had stymied even the mighty Alphabet/Google/Waymo megacorp?
You’ve read the headline. You know the answer: it was a bloke dressed up as a car seat.
………
But one aspect of the rumour mill was correct: the guy really was associated with Virginia Tech. According to the university’s transportation institute, he was engaged in research about autonomous vehicles, likely gathering data about the reaction of normal drivers to sharing road space with a self-driving car.
I’m not sure if this was a real study, or just an excuse for some researcher to f%$# with fellow drivers.
My money on the latter.
For 12 years Elon Musk had a personal assistant. When she asked for a raise, he told her to take a vacation so he could see how essential her services were.
When she came back, he he told her that her services were not required, and he fired her. (See also here and here)
Elon Musk is a busy billionaire who you might imagine has a lot of people working for him to keep all of his various projects afloat, but Business Insider brought up an anecdote from a biography of Musk today about how he once fired his long-time assistant for asking for a raise. (Update: Elon Musk has denied the biography’s account on Twitter.)
Look, obviously being the super rich guy behind some of the most influential American companies in recent history is going to make you feel important and probably turn into kind of a jerk. But this anecdote is almost something else, so here it is, as summarized by Business Insider from Musk’s biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, by author Ashlee Vance:
According to Vance, the assistant, Mary Beth Brown, asked Musk for a significant raise after she’d been working with him for 12 years. In response, Musk told Brown to take two weeks off, during which he would assume her responsibilities and see whether she was critical to his success.
When Brown returned, Musk told her he didn’t need her anymore.
Musk also told Vance that he offered Brown another position at the company but that she never returned to the office after that.
Now, of course, this is just an anecdote in a biography, so the telling of what happened may not be exactly as it actually happened. Does it sound like this is something Musk would do? Yeah. Does anyone think Musk can actually operate without an assistant? You probably shouldn’t.
But! After some brief digging to see if I could find something else, I found a Quora posting from the verified profile of Justine Musk, ex-wife of Elon, that practically doubles down on Mary Beth Brown’s story, as well as how insane it is to have any sort of relationship with Elon Musk:
Mary Beth Brown started working for Elon soon after we moved to LA twelve or thirteen years ago (Elon and I were still married then). MB was an exceptional and devoted employee of Elon’s and lovely to deal with on a personal level. She gave her life to the job — and to our family — and the news of her departure was a shock to me.
Apparently (according, I believe, to Ashlee Vance, who wrote the book on Elon), MB asked for a raise. E told her that if she was truly critical to SpaceX, it should not be able to operate in her absence (or something to that effect). He suggested a 3-week experiment to test this hypothesis/her worth. This reminds me of something similar he once said to me, many years ago, after I came back from a week’s visit with my family in Canada — that his life had operated quite smoothly in my absence. He was letting me know that I was an incompetent house manager. (He was not wrong.) So of the different stories I have heard behind MB’s departure from SpaceX, this is the one that resonates with me. (Although you would *never* use the word ‘incompetent’ in association with MB!)
Wherever MB is and whatever she is doing, I hope her life is fabulous. She and I have not always been on the same side, but I have — and will always have — tremendous respect for that remarkable woman.
Abraham Lincoln once said , “I care not much for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”
By this standard, Elon Musk’s cult of well ……… Elon Musk ……… severely lacking.
I’m a Google Manufacturing Robot and I Believe Humans Are Biologically Unfit to Have Jobs in Tech
Heh.
Working on an issue at the Stellar Parthenon BBS, where I am an admin.
Looks like I’m going to have my evenings occupied for a while.
I am referring, of course, to India’s history with developing indigenous weapons systems.
For example, we have the now-terminated and protracted development of the Arjun tank and the INSAS rifle system, but Tejas program, has suffered through a 33+ year development program is crown jewel of this dubious crown.
And now we see more schedule slippage:
The Indian Ministry of Defence (MoD) has revealed further delays in the country’s programme to produce the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) for the Indian Air Force (IAF).
The MoD said in a statement on 4 August that state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) has delivered just four aircraft to the IAF out of 40 ordered in 2005. All these aircraft were previously scheduled to be delivered to the IAF by 2017–18.
The four aircraft so far delivered are from a batch of 20 designated for initial operational clearance (IOC), while the remaining 20 aircraft were designated for final operational clearance (FOC).
The MoD said that 12 remaining aircraft under the IOC batch are at the production stage and four more aircraft, which will be used as trainers, will be produced following necessary approvals by the MoD’s Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA).
It added that production of the 20 FOC aircraft will also depend on clearance by the ADA, which has led the Tejas development programme for the past three decades.
This is f%$#ed up and sh%$.
Yesterday, anonymous intelligence sources claimed that North Korea had a miniaturized warhead suitable for use on its recently fired missile:
North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment.
The analysis, completed last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency, comes on the heels of another intelligence assessment that sharply raises the official estimate for the total number of bombs in the communist country’s atomic arsenal. The United States calculated last month that up to 60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Some independent experts think the number is much smaller.
The findings are likely to deepen concerns about an evolving North Korean military threat that appears to be advancing far more rapidly than many experts had predicted. U.S. officials concluded last month that Pyongyang is also outpacing expectations in its effort to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking the American mainland.
You know, maybe it’s the time to engage in direct talks, exchange ambassadors, and END THE F%$#ING KOREAN WAR, which is still technically ongoing.
The US position, complete capitulation as a prelude to negotiations, is not a winning strategy.
Earlier posts are here,.
I’ve always felt that the whole Russia hysteria is primarily about those who screwed the pooch in 2016 finding a scapegoat upon which they would attach the blame.
At best, the underlying criminal act is a violation of campaign finance law, and given the current dysfunctional nature of the Federal Elections Commission mitigates against even that.
That being said, in this sort of situation, it’s frequently not the crime, it’s the coverup, and when the FBI executes a predawn raid on one of the principals in the matter, it’s starting to get really interesting:
FBI agents raided the home in Alexandria, Va., of President Trump’s former campaign chairman, arriving in the pre-dawn hours late last month and seizing documents and other materials related to the special counsel investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
The raid, which occurred without warning on July 26, signaled an aggressive new approach by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team in dealing with a key figure in the Russia inquiry. Manafort has been under increasing pressure as the Mueller team looked into his personal finances and his professional career as a highly paid foreign political consultant.
Using a search warrant, agents appeared the day Manafort was scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee and a day after he met voluntarily with Senate Intelligence Committee staff members.
The search warrant requested documents related to tax, banking and other matters. People familiar with the search said agents departed the Manafort residence with a trove of material, including binders prepared ahead of Manafort’s congressional testimony.
Investigators in the Russia inquiry have previously sought documents with subpoenas, which are less intrusive and confrontational than a search warrant. With a warrant, agents can inspect a physical location and seize any useful information. To get a judge to sign off on a search warrant, prosecutors must show that there is probable cause that a crime has been committed
This must have rattled their cages.
John Oliver describes the cluterf%$# that is the US Border Patrol:
Contained within that bill are a number of waivers, and they provide a precise road map on how Russia can best retaliate against the US.
The one that immediately comes to mind is waivers for NASA, and in particular the RD-180 engine used by the US Atlas launcher, but you will find a lot sprinkled throughout the bill.
It turns out that the primary reason for this is that it allows companies to ignore the cost of stratospheric pay levels and creating misleading metrics to justify bonuses:
Investors liked what they saw in PayPal’s second-quarter financial results, reported by the digital and mobile payments giant on July 26. Revenues grew to $3.14 billion in the quarter that ended in June, an increase of 18 percent over the same period last year. Total payment volume of $106 billion was up 23 percent, year over year.
Even better, PayPal’s favored earnings-per-share measure — which it does not calculate in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP — came in at 46 cents per share, 3 cents more than Wall Street analysts had expected. The company has trained investors to focus on this number, rather than on the less pretty GAAP-compliant numbers most companies are judged by. And focus they did.
Exceeding analysts’ estimates — “beating the number,” in Wall Street parlance — is crucial for any corporate leader interested in keeping his or her stock price aloft. Even the smallest earnings miss can send shares tumbling.
………
Naturally, many factors contributed to PayPal’s second-quarter earnings. But one element stands out: the amount the company dispensed to employees in the form of stock-based compensation.
How could stock-based compensation — which is a company expense, after all — have helped PayPal’s performance in the quarter? Simple. The company does not consider stock awards a cost when calculating its favored earnings measure. So when PayPal doles out more stock compensation than it has done historically, all else being equal, its chosen non-GAAP income growth looks better.
Accounting rules have required companies to include stock-based compensation as a cost of doing business for years. That’s as it should be: Stock awards have value, after all, or employees wouldn’t accept them as pay. And that value should be run through a company’s financial statements as an expense.
………
Back in the 1990s, technology companies argued strenuously against having to run stock compensation costs through their profit-and-loss statements. Who can blame them for wanting to make an expense disappear?
They lost that battle with the accounting rule makers. But then they took a new tack: Technology companies began providing alternative earnings calculations without such costs alongside results that were accounted for under GAAP, essentially offering two sets of numbers every quarter. The non-GAAP statements — called pro forma numbers or adjusted results — often exclude expenses like stock awards and acquisition costs. And the equity analysts who hold such sway on Wall Street seem to be fine with them.
………
PayPal is by no means the only company that adds back the costs of stock-based compensation to its unconventional earnings calculations. Many technology companies do, contending, as PayPal does, that their own arithmetic “provides investors a consistent basis for assessing the company’s performance and helps to facilitate comparisons across different periods.”
………
PayPal takes the opposite approach. [From companies like Google and Facebook] And look at what it does to its results.
Under generally accepted accounting principles, PayPal reported operating income of $430 million in the second quarter of 2017. That was up almost 16 percent from the $371 million it produced in the same period last year.
But under PayPal’s alternative accounting, its non-GAAP operating income was $659 million in the June quarter, an increase of almost 25 percent from 2016.
So what’s to account for the added $230 million in operating income under PayPal’s preferred calculation? Most of it — $192 million — was stock-based compensation PayPal dispensed to employees in the June quarter and added back to its results as calculated under GAAP.
That was a big jump — 57 percent — from the $122 million PayPal handed out during the second quarter of 2016. And back in 2015, PayPal reported just $89 million in stock awards.
………
Craig Maurer is a partner at Autonomous, an independent investment research firm in New York. He follows payments companies and rates PayPal’s stock an underperformer.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Maurer was critical of how the company accounts for stock-based pay. He said that as a percentage of PayPal’s non-GAAP operating income, stock-based compensation has risen to 29 percent this year from 17 percent in 2015.
“They are literally taking a cost out of their income statement, moving it to a different line and backing it out of results,” Mr. Maurer said in an interview. “And you can see that it’s adding significantly to their ability to meet earnings expectations. If you backed out the difference between what we were expecting on stock-based comp in the quarter versus what they reported, it was 2 cents of earnings.”
………
PayPal’s stock-based compensation practices have another noteworthy effect: They drive executive pay higher at the company. Here’s how.
The company says it has three main metrics for calculating its managers’ performance pay each year. One of those measures, its proxy shows, is non-GAAP net income. So, as PayPal awards more and more stock to its executives and employees, non-GAAP net income shows better growth. And the greater that growth, the more incentive pay the company awards to its top executives.
For PayPal insiders, at least, that’s one virtuous circle.
While I have commented on a number of problems in the American economy, particularly excessive rent seeking through IP, it’s important to note that business practices that have the effect of allowing managers to loot their companies, and defraud investors are a problem as well.
Natalie came across a french fry recipe online.
First, you pickle them in brine before you fry them up.
After a week or so, open the jar and rinse the fries off and then pat dry.
Fry up as you would normal fries, and add salt immediately after cooking is done, and put on paper towels to drain the oil.
Some notes:
I rather liked them.
No, no pictures, I am referring to the fact that the emperor may have no clothes, and Elon Musk, in particular his Tesla Motors project, seems to be increasingly unmoored from reality:
If you’re a hedge fund analyst looking over a public company’s numbers and you see a troubling financial trend making itself evident in the data (like a company burning through cash while booking revenue for a product that is seems perhaps incapable of delivering in the volume promised in the timeframe laid out), you will feel the natural urge to short that company’s stock and wait quietly for the money and praise to roll in.
But we want you to pause for a moment and look at the top of that file. Does it say “Tesla Motors, Inc. (TSLA)”?
It does?
Yeah, you’re going to want to rethink that short, homie, because you have not factored “Blind Elon-ic Faith” into your Alpha.
But you wouldn’t be alone.
Tesla reported yesterday, and from a purely logical perspective it was a mixed bag:Tesla’s reported a net loss of $336 million, or $2.04 per share, compared to a loss of $293 million, or $2.09 a share, a year ago.
Excluding stock based compensation, Tesla lost $1.33 a share, which was narrower than expected, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters.
Revenue climbed to $2.79 billion from $1.27 billion in the year-ago period, and outpacing Wall Street’s estimates of $2.51 billion.Yeah, we said “mixed”:
Heading into the earnings report, analysts expressed concerns about whether Tesla would ramp up production of its Model 3, a more affordable electric car with a base cost of $35,000, quick enough. In the past, Tesla has struggled with production issues.
Musk also said that he hasn’t ruled out dipping a toe back into the debt market.
See, Tesla is currently promising that it can make 1,500 of these things in the entire third quarter of this year, but Elon is also telling anyone who will listen that he will be able to make 10,000 in a week by the end of 2018. That kind of ramp-up has led a lot of people in the asset management game to doubt Tesla’s long-term strength, what with logic dictating that cash will burn at the altar of Elon’s ambition, and that the fire might rage out of control while he’s busy glancing over at his rockets, his Hyperloop tunnels or putting the finishing touches on his dope-ass new solar roof. All those factors are causing David Einhorn and a legion of his fellow traders to go short on TSLA.
Just to remind you, their plant used to be the joint Toyota-GM NUMMI plant, and the most cars that it ever produced under that management was 428,633 units in 2006, or less than 8,500 units a week, and Tesla is saying that it can ramp up from about 120 units a week to 10,000 units a week over the next 18 months.
For his next trick, Elon Musk will appoint a horse to his board of directors.
But the underlying story here is that Tesla releases profoundly mixed numbers, reveals that its production ramp up plans are unrealistic, and they get shorted by speculators.
In response to an awful quarterly report, the stock goes up, and the speculators take it on the chin, because ……… Elon!
This is what happens when you short a cult. At this point, R Kelly has nothing on Elon Musk. And the notion that a short squeeze might put a shudder in Tesla’s rise seems – like all other rational ideas that come in contact with Tesla – to be neutered by whatever Tesla investors think of Tesla.
So, here’s our last word of caution to you hedgie analysts out there crunching numbers on TSLA: You’re wasting your time. Tesla isn’t about facts and figures, it’s about belief in the divinity of Elon f%$#ing Musk. You’ll never understand what is happening because the Kool-Aid is the stock and a lot of people can’t stop drinking it.
(%$# mine)
So, Tesla is facing a unionization effort from employees who say that their manufacturing facility is abusive and dangerous, and the corporate response has been (I am not kidding here) free frozen yogurt at their Freemont, CA plant.
So now Tesla is warning its workforce, one that already has issues with excessive mandatory overtime ans safety issues that they will be facing, “Production Hell“.
Honestly, I’m half expecting a strike in the next 18 months:
When Tesla chief executive Elon Musk handed over the first 30 Model 3 sedans to reservation holders last Friday, he warned employees they’ll be in “production hell” for the next several months. It was a curious remark, as Tesla employees have been voicing concerns about workplace injuries since earlier this year. Employees reiterated those points in a letter to Tesla’s board Monday, and demanded answers to questions about pay transparency and safety.
“We’re tired of suffering preventable injury after preventable injury,” said Michael Catura, a production associate at Tesla, in a statement. “It impacts morale, it slows down production and it’s of course traumatizing and financially difficult for the affected person. We want to know what the company’s plan is to address this problem, and to see whether or not any progress is being made.”
The letter, signed by the Tesla Workers’ Organizing Committee, said it believes in Tesla’s mission to build a mass-market, emission-free electric vehicle. But the committee cites a number of ongoing issues, and it requests access to a safety plan and clarity on pay and non-retaliation agreements for employees trying to form a union. Earlier this month, a group of 10 factory employees presented a petition with questions about how workers are paid and how raises are distributed. BuzzFeed reported that about 400 employees had signed the petition.
Here is a new phrase to me, “Rest and Vest”.
It refers to a phenomenon where entitled dotcommers are allowed to do no works for months on end until their stock options vest.
The sense of entitlement is really staggering:
On a sunny summer morning, a Facebook engineer woke up to go to work but felt ill. She ran to her bathroom and threw up. “I thought I was getting sick,” the engineer recalled.
It wasn’t a virus or food poisoning. She was having a bad reaction to her job.
She was making $1 million a year, mostly in stock, and running a team of about three dozen people, she told Business Insider. And she had worked herself into a state of exhaustion in the three years since Facebook had acquired her previous company. The acquisition had been highly political, the integration wasn’t going well, and she had been killing herself to make it more successful and protect her people from losing their jobs over it.
As tired as she was, she couldn’t just quit this job. She owed a big chunk of money in taxes thanks to that stock and needed her salary to pay those taxes.
But after getting violently ill at the thought of going to work, she decided not to go in. Not that day. Not ever again. And she knew she wouldn’t get fired.
Because not going to work was actually her manager’s idea.
The previous day she had told him she would be leaving the company at the end of the year, six months away. She wanted to spend the rest of the year wrapping up her projects but not taking on any more, collecting on the stock that would vest by year end and making the money she needed to pay her taxes.
“My manager and I had lots of conversations. I teetered on leaving so many times,” she said. “But this time was for real. I was going to see these projects to a healthy state and then I needed to go. I felt good about it. The next thing, he told me not to come in.”
She panicked thinking he was firing her, but he explained she wasn’t being terminated at all. “Just don’t come to work,” he told her. “You’re burned out and need a break. Just don’t talk about it, and everyone will assume you’re on someone else’s team.”
………
And that’s how this hardworking, conscientious engineer wound up joining the least secret secret club in the Valley, known as “rest and vest.”
“Resting and vesting” is when an employee, typically an engineer, has an easy workload (if any job responsibilities at all) and hangs out on the company’s payroll collecting full pay and stock. Stock is often the bigger chunk of total compensation for a senior engineer than salary.
Once she was in rest-and-vest mode, this engineer spent her time attending tech conferences, working on pet coding projects, networking with friends, and planning her next career move.
She realized that her manager let her rest and vest to keep her quiet about the problems with that acquisition, so she had time to find her next thing. Had he terminated her immediately, she would have been incensed. “Everyone knew I had a big mouth and would speak out,” she said. “He figured, ‘Hey, it costs us next to nothing keep her happy for six months.'”
This is nuts, and it is a sign of a bloated and dysfunctional industry.
The reason that this effects the rest of us is that these excesses indicate a misallocation of resources, and as such they are not available to more useful purposes than sharing cat pictures.
To paraphrase Ike, every redundant social media site that is made, every web 2.0 site that is launched, every IPO that is launched signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who actually do useful work.
The Socialist Movement Is Getting Younger, Thanks to One 75-Year-Old
Bernie, of course, has been the proximate cause of this renaissance.
The article, of course, has a rather condescending tone, but it’s nice to see the left increasing in popularity, if just because the consensus of politics in the US is neoliberal crap.