Hard Bold Facts

In spite of being a broadly recognized desirable trait, Courage is rare. It's common for people to present boldness where they face no personal consequence, or even a real expectation of consequence. True boldness only comes with the expectation of a personal cost. It requires vulnerability, the possibility of sacrifice. In our extroverted world, being loud is often confused with being bold. Posturing for an echo chamber isn't bold, it's a plea for dopamine or, in some cases, votes.

One good thing about more people starting to wake up to the dysfunction in Texas politics is that they're finally paying attention at a little deeper level. What may not be so good because of that, for Texas politicians, is that people are starting to see through the veneer of bold words to the inconsistent actions of elected officials. Elected officials in Texas would do well to recognize that a shift is happening.

When people are only superficially paying attention to the actions of politicians, they are easy to gaslight or inspire with political theater. When people start paying closer attention, they are easy to enrage with attempts to manipulate them. People like authentic boldness. They hate being manipulated, no matter how theatrically.

In the quorum breaking episode that Texans have endured for the last month, we see some R politicians setting expectations that they will do things that they're not really capable of doing. We see some talk about doing minor things that are within their capability, but never quite happening. This kind of stuff worked for them in the past, but it's increasingly working against them now. That line between inspired and enraged is approaching. Politician beware.

For Texas republicans just catching on to the myth of the deep red Texas capitol, this is all a confusing mess. We have some great reps in the statehouse. We have some truly terrible reps in the statehouse. The bad ones know what to say to make conservative Texans vote for them. They've had a lot of practice. They're good at the theater of conservative politics. They don't expect you to pay close attention to state politics. Watch their actions.

 

American STEM Sell

Originally published in 2015, still relevant...

There was a time when I thought that having a bad day at work was pretty routine. Then I had one. The day I found myself sitting across the desk from the coworkers I had to give the news that they were being let go. Some were friends. Some did their jobs very well, some not so well. They asked the predictable questions. Why was I picked? What could I have done better? The business said “cut”, so we cut. They told us who to cut, so we cut them. They didn't give us answers to the predictable questions. Within a year the business would say “hire” and I would hire more engineers. Of course there was a moratorium on hiring anyone that had been laid off. Just one more turn of the wheel of corporate life.

Scenarios like the one described above have played out for over a million STEM workers in the United States over the past decade. If we look all the way back to 2000 we can add over a million more. And then there are the over 1.5 million aerospace and defense workers who lost jobs in the late 1980s and early 90s. Each time there was a very real impact on someone’s life, family, dreams, and plans. The more recent episodes have become a routine, well-choreographed, part of life driven not by paradigm shifts in technology or geopolitics, but by a high-tech industry with a laser like focus on maximizing shareholder value. The continual clamor for increasing the number of H-1B visas for the STEM sector is nothing more than one part of a cynical practice driven by quarterly accounting. I have worked in high-tech industries for 25 years. The US STEM worker shortage is an artifice. With the possible exception of a couple of years during the late 90s tech boom, there has never been a shortage of high-quality STEM workers in the United States. But the effects of that one shortage were profound and long lasting for the entire tech industry.

In the unprecedented demand for new high-tech workers during the tech boom competition for good employees was fierce and turnover was high. I witnessed engineers quitting a job, and becoming contractors for the same company at two times the income, without ever missing a day of work. In Silicon Valley stories of engineers changing employers multiple times a year to drive up salaries were common. Between 1995 and 2000 my salary doubled – at the same employer doing the same job. It was exciting to be in such high demand. Companies started doing some positive things to improve employee retention, but the bottom line was that the dynamics of the labor market were disruptive to business, and expensive. As a result, tech companies became increasingly creative in their efforts to stabilize the labor pool and control wages.

Offshore sites that had traditionally been focused on mass production or regional efforts for global US corporations were expanded into R&D centers, brand new sites were established, there were calls for increased H-1B visa limits to fill positions here in the states, and foreign job-shops stepped up competition against domestic contractors. Then, just when this high-tech human capital producing juggernaut hit full steam, the dot com boom came crashing to a halt. Why that juggernaut has continued charging through down-turn after down-turn and layoff after layoff is a question that demands an answer.

The main reason is probably just because it was there. Business leaders and managers had put substantial effort into creating new systems, processes, and organizations for ensuring the production bandwidth that a sustained technology boom would have required. It would have been unrealistic to assume that they would just scrap the new system and go back to the previous status-quo just because the demand for human capital had dropped off. And, to be fair, all of us had great hopes that the industry would rapidly shake off its slump and blast off again. Hopes that faded as new dynamics began taking shape.

What had been a deep domestic industry became a shallow industry spread across the globe. Tech support, software development, high-tech assembly, and manufacturing were among the first activities to make major moves offshore, but R&D would follow within a few years. As the high tide of the tech boom continued to recede, duplicate foreign and domestic efforts became unnecessary. Organizations that had their development activities divided between domestic and foreign teams found it expedient to grow offshore when growth was necessary and reduce at home when it was time to cut back. Just recently a situation was brought to my attention where a manager was encouraged to replace a departing engineer by growing an offshore team. From an operational perspective it makes more sense to replace the departing worker in the local team, but making that case to senior management can be career limiting.

There is frustration on both sides of the H-1B visa debate. That frustration has resulted in some common arguments that don’t hold up well under scrutiny. A frequent motive ascribed to corporate interest in hiring foreign workers is that visa holders are cheaper to hire. It is certainly true that hiring foreign workers to work in their home country can be much cheaper than hiring Americans to work in the United States. On the other hand, it is not universally true that foreign workers hired to work in the United States are cheaper than their US counterparts. It is definitely not the case among the major US corporations lobbying for increasing the number of STEM visas. The corporation I work for does not use different salary scales for full time US employees based on visa status or national origin. Graduates in the US on student visas are predominantly obtaining advanced degrees and start at a higher rate than US citizens that tend to compete for the same jobs with bachelor degrees. The typical H-1B visa holder is paid on par with his US citizen colleagues.

One of the common arguments against reducing the visa numbers is that we cut ourselves off from the best and brightest STEM talent the world has to offer. It is an absurd assertion in practice. In an ideal world, where hiring managers applied visa hiring in the spirit of the guidelines, the process might “average up” the quality of the labor pool. The guidelines stipulate that no suitable citizen be available for a job before it can be offered to a visa holder. But the guideline is not followed. Managers simply lie on the paperwork and nullify any perceived barrier to hiring foreign workers over citizens. It’s a routine practice, and bucking the routine can be another career limiting activity for a low or mid-level manager. The reality is that the industry does hire some excellent foreign STEM workers. We also hire a lot of average and poor H-1B visa holders. The process is simply not tailored to bringing the world’s Einsteins to America.

So if routine layoffs in the past few years demonstrate that there is not a shortage of STEM workers, and foreign visa applicants aren’t cheaper to hire than citizens, and visa applicants don’t offer a qualitative advantage, then what motivates the big tech companies to consistently expend effort lobbying Congress to increase visa numbers? The answer, again, is not as complicated as some might think. The same basic economics of supply and demand that drove wages up and increased talent competition in the 1990s, is now being applied by tech companies to maintain a permanent oversupply of STEM workers. Increasing the pool of candidates, well beyond industry demand, depresses the wages of the entire industry, not just the wages of visa holders. The value this approach offers to large corporations should not be understated. Every thousand dollars saved on an annual engineering salary may represent tens of millions of dollars for one of these large corporations. You can hire a good team of lobbyists with that kind of money. But to make the case for increasing the supply, some evidence of demand needs to be demonstrated. The complexities of the situation surround the activities that are necessary to keep the over-supply of labor from appearing completely disconnected with the domestic demand for STEM workers.

One way artificial demand is developed is to create an arbitrary bias for advanced degrees. For most entry level tech jobs an advanced degree offers no benefit over a bachelor degree. Foreign students are overrepresented in advanced degree programs due to immigration policy details. In my own experience as a hiring manager I have seen requests for bachelor graduates result in resume after resume from masters degree and PhD graduates, all requiring visa sponsorship. When questioned about it, the Staffing department seems baffled that a manager isn’t overjoyed at being offered a PhD graduate for the entry level position. Diversity efforts, ostensibly intended to help traditionally disadvantaged groups, have also been corrupted as a way to bias the hiring process toward H-1B visa candidates.

The oversupply of workers is heavily weighted toward the entry level. As a result there is a real motivation to focus hiring practices on less experienced workers, and there is a real incentive to move more expensive senior STEM workers out the door. In addition to limiting placement opportunities for new American graduates, the impact on more senior STEM workers has been devastating. When the salary difference between established STEM workers and college graduates can exceed fifty thousand dollars, you don’t have to cut many senior folks and replace them with new grads for it to quickly add up. Laying off a thousand engineers can easily add 20 or 30 million dollars to the bottom line, even if a thousand new hires are brought in to replace them. This is essentially the case in the tragic scenario at the beginning of this article. Companies with heavy focus on shareholder value have a clear incentive to engage in this practice - Wall Street consistently rewards the shareholders of companies that do so.

Layoffs are not rare in the tech industry. In the past decade they have been as common as the cries for more H-1B visas. It barely made a news cycle ripple when Microsoft laid-off 18,000 workers, and affected thousands of additional contractors in 2014 after having just joined with other tech giants in writing a letter to Congress calling for visa and green-card increases in 2013. Thankfully I’ve never had to ask a laid off engineer to train his replacement, but I have personally seen examples of the practice. In recent news there have been examples of companies tying severance packages to requirements that the laid off worker train their visa holding replacement before they leave. Middle aged engineers are increasingly likely to leave the STEM field after a layoff. The willingness to lose these experienced and knowledgeable STEM resources puts the lie to the cries of under supply.

We don’t hear news stories about large numbers of unemployed college graduates for a couple of different reasons. One reason is that the economy has been bad enough for the past several years that stories about people having trouble finding a job are not newsworthy. Another reason is that companies put considerable effort into making room for younger workers at the expense of older, more expensive, experienced employees. One of the side effects of moving from traditional pension plans to 401k based retirement plans is retirement mobility. Pension plans tend to accumulate very little benefit in the early years and ramp steeply toward the end of one’s career. Employees have a strong incentive to stay with a company long term under a pension plan. That incentive is reduced significantly where a 401k plan is substituted for the pension, but that dynamic works both ways. It is easier for companies to rationalize laying off older workers when they get to take their retirement savings with them. The missing part of the picture is the number of older laid-off STEM workers that take significant pay cuts to stay in their field, or finish their working years making substantially less in a completely different field. The older engineer that is working at Home Depot, teaching high-school math, or fixing cell-phones in the mall, has a different opinion about the visa system than the board members of America’s large tech corporations, and the lobbyists they hire. This is where the downside of increasing H-1B visa numbers is most strongly felt.

A 2014 US census survey summed up the situation pretty well – 74% of American workers with STEM degrees are not employed in a STEM field. There are a lot of reasons why people might decide not to work in the field they studied for, but 74% is an enormous number. These degrees are among the most difficult to attain, and those that pursue them frequently have a passion for the work. Many among this 74% would love to work in their field, but the laid off engineer that gets shut out for a year or two in an economic downturn, or the young parent that takes time off to nurture a pre-school child finds re-entry into their chosen field extremely difficult. In many cases there is no downside, no compromise, in hiring these experienced workers - the oversupply pipeline is just biased towards someone else. There is simply no shortage of American STEM workers, and there is no compromise of quality in hiring them.

There is some evidence that the “side effects” of the H-1B system were intentionally baked in at its origin. The system was established in 1990, in the midst of a widespread culling of Aerospace and Defense industry workers. There was clearly no shortage of STEM workers at the time. In the chorus of voices chiming in on immigration reform and visa issues, the voice of the American STEM worker is too easily lost in the din. There are no well-heeled lobbyists, no unions, and no special interest groups, interceding for the displaced American STEM worker.

US corporations certainly have legitimate responsibilities to their shareholders, and legitimate self-interest in maximizing profits. It is not reasonable for them to pursue those goals by lobbying government for immigration policies based on the false premise of a STEM worker shortage. Arguments could be made that the government may have a role to play in ensuring the competitiveness of US industry in the face of real shortages, but in the absence of those shortages, capitulating to calls for expanded visa quotas is just one more example of crony capitalism. Complicity in a system that arbitrarily throws the lives of American STEM workers into turmoil, or exiles the more experienced from their chosen profession is not a legitimate role of government. It’s time for the interests of Technology companies and the STEM workers they employ to be equally represented in Washington.

What the L?

Once upon a not-so-very-long-ago Conservatives distinguished themselves from big "L" Libertarians. We knew why, and we embraced the distinctions. Conservatives have traditionally seen Libertarians as misguided allies in the effort to defend western civilization and preserve our small "l" libertarian foundations. The primary distinction between these two libertarian branches of political philosophy can be attributed to a fairly significant difference in worldview.

The distinction between Libertarian and Conservative has long been clearly demarcated by differences on issues like supporting open borders, pornography, abortion, prostitution, gambling, and drug use. Conservatives have rejected these positions, and Libertarians have embraced them. While policy issues related to these areas may fluctuate to some degree within the different camps, the underlying philosophies do not, and the camps invariably return to their roots over time. How these two universes, primarily rooted in the same soil of individual liberty, arrive at odds on these issues is dictated by the basic axioms of their philosophies. It is an inevitable outcome of differences in worldview.

The basic schism between left and right worldview stems from an individual's understanding of the nature of man. Is man fundamentally good, or bad? If a person believes that man is fundamentally flawed, he will tend to be a conservative. If a person believes that man is fundamentally good, he will tend to be a liberal. Generally, the Libertarian will either disregard any assumption regarding human nature, or embrace that man is fundamentally good. This is a primordial American struggle, as captured in the discussions of America's founders in Federalist 51:

"...But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself..."

America's founders built our form of government on the premise that man is fundamentally flawed and unperfectable. The Conservative has historically viewed the Libertarian as a utopian that ignores the threats of societal decay and cultural deconstruction. The paradox of Conservative philosophy is its basic acceptance of the fact that individual liberty can only be preserved through order. The ability to reconcile these disparate thoughts is a uniquely Conservative trait. If someone recoils at that premise, there is a good chance they are not a Conservative. It is a basic tenet of conservatism that societal decay is a building block of statism, and a direct threat to individual liberty and self determination. This is axiomatic for the Conservative - based on millennia of observed human experience. Chaos is the ultimate ally of tyrants, grist for tyranny's mill.

For the Conservative, societal decay and cultural deconstruction are always on one side of the scale. Individual liberty is on the other. Because men are not angels, that balance is precarious and requires our constant vigilance and sobriety at every consideration.

I am alarmed at the nature of the "debate" over the current THC issue in Texas. This is an issue that demands less capriciousness and more thoughtfulness from every side. The discussion has devolved into lecturing and yelling at each other. It is pretty obvious that neither side is listening to the other, and that the tactics being employed will simply guarantee that will continue indefinitely. There is virtually no serious effort of persuasion underway on either side.

As a Conservative, I don't support drug legalization because I don't believe that the combination of the welfare state and a culture of dependency is compatible with limited government. I do support medical use, and don't see any rational argument for disallowing that. What I find strange is how legalizing THC drug use exploded into the hill so many people are ready to die on when it wasn't even a serious topic of discussion in Texas five seconds ago. And it would be great if I never heard another "conservative" brag about all the bucks it could bring into the state coffers.

Texas never intended to legalize hemp as a retail drug. A lot of people made a choice to exploit a loophole in the 2018 farm bill. It's ironic because the hemp lobby has shouted down everyone who opposed hemp legalization for years on the premise that hemp isn't a drug, and then immediately exploited a law that was clearly intended to not legalize THC drug use. These businesses knew what they were doing, and I don't have a lot of sympathy for them.

It's also clear that there are a ton of genuine health needs that can be served better by THC than other available options. Our elected officials have a duty to sort that out with serious consideration. There is a deep dysfunction in our medical and pharmaceutical establishments. Dealing with much more dangerous things than THC is daily routine for them, but they can't find a way to deliver an effective and easily produced drug in obvious demand. Fix that.

The regulatory difficulties with any level of THC legalization are real. The articulated burdens on law enforcement are real. The THC related increases in medical adverse reactions since 2019 are real. The lack of representation for people relying on THC for basic quality of life is real. The certainty that this isn't all going to be sorted out this instant is real. It's a real mess.

It's as strange as it is unfortunate that this issue was handled in such a way as to throw the whole discussion into instant bedlam. It still isn't clear how we went from having essentially no statewide discussion about this between the ill fated 2018 farm bill and today, to having a full blown nuclear melt down on the topic. It's bemusing, in a pathetic sort of way, to watch people suddenly pontificating on a topic they weren't dimly aware of, and certainly weren't clamoring about, until it blew up. Now it's a hill to die upon depending on whatever echo chamber they want to be popular in. Narrative. Branding. Clicks. What could go wrong with such a thoughtful approach?

Concern Tolls

The Austin political industry is currently on a mission to gaslight gullible conservatives into supporting taxpayer funded lobbying. For years, the establishment has been making arguments that we should support local tyranny masquerading as local control. When a politician starts talking about local control, look extra close to make sure they mean you, because they almost always don't.

The fundamental argument against taxpayer funded lobbying is that local governments should make their case to their local constituents, not directly to the legislature. The Constitution guarantees representation and rights of redress to the people directly. Local cities or counties are granted powers, the citizens thereof are the holders of rights.

Taxpayer funded lobbying is not taxpayer lobbying. It is the government bypassing the citizen to lobby the government. Well meaning local officials may find it inconvenient to rely on the people to organize and lobby their representatives, but our system invests this trust in the people for profound reasons. Replacing the citizen with a government funded middleman is antithetical to the basic philosophy underlying our governmental framework, directly usurping the constituent identity of the citizen.

Local officials should find ways to involve their constituents, not look for ways to bypass them. It might not be easy, but bottom up citizen engagement in governance is a minimum requirement for the long term preservation of liberty.

Out of Our Depth

The Titan incident has spawned a fascinating variety of responses from an unusual variety of people. From people on social media openly mocking those who have died, to Matt Walsh lauding the Titan five as the ilk of renown historical adventurers and explorers, to James Cameron's objective and technical critique of the sub design, there just seems to be a strange quality to the entire episode. It's fascinating in what it highlights about current sensibilities.

I have great sympathy for the families of the dead, and no ill will for the dead themselves, for the most part. I have great contempt for the OceanGate CEO, who was clearly a man of staggering hubris and foolishness. Though it ultimately cost him his life, the consequences of it were not limited to him. The unfortunate thing is that his mindset is becoming more common in the world, and we are confronted here with the fact that the scientific world isn't immune.

Reality doesn't bow to ideology in the physical systems used by mankind. Science demands respect. It is unforgiving and unmalleable. It will kill if wielded irresponsibly, on any scale imaginable. There are reasons that real science is built on a foundation of science, layer by layer, in a progression as old as human civilization. Rejecting the lessons of past experience in dangerous endeavors is the act of fools. It is also a trend.

We live in a time of astounding hubris. It goes far beyond science. Across the board, we reject the constancy of human nature and declare every step of those who went before "outdated". We replace experience with conviction and self declared virtue. We devalue the life lessons and expertise of the experienced still among us. We push mature, proven, technologies aside to make a space to "create". And people die. Unnecessarily.

There is a science to safety. Ensuring it requires testing and validation, just like any STEM development requires testing and validation. Rejecting previously tested and proven safety methods, processes, and systems, is dangerous. Whether it's creating a completely new materials approach to designing deep sea vehicles, or lowering the requirements for safety critical jobs (like pilots) to change corporate social score ratings, or adopting a new vaccine technology and administering it on a global scale without long term testing, or modifying viruses and bacteria without adequate safeguards, it's dangerous.

We will get away with it sometimes. Getting away with something doesn't mean it's not dangerous. People are dabbling with seriously dangerous things in our modern world. Maintaining respect for the engineers and scientists who charted the course through scientific history is important for keeping us safe. There is no controlling authority in the middle of the ocean who will keep your sub design safe, or your bio lab. Safety has to be in the heart and mind of everyone who works in a dangerous field.

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Tools don't do work, they get used

In his forum with Shelley Luther last night, Reggie, with great flare, took credit for a number of things that the legislature did to address government overreach in the Covid response.  Unfortunately, the reality is that a response to the crisis from Reggie was non-existent. Greg Abbott delivered his first shutdown order in March of 2020. The 87th legislative session convened on January 12, 2021. For 10 months, Reggie Smith was completely silent on this issue while constituents were asking their representative to call for a special session so the people's voice could be heard on the topic.

Reggie's umbrage at the accusation that he didn't do enough was as clear as it was ironic in face of the reality that he did literally nothing for those 10 months. Zero is not enough. When the legislature convened in January of 2021, Reggie took his place as a loyal follower of the House establishment leadership. We would have been as well served by any empty suit who could follow orders. It is disappointing to see his fire reserved solely for the concerns of those constituents who have been begging their representative to direct it at obstacles in Austin.

The political establishment defends itself and represents itself against the concerns of the people. This isn't just about a political campaign event between two candidates. Shelley Luther is voicing concerns that many of Reggie's constituents have regarding how their voice is being heard, or silenced, in Austin. It should not be unreasonable to expect the fire and passion Reggie displayed last night on behalf of Austin to follow him to Austin on behalf of his constituents. Yet, he couldn't find it within him to muster such passion a single time in 10 months of Abbott's serial misuse of his emergency powers.

Many of us have been calling for a fourth special session for months now. Reggie has given no indication that he has any interest in joining that call. Our state has extremely serious and time sensitive issues that urgently need to be addressed by our representatives. It is appalling to see that these will simply be ignored until 2023, but that is the course we are on. If Reggie wins this race I am sure that he will brag again about the accomplishments of the session, while once again ignoring the wreckage wrought by the long intervening delays.

It is crystal clear which of these two candidates has the sense of urgency, and basic empathy, that matches the enormity of the issues facing Texas and HD62. Please join me supporting Shelley Luther.

Shelley Luther on the Campaign Trail

 A video of  Shelley Luther Speaking for folks who may not have access to facebook. (Click on Shelley's name to see the video)