HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Monday, July 26, 2021
Sunday, July 25, 2021
Saturday, July 24, 2021
Introduction from "I Alone Can Fix It"
The characteristics of Trump’s leadership, blazingly evident through the first three years of his presidency, had deadly ramifications in his final year. He displayed his ignorance, his rash temper, his pettiness and pique, his malice and cruelty, his utter absence of empathy, his narcissism, his transgressive personality, his disloyalty, his sense of victimhood, his addiction to television, his suspicion and silencing of experts, and his deception and lies. Every trait thwarted the response of the world’s most powerful nation to a lethal threat.
Thursday, July 22, 2021
Nancy Pelosi Calls BS
Nancy Pelosi Calls BS
The pundit class clutches its pearls
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Washington is shocked
because Nancy Pelosi decided yesterday that making a farce of an attempted
insurrection was not normal.
Like much of the
numbed political establishment, Kevin McCarthy had assumed that Pelosi would
simply go along with his decision to try to beclown the January 6 committee.
Three of his five appointees had voted to overturn electoral votes from states
won by Joe Biden.
That, in itself ought to
have been disqualifying, but the appointment of Jim Jordan and Jim Banks was
starkly unsubtle. Jordan is a one-man clown car, whose only role on the
committee would have been to throw merde into the gears and
provide Fox News with soundbites.
But it was actually
worse than that.
Back in December,
Jordan had fully embraced Trump’s Big Lie, saying that Trump should refuse to
concede the election. There was, he told CNN, “No way, no way, no way” that Trump should concede. “We should
still try to figure out exactly what took place here. And as I said, that
includes, I think, debates on the House floor — potentially on Jan. 6.”
As the New York Times reports: “Later that month, he participated in a meeting at the White House, where Republican lawmakers discussed plans
with Mr. Trump’s team to use the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to
challenge the election outcome.”
In other words,
McCarthy — who is himself a potential material witness — named another material
witness (and potential co-conspirator) to the panel investigating the attack on
the Capitol.
As for Banks, our
colleague Tim Miller wrote:
He is an election
truther who polled his constituents on whether or not he
should cancel the votes of citizens from other states. . . . Banks’s communications director
is Buckley Carlson, son of Tucker, ensuring that the White Power Hour will have a
direct line to leaks from the committee.
From the beginning,
Banks made it clear that he intended to derail the committee’s work. He accused
Democrats of creating it to “malign conservatives.”
“I will not allow this
committee to be turned into a forum for condemning millions of Americans
because of their political beliefs,” he declared.
Banks also pledged an
aggressive campaign of distraction and whataboutism. “If Democrats were serious
about investigating political violence,” Banks declared, “this committee would
be studying not only the January 6 riot at the Capitol but also the hundreds of
violent political riots last summer when many more innocent Americans and
law-enforcement officers were attacked.”
Under the Old Rules,
Pelosi was expected to go along with all of this.
Conventional wisdom
assumed Pelosi would accept the New Normal in which the minority party was
openly declaring its intention to memory-hole and retcon an attack on Congress
itself. The smart set figured she would go along with the GOP’s decision to
turn the probe into a clickbaity shitshow.
On Wednesday, Pelosi
decided to hell with that.
“With respect for the
integrity of the investigation, with an insistence on the truth and with
concern about statements made and actions taken by these Members, I must reject
the recommendations of Representatives Banks and Jordan to the Select
Committee,” Pelosi said in her statement.
“The unprecedented
nature of January 6th,” she said, “demands this unprecedented decision.”
In other words:
She drew a red line
because an act of sedition requires the drawing of red lines.
The result was a
cascade of faux outrage.
McCarthy sulked and
DC’s pundit class collectively clutched its pearls. “Nancy Pelosi just doomed the
already tiny chances of the 1/6 committee actually mattering,” opined Chris Cillizza. “Should have left well enough alone,”
former Ohio Governor John Kasich insisted on CNN. Others insisted that it was a
gift to McCarthy,
But this requires us
to accept the idea that it is perfectly normal to name members who, as Tim
Miller puts it, “literally supported a MAGA coup” as a precondition of
“bipartisanship.”
Of course, the
committee is already bipartisan, both literally and seriously. (Reminder: the
GOP killed an actual independent, non-partisan commission.)
Not at all
surprisingly, it was left to Liz Cheney to provide the reality check about
Pelosi’s decision. “This investigation must go forward,” she said. “The idea
that anybody would be playing politics with an attack on the United States
Capitol is despicable and is disgraceful.”
The
Republican Accountability Project @AccountableGOP
Cheney noted that
Pelosi had rejected two appointees.
One who may be a
material witness to events that led to that day . . . the other who disqualified
himself by his comments over the last 24 hours demonstrating he's not taking
this seriously
And then she trained
her fire on McCarthy:
The rhetoric we have heard from the minority leader is
disingenuous . . . at every opportunity, the minority leader has attempted to
prevent the American people from understanding what happened.
I think that any
person who would be third in line to the presidency must demonstrate a
commitment to the Constitution and a commitment to the rule of law and Minority
Leader McCarthy has not done that.
Exit take: Pelosi and
Cheney reminded us yesterday that we don’t have to eat the shit sandwiches — or
pretend that there is anything normal about any of this.
Wednesday, July 21, 2021
BRET STEPHENS COLUMN
BRET STEPHENS
Eric Adams Is Going to Save New York
July 20, 2021
Opinion Columnist
Eric Adams arrives for lunch alone, no
entourage or media handler. He shows me his new earring — “the first thing,” he
says, that Joe Biden “asked to see” when the two met recently to discuss gun
violence. He orders a tomato salad with oil on the side, the abstemious diet of
the all-but-crowned king of New York.
For some progressives, the prospect of
Adams as mayor (he still has to defeat Republican opponent Curtis Sliwa in
November) is a nightmare. He’s been a thorn in the side of every institution
he’s ever been part of.
He’s a former cop who crusaded against
police brutality, a leading Democrat who was once a registered Republican, a
machine politician who casts himself as a foe of city bureaucracy, a
self-described progressive who’s friendly to charter schools and real estate
developers and, most recently, a champion of law-and-order who refutes the idea
that a Black leader must also be on the left.
For the rest of
big-city America, not to mention the Democratic Party that usually runs it,
he’s a godsend.
That’s because Democrats are
again becoming the party of urban misrule, just as they were in the 1970s. In
Portland and Seattle, progressive mayors have ceded the public square to
anarchists and rioters. In San Francisco and Los Angeles, to homeless encampments
and addicts. In Chicago and Baltimore, to street gangs and gun violence.
And, in New York, the city that in the
1990s and 2000s led the way in the historic and nationwide reductions in
crime, 981 people were shot this year as
of Sunday. That includes two women and a 4-year-old girl hit by stray bullets
in May in Times Square, in broad daylight.
“This stuff can unravel so quickly,”
Adams says, referring to social order. His mission is not to let New York go
the way of Portland or San Francisco.
The key is the police. In
2019, multiple videos went viral of police officers
offering no response after being doused by hecklers with buckets of water.
“When I saw that I said we’re going to lose the city,” he recalls. “When you
attack that officer, you didn’t attack that individual. You attacked the symbol
of safety.”
Adams
graduated from the police academy in 1984, another era of diminished faith in
law enforcement, not least among cops themselves. The prevailing attitude, he
says, was, “You hold on for 20 years, you get promoted, get your pension,
nothing you’re going to do about crime.” He rejected that attitude and made his
name in the 1990s as a dissident officer fighting police brutality and racial
profiling.
But he also believes that
effective policing is the basis for justice, not an enemy of it.
Well-intentioned liberals, he says, “have piggybacked off of the appealing,
attractive conversation. You know, ‘Black Lives Matter.’ Well, if they matter,
damn it, then we should be talking about a 13-year-old kid being assassinated
in the Bronx.”
He argues for reversing the
state bail reforms that treated some robberies as nonviolent offenses,
for bringing back the plainclothes police squad disbanded last year by Bill de
Blasio and for using stop-and-frisk (or, as he reminds me,
“stop-QUESTION-frisk”) as an essential policing tool, so long as it isn’t being
unconstitutionally abused to fill a weekly police quota or harass civilians.
As for abolishing the police:
“When I get out of that subway station, I want to see that cop at the top of
the stairs.”
After rebuking certain progressives for
their views on New York’s finest, he turns to their views on New York’s
richest. “Sixty-five thousand families pay 51 percent of our income taxes,” he
says. “Those income taxes are going to the police, the teachers, Department of
Sanitation. We have people who say, ‘Who cares whether the rich leave?’ You’d
better connect the dots. I care!”
Adams doesn’t fear the rich leaving
town because of sky-high taxes (though he should). But he knows that they’ll
flee to safety if they have to fear that their children “can’t walk the
streets.”
He also recognizes the harm the city
does itself with its results-unfriendly bureaucracy.
“How do you have a Small Business
Services that’s trying to get restaurants open, but you have the Department of
Buildings that takes a year and half to give someone their C-of-O to get
inside?” he asks, referring to a certificate of occupancy. “Try opening a
hotel: If you can get their sprinkler system inspected in two years, you’re a
miracle maker.”
He plans to do for
city agencies what the CompStat program did in the 1990s when it took police
units out of their respective silos to make them see the larger picture. It helped
bring crime down from historic highs to historic lows, until liberal guilt got
the better of pragmatic good sense. At one point he quotes the Chinese aphorism
that it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, “you still have to catch
the mouse.” It happened to have been a favorite of Deng Xiaoping.
Listening to Adams
hold forth like this for an hour is an enjoyable, even delightful experience,
because it’s so refreshingly free of ideological cant. If Adams can govern as
he campaigned, he’ll be remembered as the mayor who saved New York from walking
itself off a ledge. It probably won’t be the last, much less the highest,
office he’ll hold.
Monday, July 19, 2021
New INC. Magazine blog post by Howard Tullman
Don't Sell Until You Clean Up the Code
A lot of software-dependent startups, having survived the pandemic intact, are now at the "move up or out" crossroads. But there's a hidden risk buried deep in their digital architecture.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
A regular topic of
conversation in every post-pandemic board meeting these days has to do with
buying or selling something. Often, the company itself is potentially on the
block, but at other times the discussion is about acquiring a competitor ripe
for a timely takeover, or an outfit in an adjacent line of business to add
revenues and help cover fixed costs. No one wants to sit still right now even
though it's not clear whether the better, smarter, and safer path for the
business is up or out. Everyone's got their
own advice and suggestions on the subject.
This present angst may
be the product of an emotional and physical hangover from the pandemic, where
everyone's just really tired of fighting fires and struggling to stay alive. Or
perhaps it's due to an unsettling sense that the big guys in tech have grown so
immensely bigger in the last two or three years (most of them at least doubling
their market caps in that time) and that they're even more dominant in
practically every space that matters. Either way, there's just a ton of
talk about trying to get bigger fast or cashing out entirely. Needless to say,
discussing these two rather starkly opposed alternatives makes management,
investors and board members more than a little nervous.
All of these tense
discussions revolve around a similar checklist, including accomplishments,
valuations, risk factors, and market conditions. But the issue that has the
most critical relevance for semi-mature startups (2-to-5 years in the fight)
isn't these considerations or the other obvious choices such as sales, traction
and profitability. I'm referring to the much more difficult determination of
"tech debt," which is an unavoidable part of the early stages of
building any code-based business. I call this problem "the pig in the
python" which - in its simplest terms - means that there's often a pile of
undocumented and sometimes entirely abandoned spaghetti code right smack in the
middle of the business's core operating systems. This code helped to get you
there, but now it's a cause of unnecessary friction in the system, it's
creating serious documentation issues and raising personnel concerns - in
short, excess baggage that still needs to be maintained or eventually removed.
The prospect of having
to clean up this very expensive code, which any young company has likely spent
millions developing over the last several years, is one of the major deal
killers that I've seen even though it's an ordinary, expected, and completely
typical part of the iterative process that every business undertakes. Buyers
and somewhat naïve board members all want to know how you could possibly have
spent so much on developing code that no longer plays a part in the current programs.
Especially since someone new (on their dime) is now going to have to make it
all go away and is likely to be unhappy or unwilling to bear both the costs of
the remediation process and the competitive risks associated with it -- which
may even be greater.
Hence, the classic
wisdom around acquisitions: it's not how much you pay for the deal; it's how
much the deal ultimately costs you. Tech debt is the embedded and
hard-to-calculate expense of fixing and eliminating all the crappy code, false
starts, ugly overhead, and other vagaries that still live in a business's code
base many years after any of it ceased to have any value or effectiveness. Yet
the business wouldn't exist without the trials and errors, unproductive
directions, new product initiatives, and overall answers and ultimate
improvements that the code represents.
Every software
delivery system starts out big and bulky and ideally, over time, is
streamlined, simplified and sped up. The process is as unavoidable and
inevitable as gravity. And anyone who thinks that it's an easy task to make a
consumer-facing system look simple and be user-friendly has never built
anything. As Richard Branson always says: "Any fool can make something
complicated. It's hard to keep things simple."
And, even more importantly,
businesses need years to determine the best inputs and outputs to these
systems, whether those are queries, searches, forms, reports, or responses. For
startups, this simple reality presents a very serious risk. In tech businesses,
you learn that anything really great seems obvious and inevitable in
retrospect, but that's only to people on the outside -- never
to the ones who had to suffer through the birthing process and make the
millions of changes required to get to the end result. But being
underappreciated for pulling off this trick and building this thing of beauty
isn't the worst pain by a long shot.
Sadly, once you solve
the riddle and create the ideal solution, everyone and their brother can jump
right in and copy the front and back ends of your business and do it faster,
cheaper, and even more efficiently because they aren't dragging three years of
old code along with them. They haven't had to spend years and millions of
dollars getting to the solution. They don't have a pig stuck in the middle of
their process because they went to school on your solution, ran right up your
back, and, most likely, even built their competitive offerings on better,
faster and more efficient third-party systems, clouds and networks. This is not
a happy story, but it is a familiar one. Not one startup in a million has
invested in patents or other legal protection sufficient to help in this
situation or nor they can afford the legal battles it would entail.
So, all of the
remediation costs aside, in those buy- or sell- discussions, there's always the
competitive risk element as well. How quickly will the competition be able to
duplicate all the business's offerings for a far smaller investment and, even
worse yet, should the prospective buyer just take a step back and look into
building their own version of the solution rather than buying yesterday's code
and a bunch of other baggage? All because startups across the board are always
in too much of a hurry moving forward to clean up after themselves and take out
the trash. Documentation is also a pain and a burden, but it's another essential
building block startups consistently neglect until it's too late.
A word to the wise:
Invest the time now, before you think about trying to sell your business, to
audit and purge your code base, confirm that your documentation is in order,
and make sure that the loss of one or two critical employees at any point
wouldn't put the entire operation at risk because of their unique knowledge and
history. Take your own careful and detailed look at whether you should be
cannibalizing your own code, moving some operations to someone else's cloud,
and otherwise reducing your exposure and improving your own system's
efficiencies by taking advantage of tomorrow's code rather than yesterday's.
JUL 20, 2021
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