Mark Abrams doesn't understand capitalism

The otherwise reasonably intelligent lefty radio host Marc Abrams (Kremer and Abrams on KXL AM-750, Sundays 9 to 11 am) blew it today big-time.

Oh, you people who think the private sector is better are so wrong, Abrams crowed. Yet look at Merrill Lynch - they let their chairman and chief executive, Stan O'Neal, go - and paid him $161 million after the guy lost them $8.4 billion.

Here are some of the ways Abrams gets this wrong:

1. Nobody said capitalism was error-free, any more than government is error free. That's a straw man argument. The real difference lies in things like, how are errors handled? What are the incentives? Whose money is it, and who makes the decisions? In this case, the guy responsible for blowing it was canned. He won't be around to continue to make mistakes for the next 4 or 8 or 20 years. Compare that to say Oregon DMV where a Director can blow $88 million and get a promotion. Notice how many of these examples - 10 of 13 - are from government (look under "Notable Project Failures").

2. Paying O'Neal $161 million to leave was some sort of sweet deal - he should have been kicked to the curb. Whose money was it? Private money - not taxpayer money. If you don't want your money used that way, don't own Merrill Lynch shares. It's not yet clear from the news reports if the $161 million is what his contract calls for as his severance.

3. Yes O'Neal lost the firm $8.4 billion this year. Over the last two years he made them $12 billion, and increased the firm's cash by $17 billion. He did that by risking private capital, not taxpayer dollars. By creating wealth.

Find me the government program that creates that kind of wealth, without risking tax dollars, and that actually holds people responsible for performance, and I'll start to think maybe the government is coming close to being as good as the private, capitalist sector at being efficient and effective. Until then, you can go stand in a DMV line.

OpinionJournal - Amazonian Swindle

Daryl Hannah goes to Ecuador and gets in over her head.

In the latest installment of Liberal Myopia meets Opportunistic Plaintiff's Lawyers, we see a capitalist entity being sued for the crimes of a different, state-owned entity, and the wacky left doesn't care about the facts.

Once again, the "narrative" is more important to self-indulgent, emotionally driven eco-greenies than facts, data, or reality.

Junk like this makes it impossible to work towards a truly cleaner environment. You can't partner with irrational people and make progress.

MarketBeat Blog - WSJ.com : Is the Surge Working? Ask the Bond Market.

MarketBeat Blog - WSJ.com : Is the Surge Working? Ask the Bond Market. I'm a fan of good news from Iraq - this isn't it.

I'm also a fan of looking at markets to see what they tell us people are thinking and believing. It looks from this data that the insiders - the "smart money" - are betting against the "surge" in Iraq leading to lasting stability.

Clearly if folks want to disagree, here is a way to make some money - buy these underpriced Iraqi bonds and rake in the dough. However, if the "surge" does not lead to long term stability, the holders of these bonds will own zero zilch nada.

Here's the difference in the two narratives. Narrowly and militarily, the "surge" seems to be working to bring a lower level of bloodshed to Baghdad and Iraq. Broadly and politically, the "surge" is not delivering on the political changes that will allow for long term peace and stability in Iraq. The lower bloodshed is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for peace. Looks like it's not enough, at least not yet.

Notable & Quotable - WSJ.com - re: Climate Change

Notable & Quotable - WSJ.com: "And when we build -- and I'm one of the few people in the world that actually builds these climate data sets -- we don't see the catastrophic changes that are being promoted all over the place. For example, I suppose CNN did not announce two weeks ago when the Antarctic sea ice extent reached its all-time maximum, even though, in the Arctic in the North Pole, it reached its all-time minimum." [emphasis added]
--John Christy of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (co-recipient of this year's Nobel Peace Prize) responds to questions by CNN anchor Miles O'Brien

Challange with my Treo 650/ error message - TreoQuestions.org

Challange with my Treo 650/ error message - TreoQuestions.org
User experienced this:

"When i start up my treo i receive the following error message; Please Load Library SAMgr.Lib. When i hit the Ok message, the treo reboots and brings me back to square 1

This occurred after my IT person attempted to delete numerous blank contacts that had appeared on my phone.

Unfortunately i am not able to hotsync nor do anything else. Suggestions greatly appreciated."

I had the same problem on my Treo 700p and spent an hour with multiple Verizon and Palm techs, none of whom could figure this out despite multiple hard-resets of my poor PDA.

Finally I took matters into my own hands, found "SAMgr.PRC" in my Palm Archive folder on my PC, and re-installed it. Bingo, the error message went away.

We still don't know why the Palm lost that file (and several others) in the first place. But at least I got past the error message and I can make calls again.

Blinders on the Left - why global warming is the new religion

In reading this OpinionJournal piece on the evidence against catastrophic man-made global warming, I became more thoroughly convinced that the political Left in the US - and perhaps most humans - operate on a mental model of

1. figure out what conclusion makes you feel good,
2. select data that supports your conclusion, and
3. ignore or marginalize people and data that contradict your conclusion.

How else do we get such astonishingly named initiatives as "fact based decision making" - unless that's the exception, which apparently it is.

Consider this article that proves beyond reasonable doubt that the shrinking of Mt. Kilimanjaro's snow cap is being caused by an increase in solar radiation - an act of God - not by man-made warming of the air.

Where's the media coverage? No place - the 85% of the national media who voted for Clinton, the herd-mentality media, won't touch anything that contradicts the established and agreed upon conclusion. Only evidence that supports the conclusion will get big media play.

Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance

This is an amazing bit of research - not so much for what it says, but for what it implies.

Consider this:

It may stun you, if you are a manager, to learn what power you hold. Your behavior as a manager dramatically shapes your employees’ inner work lives. But the key levers in your hands for driving motivation and performance may not be the ones you’d suspect.

At the same time, so many managers feel powerless to affect their people. So what are these "key levers...for driving motivation and performance"?

It's not mere praise. Rather - and here I'm going beyond the authors of the study - it's a combination of attention and conditional praise.

Consider these employee behaviors and manager-supplied consequences.

Behavior 1 - employee does what he believes is a good job
Behavior 2 - employee does what he believes is a mediocre job
Behavior 3 - employee does what he believes is a poor job

Consequence 1 - manager praises employee behavior
Consequence 2 - manager ignores employee behavior
Consequence 3 - manager criticizes or corrects employee behavior
Consequence 4 - manager pays neutral attention (no praise or criticism)

Here's the resulting grid:

Employee Behaviors, Manager Consequence, and Effect on Employee Motivation

	B1 Good Job	B2 OK Job	B3 Bad Job
C1 Praise	Higher motivation and performance	Lower motivation; feels manipulated	Lower motivation; feels alienated, cynical
C2 Ignore	Lower motivation; Feels neglected	Lower motivation; Feels neglected	Management are idiots; nothing I do matters
C3 Criticize or Correct	Strongly alienated; may become detached, angry	Alienated	Fair enough
C4 Neutral Attention	Okay	Positive	Management are idiots

You begin to get the idea - as a manager you can do the exact same thing, and have wildly different consequences.

In other words, praise alone is not a Golden Ticket.

Fearlessness: The Last Organizational Change Strategy

Fearlessness: The Last Organizational Change Strategy - Great interview of the ubiquitous Margaret Wheatley, who says:

The Gallup Organization did a survey that indicates how people are feeling about their workplace. Last year, more than 70 percent of the American workforce felt disengaged, up from around 33 percent in 2000. That’s what happens if you squeeze fewer people to do more work, give them shorter deadlines, measure their work using meaningless metrics, and, to top it off, treat them with profound levels of disrespect.

This is another person quoting the Gallup survey on employee disengagement.

OpinionJournal - What Happened at Haditha

OpinionJournal - What Happened at Haditha goes over the currently known information about the "massacre" at Haditha, which largely exonerates the US Military and further indicts the American press corps and some anti-war politicians:

Many, including Members of Congress, were looking for another moral bonfire to discredit the cause in Iraq, and they found a pretext in Haditha. The critics rushed to judgment; facts and evidence were discarded to fit the antiwar template.

Most despicably, they created and stoked a political atmosphere that exposes American soldiers in the line of duty, risking and often losing their lives, to criminal liability for the chaos of war. This is the deepest shame of Haditha, and the one for which apologies ought to be made.

This is one of the legacies of the Iraq War, along with the clear incompetence of the Bush Administration: the shamelessness with which the media in particular have selected a subset of facts to fit the day's narrative.

This is why the media are less and less trusted.

OpinionJournal - Al Qaeda's War of Villages

OpinionJournal - Federation: "Al Qaeda's War of Villages Signs that the terrorists are losing in Iraq." I still worry about selective filtering. I want the US to win in Iraq (whatever that means - I have some ideas on that score) so of course I want to believe good news and disbelieve bad news.

Nevertheless, steeling myself against the good news, I still smile when I read something like this. Good to know that things are trending well, and unsurprising that the major media cannot or will not report it.