The United States of Chaos

Chaos, the state of  disorder and confusion, feels widespread.  I see it everyday I work in a large healthcare company where private equity owners deform our operations for their financial gain.  Executives termed it "a bumpy year" for employees.  Those lucky enough to keep a job characterize it as chaos. Taking a broader view affordable, accessible healthcare remains a major worry for citizens. 

I hear it on television news stations, regardless of channel and political persuasion.  I observe it from our President, who insists on punching back harder than he believes he's been hit, and Red team officials who dare not give anything but 100% fealty.   Many business executives display the same personality dysfunction as our President.  Real relationship is absent. 

I see it in big data which often uses correlation to make critical decisions, ones that impact life and death.  Probability is based on theoretical distributions that often do not exist in our real world.  Algorithms work until they don't i.e. until the fundamental assumptions used in their creation are revealed to be wrong.  Correlation isn't causation. Data does not speak, people do.

Chaos initially referred to a void before it's definition changed.  Our county has a leadership void on both the political and corporate front.  Americans have lower confidence in figures and institutions, according to Gallup.  The vast majority of employees have disengaged from their workplace

 
Chaos has a number of synonyms:

Disorder grows until a natural system reaches a bifurcation point, the point of maximum instability, after which the system reorders itself.    Is the workplace a natural system?

Self serving elected officials and corporate chiefs can choose to atone for their wrongs on this earth.  We will all face our maker, that is assured.    

Update 11-21-20:  Pay levels of US chief executives have increased by an average of 940% since 1978, compared with a 12% increase in workers’ pay.  Trump is in full retaliatory mode after losing the election to President Elect Joe Biden.  Trump's revenge campaign is intended to scorch America's democracy.  How much damage will Trump's foul fart lighting inflict on our country in his last sixty days?

Update 10-13-21:  Chaos President Donald Trump had no White House guardrails in the run up to his January 6th Middle Age Wilding, otherwise known as the Capital insurrection. 

Update 3-24-23:  Adding to chaos is AI.

ChatGPT-4 uses deductive reasoning vs. memorization, which can lead to inaccurate results.

"The thing that I try to caution people the most is what we call the ‘hallucinations problem’" Altman told ABC News. "The model will confidently state things as if they were facts (but they) are entirely made up."

"People’s perspectives can be manipulated as they seek all kinds of answers from AI."

Knowledge is gained from the scientific method, from conducting experiments in the real world.

Conservatism No Longer Fiscal

Bloomberg reported:

The U.S. posted its biggest monthly budget deficit on record last month, amid a 20 percent drop in corporate tax revenue and a boost in spending so far this fiscal year.

The budget gap widened to $234 billion in February, compared with a fiscal gap of $215.2 billion a year earlier. That gap surpassed the previous monthly record of $231.7 billion set seven years ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

February’s shortfall helped push the deficit for the first five months of the government’s fiscal year to $544.2 billion, up almost 40 percent from the same period the previous year.

Fiscal conservatism is dead as President Trump and Congress gifted corporations and the wealthy.

Corporations have so far this fiscal year paid $59.2 billion, compared to $73.5 billion at the point in 2018, when the tax law was only partially in effect for some corporations. In 2017, however, the year before the law was enacted, corporations had paid $87.4 billion at this point in the year.

 America's billionaire President serves the billionaire class. 

Update 9-17-19:  The U.S. government’s red ink for fiscal 2019 swelled past the $1 trillion mark. 

Update 9-28-21:  The Red Team balked at Uncle Sam paying his bills, many racked up under President Trump. 

Update 10-8-21:  U.S. national debt rose by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. Red Team politicians suddenly re-found their fiscal nuts and are chattering energetically at this discovery. 

Update 10-20-21:  My Congressman ignored four years of Republican fiscal irresponsibility and voted for the U.S. to default on its debts.  The national debt rose by nearly $7.8 trillion during the Trump Presidency.

Update 11-1-21:  Red Team Senator Rick Scott expressed his concern over fiscal deficits but refused to answer a question on repealing the Trump tax cuts.  The third richest Senator said inflation is "It's hurting families like mine."  There are not many families in the U.S. with $220 million.

Update 5-10-23:  Former Vice President Mike Pence said he and Trump "have done a better job of controlling spending under our administration."  Balanced budgets only matter to the Red Team when they don't control the White House and Congress.  That's been their history.

Senator Sasse Cites Loneliness Problem, Misses Abandonment, Manipulation

Senator Ben Sasse blamed American angst on "loneliness" in a Face the Nation segment this morning.  I would use a different term, abandonment.

The former McKinsey consultant seems unaware of the failure of extrinsic motivators.

There's a ton of literature now that shows we're the richest people in the history of humanity. And yet we're some of the most dissatisfied people in the history of humanity. How do you make sense of that?

Pursuit of things outside ourselves can only produce a fleeting impact.  Money does not buy happiness.  Surely ex-consultant Sasse is familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Dr. W. Edwards Deming's teachings on motivation, extrinsic and intrinsic,

Intrinsic motivation refers to motivation that is driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, and exists within the individual rather than relying on any external pressure.

Extrinsic motivation comes from outside of the individual. Common extrinsic motivations are rewards like money and gold stars on the one hand, and coercion and threat of punishment on the other.

America's leaders are responsible for an extreme over-reliance on extrinsic motivators, turning our country into a failure factory.  Education over relies on testing, rating and reward/punishment systems.  The workplace is rife with scarcity systems.  Raises have been nonexistent in years for many workers.  Executives, in collusion with club boards of directors, reap rewards of a feudal king, all on the back of serf-like workers toiling in cubicle farms.

Workers know the consequence for failure to achieve an arbitrary mark or measure, thus they cheat or lie to save their job.  Executives backdated roughly 30% of stock options, supposedly the most pure form of incentive pay.  Executives effectively stole from shareholders to maximize their pay.  Without these extrinsic reward systems distorting behavior there is little incentive to lie, cheat or steal. 

Former GE CEO Jack Welch imposed benchmarking a person's value relative to their co-worker, eliminating the bottom 10% of his employees every year.  Sasse said firings/job eliminations will get worse, much worse.

50 percent of Americans are going to be primarily freelancers in three years.

Translation:  Half of Americans will have been abandoned by their employer, living in the least committed relationship of freelancer.  We'll call you if we need you, pay you as little as possible, and not provide any benefits.  That's abandonment, not loneliness, Mr. Sasse.

Social media turned the intrinsic possibility for real connection into an extrinsic reward system via friend counts and number of likes.   It took a person's personal information and monetized it for business or political purposes.  It became a high tech tool to use people.

Oddly, Host John Dickerson conflated intrinsic/extrinsic motivators with his recent story on Benign Envy.  Envy is one of the seven deadly sins.

Envy is the intense desire to have an item or experience that someone else possesses.

Dickerson's piece tried to paint someone observing another person doing something good as producing envy in the observer.  That envy then motivates the observer to behave similarly to garner the reward.  His story cites "how selfless actions can inspire all of us" and "service often goes hand-in-hand with sacrifice."

An act driven by envy is not selfless, it is about having or possessing.   

Benign Envy -- The desire to be better when we see someone doing something good.  

I would consider this learning or questioning in a manner that fosters intrinsic motivation.  Acting selfless for selfish reasons does not ring true.    

When I watched the Dickerson piece it felt like society was trying to paint lesser human behaviors, like envy and greed, as noble. Weeks later Dickerson and Sasse hit the same chord.

Work is statistically one of the most significant drivers of whether or not people are happy.-- Senator Sasse on Face the Nation 10-14-18

It is easy to deduce work is a significant cause of widespread dissatisfaction cited earlier by the Senator.  Sasse voted for Trump tax cuts late last year.  Those cuts make the "richest people in the history of humanity" even richer.

Sasse did not challenge corporate executives to shore up their relationship with employees with pay/benefit increases or make commitments to maintain jobs.  Corporations, executives and board members took Trump tax cut windfalls and used it to buy back stock, further enriching themselves.  Envy and greed are widespread among leaders in our country.

Senator Ben Sasse delivered his comments as if he were your next door neighbor, your friend two doors down.  Sasse knows Americans are being abandoned by employers and America's political elite.  Together they further victimize the harmed by discounting their situation as mere loneliness.   Leadership greed and envy are killing our workplaces.

Senator Sasse's comments arise from the sick leadership displayed in corporations and the political world, so unbalanced it verges on the unhinged.  It is hard to detect when envy is benign, greed is lauded and freelance is employment.  Some 40% of Americans cannot afford a surprise $400 expense.

Our leaders care not about the people's suffering as no one is home emotionally.  Executives and politicians have reward systems to manipulate on their behalf.

Update 10-16-18:  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell piled on with his call to abandon Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security commitments.  How lonely will these people be after they lose healthcare and retirement?  Tax cuts for the rich got no mention in McConnell's analysis.

Update 10-21-18:  Senator Ben Sasse reframed President Trumps's encouragement of violence as "playful."  Our leaders have abandoned civility and honesty.

Update  10-22-2018:  Companies spend huge amounts on stock buybacks but continue to underfund their pension plans.  This is part of the abandonment employees feel.

Update 10-23-18:  Paul Volker noted the preferential treatment given to the billionaire PEU class.

Update 12-26-18:  NYT ran a piece on McKinsey that raises questions about the consulting firm's motivation in bankruptcy cases.

Update 12-28-18:  McKinsey abandoned a Saudi partner who is yet to be released from the Crown Prince's abusive shakedown.

Update 12-30-18:  McKinsey played a role in an international bribery case.

Update 1-4-19:  Trump political appointees will get huge raises while federal workers continue to work with paychecks.  The blame goes to the bottom while the top rakes it in.  It's enough to make a person very lonely angry.

Update 1-13-19:  McKinsey is a sponsor of the 2019 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.  While the average citizen saw little to no economic gains for the last two decades the greed and leverage boys did very well.  Is anyone lonely for a raise?  That would mean someone would have to share....

Update 2-5-19:  NYT reported:  In 2009, McKinsey wrote a report for Purdue Pharma saying that new sales tactics would increase sales of OxyContin by $200 million to $400 million annually and “suggested sales ‘drivers’ based on the ideas that opioids reduce stress and make patients more optimistic and less isolated.”.

Update 3-23-19:   The United States fell to 19th in a world ranking of happiness.  The culprit was not Ben Sasse's loneliness but addiction. Me?  I'm still waiting for trickle down as executives take and take and take but let not one crumb fall from their table.

Update 12-5-19:  Residents of Sidney, Nebraska would cite lack of good paying jobs as their biggest problem.  Fox News Tucker Carlson did a story about their town and how they were undone by a big Sasse donor.  Senator Ben refused to comment.  Loneliness?

Update 1-13-21:   Professor Wolff has a take on the abandonment and manipulation cited in this piece.

Update 1-17-21:  The average citizen is but a pawn in a battle of the elites.  Politicians Red and Blue love PEU (private equity underwriters).  

Update 2-7-21:  Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote " Many are understandably angry after being left behind in vast enclaves of unemployment and despair."  His piece ignores the role the Blue Team had in selling the average citizen down the road the last two and a half decades.

Update 12-8-22:  Billionaire Elon Musk asked employees to envision themselves as a crime victim to increase productivity.

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He also invited Twitter employees to not leave the workplace by providing beds in conference rooms.

Update 3-23-23:  Social media divided the world when it was supposed to unite it.   Artificial intelligence will do similarly.  Bill Gates' says that AI will give everyone a "personal assistant."   No thank you.  Count this person out.  Knowledge grows from real world experimentation.  AI cannot do that.

Update 5-28-23:  Worker mental health plummeted the last six months given growing job cuts and the specter of artificial intelligence eliminating countless jobs.  I wonder how many of those workers are in PEU affiliates?

Update 5-30-23:  HuffPo's "The Golden Age of White Collar Crime" stated:

32 percent of American managers said they were comfortable behaving unethically to meet financial targets.

Update 9-11-23:  University of Florida President Ben Sasse hired his former employer McKinsey to create a vision for the university.  The cost is $4.7 million.

Sasse had a bully pulpit in the Senate and the main problem he found was "loneliness" He missed "abandonment" and "manipulation." That's because he was part of the insider group doing the abandoning and manipulating. 

Update 10-9-23:  Loneliness is now a threat to democracy itself says Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.  Murthy's history as a corporate advisor raises questions given their abandonment of workers. 

Update 10-19-23:  Happiness is now the task for the U.S.  Whew, I was worried about loneliness but Arthur C. Brooks says happiness is the job at hand.  Don't worry, be happy.....

Update 3-4-24:  University of Florida President Ben Sasse added to the loneliness of college students by firing the entire department dedicated to diversity initiatives.  Ben Sasse, leader of FU.

Update 4-23-24:  With Sasse gone from Congress two members have stepped up to address citizens' sour mood.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. and Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox are joining forces to try and address a vexing problem plaguing the U.S.: Americans are less and less happy.

They plan to start in earnest next week and break for September and October, the run up to the November election.

Ego Over Institution

The Guardian reported:

U.S. President Donald Trump has celebrated Chinese Premier Xi Jinping’s bid to shepherd China back into an era of one-man dictatorship, suggesting the United States might one day “give that a shot”.

Xi's effort to suspend term limits is not new.  Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez did that very thing.  Egypt's Hosni Mubarek benefited from a constitutional change implemented before he rose to the Presidency.   Chavez died of cancer while Mubarek lives, a free man.  A divided Togo wrestles with re-instituting term limits.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is serving his sixth term as President.  Russia would have to drop term limits for Putin to run again for office.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel formed a coalition government and will serve her fourth term.

I took the liberty of changing a famous quote by reality TV star Donald Trump.

"And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the p___residency. You can do anything."

Xi's a star on a Shakespearean stage.  Ego over institution is a global tragedy.

Update 4-4-20:  President Trump and his son-in-law redefined the Federal government's emergency role in the Coronavirus Crisis.  The Hill reported:  "The Strategic National Stockpile was described as "the nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out."

The description continued: "When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency."

Trump family egos required a language change to fit son-in-law Jared Kushner's statement:  "The notion of the federal stockpile was it's supposed to be our stockpile, it's not supposed to be the state's stockpile that they then use." Jared apparently is much like his father-in-law.  Ego over everything.

Update 4-10-20:   Trump praised daughter Ivanka for creating 15 million new jobs.  In the three years Trump has been president, only 6.7 million jobs have been created in total. That's before the coronavirus decimated employment in the U.S.

Blue Team Keeps Domestic Spying

The Intercept reported:

Joining the pro-surveillance coalition led by Trump, Paul Ryan-R, Devin Nunes-R, Adam Schiff-D, and Eric Swalwell-D was the House’s liberal icon and senior Democrat, Nancy Pelosi. 

It's a bipartisan effort to not ensure our Fourth Amendment rights.  The Blue Team joined with the Reds to enable the Trump administration to continue spying on Americans, started under President George W. Bush and extended under President Barack H. Obama.

It's America's uniparty. 

Constitutional Republic Does Not Reflect People's Wishes

U.S. elected officials and public servants have long ignored the people's wishes.  The latest snub is the people's internet.

“Americans of all political parties overwhelmingly support the values of net neutrality and want to preserve existing net neutrality protections. A strong majority (77 percent) of Americans support keeping the existing net neutrality rules in place. This view crosses party lines, as 73 percent of Republicans, 80 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Independents want to keep the FCC’s Open Internet rules.”

Congress refused to remove preferred carried interest taxation for over a decade.  This tax break made billionaires richer while America's middle class withered and federal deficits ballooned.

Congress dug in their heels, preserving exorbitant private health insurance and forcing citizens to buy their unaffordable product.  Affordable health insurance is virtually unusable due to high deductibles and precarious family financial situations.

"86 percent of Americans agree that members of Congress pay too much attention to what their major financial contributors want them to do"

The average citizen using the internet is not a major financial contributor.  So their wishes can be willfully discarded until the run up to an election.  That's when candidate language changes, only to be forgotten and ignored once sworn into office.  Both our Red and Blue political teams employ the con.

 Update 10-28-20:  The Presidency has a way of running over the people's wishes, emergency powers.  The unitary executive expanded under W. and Obama.  Trump believes he can do anything he wants. 

Update 12-11-22:  A prayer for those waiting in darkness:

O Lord,help us to understand that it is not only the afflicted who are in danger, but those of us who comfortably look on and at best do nothing, and worse spread controversy, fear, mistrust and hatred.  Pierce our hardened hearts, enlighten our blindness, and break the chains of our pride and self-deception, so that we may choose life.

Voting Is Not Litigation

Meet the Press guests said the American people litigated Trump's self disclosed predatory behavior toward women by making him President of the United States.  Voting between a limited number of candidates for an elected position is not a court of law.

Why?  Because in our strange new world language is distorted as a means to an end.  Host Chuck Todd could have challenged the use of the word litigate.  Instead he shared the Blue Team version of the same distortion relative to Bill Clinton's sexual predatory behavior.

Both the Red and Blue political team are willing to twist language in order to not hold their leaders accountable.  That is not the least bit comforting.