Scott Wilson RIP

I have had the privilege of knowing many astute and capable people in the course of my life. My best friend in high school went on to become the chief resident of ophthalmology at the Wilmer Eye Institute of Johns Hopkins University. He has been widely published and has pioneered techniques and equipment which has saved the vision of countless people. Right after high school I met my wife at the National Youth Science Camp. NYSC is chock full of brilliant people. As a Physics major in college, I met some remarkable people, both students and faculty. When we came to Dallas to work with SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics), we again met quite a number of outstanding people. I don’t think that there is an organization around like SIL which is larger with a higher percentage of PhDs. During our first several years in Dallas, we met a number of the boys at the Super Collider: all of them being remarkably intelligent. In my wanderings as a computer programmer, I have also met some really gifted people. However, even after rubbing elbows, and working, with so many distinguished folks, the first genuinely brilliant person I had as a friend outshines all the others. His name was Scott.

My family moved around a lot when I was growing up. I was never in the same elementary school for two full years. We moved to Wheaton IL in the second half my 5th grade year and there I met Scott Wilson. I never cared for school much, but I loved to play sports and, I was good at every athletic endeavor. Scott was not athletic at all. In fact, he was so bad that he got teased and shunned by some. I was small for my grade, and when I was new to a school, I was often picked last, but I liked that because my team would win. Even at that age, I knew that being bullied bothered some, like Scott, who were the target of a bully’s sharp tongue. He was my first “best friend.” We enjoyed playing strategy games together. I rode my bike over to his home countless times. The only time I’ve been hit by a car was when I was riding over to Scott’s home. I often think about him when I ride even now.

I could write a lot about Scott, but he was special. When we had a 6th grade research paper, he had a whole little box full of 3x5 cards with quotes, and bibliography. I did not write something so carefully until I got to my masters studies. Scott was brilliant and meticulous unlike anyone I’ve known compared to his peers. I’ve always thought that he would have made a great medical researcher. I’m sure he could have saved a lot of lives but he did not get the chance.

The summer when I was 13, my family took a two week vacation. When my family got back, Scott had died and was already buried. You see, he had Cystic Fibrosis. The adults all told me that Scott would not make it to his 20th birthday. However, when you are 13, 20 sounds like forever. I knew that he was sick, but not sick enough to die.

I’ve thought about him and the waste of human capital that is caused not just from Scott, but all of the kids who are born with CF. Kids today typically last a lot longer than Scott did, but still, the cost is enormous. Just earlier this year I found out that there are a series of CF fundraiser bike rides. Although I have not ridden my bike in two months, I will be doing the 60 mile ride in McKinney on October 13, Lord willing. It is a truly worthy cause that I have experienced first hand and I would like to be a small part of the solution.

Cystic fibrosis is a life-threatening genetic disease that affects approximately 30,000 children and adults in the United States. A defective gene causes the body to produce abnormally thick, sticky mucus. The abnormal mucus leads to chronic and life-threatening lung infections and impairs digestion. Currently there is no cure, and the median age of survival for a person with cystic fibrosis is 36.5 years.

The CF Foundation has consistently been recognized as one of the top voluntary health organizations in the country at efficiently using its money raised to invest in research and medical programs. By investing in the CF Foundation you are helping to fund the landmark research that will, one day, make a tremendous difference in the lives of those with the disease. With your help, we can give the children and adults with CF the quality of life and the future they deserve.

http://www.cff.org/LWC/JohnBaima

Just how good was Robert Griffin III in Week 1?

Just how good was Robert Griffin III’s rookie debut? Unbelievable. Really, what he did was just unbelievable. It goes without saying that he will not be able to play that well every week, and some of his peers will play better in the weeks to come, but that first week was just a dozy.

Never before have five rookie quarterbacks started. First, let’s review where the starting rookie quarterbacks were drafted.

Draft#	Name	Team
1	Andrew Luck	Indianapolis
2	Robert Griffin III	Washington
8	Ryan Tannehill	Miami Dolphins
22	Brandon Weeden	Cleveland Browns
75	Russell Wilson	Seattle Seahawks

The best evaluation of a quarterback is not the normal QB rating, but the “Real QB Rating” system. It is a lot more complicated, and if you want to ready about it, you can do it here.

So, how did the five rookies do? Here are their numbers. The “Rank” is how they faired compared to the 32 starting QB’s last weekend.

Rank	Team	Real QB Rating
2	Washington	124.44
28	Seattle	53.84
30	Indianapolis	42.25
31	Miami	36.13
32	Cleveland	6.94

Of the 32 QB’s last weekend, RGIII had the second best numbers of anyone, but he was playing an away game in arguably the most difficult venue, New Orleans. Without RGIII, the other 4 rookies filled 4 of the 5 lowest slots. That’s what we expect of rookies, even ones which will someday be excellent QBs. That’s why the vast majority of QBs coming out of college are backups for one or more seasons so that they can learn the systems and get the hang of the much faster NFL. We joke about this sometimes, but no college plays at the speed of the NFL. The NFL is truly in its own league.

Let’s look at last years draft and how those starters did. Here was the draft:

Draft#	Name	Team
1	Cam Newton	Carolina
8	Jake Locker	Tennessee
10	Blaine Gabbert	Jacksonville (not starter)
12	Christian Ponder	Minnesota
25	Andy Dalton	Cincinnati

Of those five, four were starters.

Rank	Team	Real QB Rating
17	Minnesota	83.61
19	Carolina	76.78
20	Tennessee	70.79
29	Cincinnati	50.60

The best of last year’s group did not make it into the top half of QBs. The places of the two years minus RGIII is:

17, 19, 20, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32

Again, none in the top half and they had a firm hold on the worst 5 performances last week.

Some have compared RGIII to Michael Vick. How did Vick do:

Michael Vick

27 Philadelphia 54.52

Humm. Outside of the rookie and 1 year vets, Michael Vick was the worst QB in the league. Maybe RGIII will have one week in his career that bad, but I seriously doubt it.

It will be interesting to see how RGIII does the rest of the year. Remember, the Redskins were 5-11 last year. The Saints were 13-3 and were (maybe still are) considered a legitimate contender for the Super Bowl. Outside of the Redskins NFC East opponents, the Saints were the strongest team they have to play this year.

If RGIII keeps doing anything like what he did last week, he will not be vying for Rookie of the Year, but MVP. The Redskins could go from 5-11 to 11-5 in one year by moving up in the draft, betting the farm on a rookie. It looks like a good bet now.

So, it may still make my head explode, but I will keep cheering for RGIII. Yikes, what has the world come to!

The GM Bailout

After the DNC, it seems like Obama is going to tout his GM bailout as the signature achievement of his administration. If you can stand it, take a look at the former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm. The only problem is that the bailout has been a disaster and the alternative would have been much better.

There were several possible outcomes from GM’s problems. The one Obama chose was to intervene before the normal bankruptcy reorganization was completed. First, the settlement originally cost tax payers about $65 billion dollars but because of some bad decisions, that price tag has increased by about $25 billion. That’s a lot of money.

The settlement imposed by Obama basically slaughtered all of the capital investors (the old GM stock was declared worthless) while the UAW got a gold plated deal. The 20,000 non-union workers at Delphi also got screwed and the Obama administration committed perjury about this to try to make themselves look good.

So, when Jennifer Granholm whines that no capital firm wanted to give GM money, including Bain, the answer should be, “No duh!” Who would be willing to invest in a company that will be nationalized by the government bypassing all of the normal legal protections with the result that you lose your money? The government can throw money away, but private firms are averse to throwing money away for some strange reason.

One the beneficial aspect of the normal bankruptcy process is that companies can get rid of loser contracts. Some of the bad contracts and subsidiaries were liquidated, but not all. One of the loser contracts was the labor contract with the UAW. Obama wanted to protect the UAW because they give him a lot of money and labor. Yes, in our current system, the government gives unions (or corporations!) money who then gleefully give money back to the politicians, not the tax payers. This is an inherently corrupt process, but that is a topic for another day.

There was another contract that GM needed to get rid of, and that was the European Opel division. To be blunt, that is one of the largest money pits ever. Without the government intervention by Obama, GM would have gotten rid of that. However, at the Obama appointed directors insistence, it was kept and that has cost another $25 billion and that gift has not quit giving. No one knows what the ultimate loss will be. Of course the people in Michigan know this, despite Governor Jennifer Granholm’s ridiculous speech.

Well, what would have happened if GM was allowed to go through the complete bankruptcy process? Would it have resulted in all of those jobs being lost like Granholm suggests? No. A judge would have restructured the contracts and given less to the UAW and more to the capital investors. After all, you cannot completely kill the current investors if you want new ones. After bankruptcy, it is possible that GM would have been able to function without any government bailout. Government bailouts to corporations just encourage them to act irresponsibly. It is possible, some would say inevitable, that GM would have needed a bailout anyway. Maybe, but what is certain with 20-20 hindsight is that it would not have been anywhere near as expensive, especially if they had successfully divested themselves of Opel.

What the Democrats fail to acknowledge in the GM case is that the price tag matters. If you could have achieved the positive result of making a large manufacturer viable again at a fraction of the cost, would not that have been better? Of course! When individuals evaluate a deal, they look at both the costs and the benefits. When liberals look at a deal, they first look at the intentions, and then if it goes well, they look at the results, but they rarely, if ever, consider the cost. In the real world where individuals live costs do matter.

So, who is right? Who had the foresight to predict what would be the least expensive alternative to helping GM? Was it Obama? He was the right choice if you are a UAW member. If you are a tax payer or someone with a private retirement account that had stock invested in GM (that was a lot of the investors), then the answer is an emphatic NO.

If the GM bailout was Obama’s signature achievement, then his time in the Whitehouse was a complete failure.

No excuses

One of the slogans I’ve mentioned before that I’d like to hear is “When we import oil, we export jobs.” And, please, don’t give me any of the, “we can’t do that because of the carbon footprint” nonsense. Even if you believe in anthropogenic, global warming due to carbon emissions, if we use our own oil, it will not cause more global carbon emissions but less. I will leave the proof of that as an exercise to the reader.

However, there is another important slogan I would like to hear from Mitt Romney, and, if he were to utter it, I think it would result in a wider victory than would otherwise be possible. Romney has on his web site, “Americans deserve more jobs and more take-home pay.” That’s fine as far as it goes, but what I want to hear is,

“Americans deserve more jobs and more take-home pay. Give me four years, and if I don’t produce that, I will not run for re-election, no excuses. Yes, there will be Democrats in congress. Yes, there will be unforeseen difficulties. Yes, I will not get my way in everything. None of that matters. My promise to you is that I will increase the take-home pay of all levels of American society or I will not run again. No excuses. I promise a brighter tomorrow, no excuses.”

We have seen the largest destruction of wealth since the Great Depression. While the average person does not know the numbers, they feel it, they believe it. People still dream of an America where each generation will do better than the last. That is in real jeopardy.

Obama has been an unmitigated disaster, and again, people feel that. But the one thing that Obama makes more than anything else is excuses. The favorite has been, and still is, “Blame Bush!” But that is never enough. Things were worse then he expected. Unexpected things happened and on and on. Things are never his fault! Although he has played more golf than both Bush Presidents and he attended more campaign fundraisers than all Presidents since Richard Nixon combined before he officially announced his re-election and REALLY got started, he is working tirelessly for us. I don’t believe he is working overtime for us and I would not care even if it were true. I don’t care if he has had good intentions. I believe in results. Obama has not delivered. If he thinks that he has delivered, I don’t want what he’s selling.

So, Mitt, you want our votes? Double down with a double promise: Not only promise us what you will do for us, promise us what the consequences for you will be if you fail. And, no excuses.

Vulture Capitalism

One of the issues in the current presidential campaign is the roll of venture capitalists, or, as our president who has never worked in a real business likes to call it, “vulture capitalism.” I was a small cog in venture capital firm and I am proud of that work as is, I suppose, anyone who has actually done that kind of work.

My company acquired 6 different companies, the largest of which was Huffy Services. I clearly remember walking into their Dayton offices for the first time. When we walked down the main hallway, I knew that all of the people on the right were going to lose their jobs and a lot of them on the left.

The right side was accounting, payroll and software development. They had 5 software developers. I replaced all of them and did not get paid anywhere close to what their senior developer got paid. They had about a dozen people entering manual worksheets. I wrote new software so that the twins in our office were able to do what those dozen did. Later, we moved it to an OCR process and then a totally electronic reporting system by web or smart phones. The billing department had almost a dozen people and my new software allowed them to do that work with two. Payroll was at least a half dozen and, again, my new software eventually got that down to one person. That one person will likely read this blog. I forget how many people were on the accounting team, but they all lost their jobs. I developed a direct, automated link from our custom software to our JD Edwards corporate accounting. All in all, dozens on that right side lost their jobs.

The left side, Operations, was not quite as bad. All of the senior administrators lost their jobs. Some of the best service coordinators were offered jobs in Dallas. Only one of those took the offer but she is still working with the company in Dallas eight years later. I remember one of the service coordinators who was only scheduling 16 Lowes stores (we were servicing 5 or 6 thousand stores) and in those stores, the same person worked there every day. The CEO used to like to joke that she could finish her day’s work before she finished her first cup of coffee. She was the niece of one of the senior people. She lost her job. The new scheduling software I wrote allowed the job to be done better with far fewer people so only a fraction kept their jobs. One of those people who worked with the company until last year will also, likely, read this blog. I consider myself friends with those people.

So, all in all, a large percentage of the white collar employees lost their jobs. How could I be proud of that? Well, the office workers were all overhead and not producers. The upside is that the 3,000 field workers who were actually producing got to keep their jobs. Without the purging and re-organization of an inefficient operation, they would have all lost their jobs. So, yes, some of it was painful, but on the whole, it was quite worthwhile.

All of the companies we purchased had a few things in common: Their software systems sucked, they were grossly inefficient, and they had to either re-organize or dissolve. So, you can point to all of the bad things that happened, or you can see the big picture which is that we allowed those companies to continue to function and provide better service for our clients at a better price because we were more efficient.

Some people will only hold up the bad and criticize good people who are doing useful work. You want some people in Washington who understand the current business changes in charge. When the Democrats tout Bill Clinton as the great American business president, remember that he had the good fortune to be president when software actually started to help. Before that time, computers did not really help white collar employees as a whole. During that time, supervisors went from supervising 5 or 6 employees to twice that number. That lead to a lot of restructuring, but it was all necessary to make America competitive in the global, competitive market.

The President Obama is telling everyone that his 700 BILLION in Medicare cuts is only all saving from waste and abuse. That’s a laugh. First, he will never achieve that number--that is pure fairy dust. And, if he achieves even a fraction of that savings, he will leave behind far more bodies than Romney ever managed to do. The costs are salaries, drugs, medical equipment and facilities so you have to cut those in order to save money. Those proposed savings are jobs and pay. One topic for another day is how ObamaCare will make the coming shortage of doctors much worse because of the “free” care and those cuts.

But just remember when Obama berates Romney for being a “Vulture Capitalist” the president has no idea what he is talking about while at the same time he is proposing something much worse then anything Romney has ever done.

Bloomberg is a hypocritical, ignorant fascist

Bloomberg is a hypocritical, ignorant fascist.

I was going to say that he is a hypocritical, ignorant fascist pig, but I did not want to make it personal, just factual.

First, do I think that people should drink sugared drinks? No, not unless they are exercising. When you drink a sugared drink and are not exercising, your body cannot use the sugar fast enough so the excess sugar plasterers itself on the outside of your cells, reduces the ability of the cells to function and never comes off until the cell dies. Ouch.

Bloomberg (Big B), however, has some problems.

First, all sugared drinks are equally harmful and that includes fruit juices which he exempts from his ban. I’m not sure if that lobby is more powerful in his world or if he is just ignorant. Fruit juice is like lipstick on a pig: You cannot take a food or drink that is basically bad for you, add something positive like “Vitamin C!” and magically get something that is good for you. The sugar in orange juice is just as bad as the sugar in Coke. Whole fruit is good for you, juices no so much. Why? The general rule of thumb for solids is that they are half digested in 45 minutes and not fully digested for four hours. Liquids can basically go straight in causing the sugar spike your body cannot handle.

The other major problem Big B has is that he is targeting obesity, not cell damage. Did you know that there is strong statistical evidence that drinking artificially sweetened drinks also leads to weight gain? There are recent studies showing that artificially sweetened drinks may stimulate the hunger centers in the brain to make you hungrier so that you may eat more. Gotta ban those bad boys too!

For the best results, you should only eat when you are active. You should not eat and then go to bed. There is a lot of evidence that eating at the wrong time of day is actually worse for you than eating the wrong foods. So, will Big B start dictating when restaurants can be open?

So, what is worse for you, the Coke you drink in the middle of the day when you are active or that sugary sweet desert just before bedtime? I often drink a 40 or more ounces of sugary soda in the middle of a long bike ride and it does me no harm at all. In fact, it helps me greatly!

Do we have a problem with obesity? Sure, we do. There is even recent evidence that the poorer you are, the more obesity is a problem. That’s a remarkable fact but I will leave that for another day. The problem with liberals like the Big B is that they want to take away our liberty because they feel that government must “Do something!”

But really, what are they going to do? Ban all deserts and eating after 8PM? See how well that works in New York City.

The whole idea that the government is not just going to give us information, but control our lives is basically fascistic. We opened the door wide to fascism in the US when we allowed smoking bans in private establishments. We like to refer to restaurants as public places, but that is really not true. Court houses are public places. Public libraries are public places. Who owns the building? If it is the public, than it is a public place. If it is private citizens (and that includes corporations which are simply a collection of individuals) who own the building, then it is a private place.

Don’t get me wrong—I hate smoking and I will not willing eat in a place that allows smoking. However, the solution that is consistent with liberty is to inform people both about smoking in general and individual restaurants. If a restaurant was required to have clear signs stating if it was smoking or non-smoking, then everyone could use their freedom to do what they want. However, this notion that since I hate smoking and I want to eat in a specific restaurant so I will get the government to change them to my likes and dislikes is fundamentally fascistic and no one exemplifies that better than Bloomberg.

If you want to learn how to eat better go to www.drmirkin.com. If you want the government to force you to do what it thinks is in your best interest, you are advocating fascism. We in the US are at a tipping point and unless we wake up and start advocating liberty, we will end up in a country devoid of liberty.

“What more do we want this man to do for us, honest to God"

“What more do we want this man to do for us, honest to God" (David Letterman)

Well, I’d like to offer my modest proposal of just two items for starters:

Be a man and take some responsibility for your actions.

Quit making so many mistakes.

1. Truman famously stated that “The buck stops here.” That phrase comes from the slang expression "pass the buck" which means passing the responsibility on to someone else. In my lifetime there has never been a president more willing to "pass the buck" or "spend the buck" than President Obama. Really, please name one thing that he has done which has not gone well for which he has taken responsibility? Even the positive things he has done like killing bin Laden are overshadowed by his undignified grabbing undo credit and his CYA preparation in case things did not go well. His bragging was completely un-Presidential.

The irony will be that if Obama loses re-election it could be due to his inability to admit his mistakes. Even now, if he were to admit that his 1 Trillion dollar stimulus spending was a mistake, the American people would accept his apology and be much more likely to follow him. When he doubles down on his mistakes, he alienates people.

No one has ever blamed more people than Obama. Of course it was Bush, than it was Big Banks, then it was Big Oil and Big Pharma, and just about any other industry that made money. It was those obstructionist Republicans even when he passed the largest, most far reaching legislation without getting a single Republican vote. Really, to avoid getting even a single vote from the opposition takes real talent, Democrat or Republican.

2. There are so many mistakes it is hard to know where to start. People are always interested in money so let’s start there and talk about the failed stimulus spending.

The number one method of creating jobs with The Great Stimulus was increasing unemployment payments. Really, I’m not making this up. Nancy Reed and Harry Pelosi (these names are from James Taranto, my favorite blogger) along with Obama and a few Republicans have been pushing unemployment pay as a way to create jobs. If this is news to you or if you do not believe me, I would like to give you some more information: This is an election year, a really important election year so it is about time to start paying attention.

Obama wasted almost 1 Trillion dollars on his failed stimulus spending. 1 Trillion dollars. I know that we have all become immune to the numbers we hear but let’s think about this just a little. How else could I spend 1 Trillion dollars? I would like to make one suggestion. I think that my idea is a really, really bad idea. However, I think that it is vastly better than how it was spent to pay back Obama’s political friends.

Okay, in the US, there will be about 140 million tax returns filed this year. I know that all my friends file a tax return so this may be somewhat shocking that only that many file, but that is about the right number. If you take out the people who are not citizens, you get fairly close to 100 million tax returns. About half of the remaining people don’t actually pay any federal income tax but they do pay Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. If you take only citizens who actually pay at least $1 of income tax, the number is significantly less than 100 million.

So, of those citizens who pay at least $1 of income tax, we randomly take 1 million of those and make than instant millionaires. That means if you are an income tax payer you would have a better than 1% (almost 2%) chance of being a millionaire. The only stipulation on that $1 million is that you had to spend it in one year inside of the US. One million new millionaires. Think about that for awhile and think of the economic hurricane it would engender.

One Trillion is a lot of money, and we spent about $250,000 for each job it created for one year. We've added over $5 Trillion in new debt over the last 3 years. If you think about how we wasted $1 Trillion and it does not make you want to cry, there is something wrong with you. How about your ideas on how to spend $1 Trillion? Maybe, just maybe, should we have spent it at all?

Reason 101 on why ObamaCare is a bad idea

I'm sure that I could come up with at least 100 reasons why I think that ObamaCare is a bad idea, however today I got reason 101. I got my garbage can today!

Last fall Cedar Hill let us know that they were switching our garbage collection from twice a week to once a week. They were also replacing our little recycle bins with a large recycle can and we could rent a separate garbage can if we wanted to. The notification was in November and we ordered our garbage can in the first week of December. Based on what they said, our expectation was that it would be delivered before the new garbage pickup plan started. Well, it almost worked out that way.

When we got into January and did not have the can, we gave Cedar Hill a call. No go on the garbage can—they were back ordered and they would not be ready until early February. A month was not enough time for the government to get the cans, oh, well.

So, February rolled around and nothing. So we gave them another call. They were not in but they would be coming Real Soon Now. So, we waited until March

Well, when March rolled around, they had Good News! They had all been delivered! The bad news: We still did not have one. They promised to figure it out and get us one, Real Soon Now.

So we called in April. Boy, they really did not have any idea why we did not have one yet, but they would make sure we got one Real Soon Now, or at least by the end of the next week. So, we started calling weekly—the hot weather was coming! Each time I told my wife that she needed to talk to someone higher up.

By May, I think that we had hit the city manager a couple of times. My wife is really nice, but I think that she finally managed to communicate to the manager that while she was nice, I would not be so nice. So, they finally sounded the red alert today, and we got our garbage can after about 5 months.

The difference between government and a business is that government has no sense of failure.  I'm sure that the manager went home feeling good about “going the extra mile for one of our citizens.” The failure of the government was on multiple levels. Seriously, they cannot order and deliver garbage cans? But it is more than that. In the several failures of the city to keep their word, never once did they let us know that there was a problem, what caused it, and what they would do to fix it. Never. They only looked at the issue when we complained. Imagine that in a private company. People would get fired. There are no consequences to failure in government. Failure in government is only ever proof that more money is needed.

What boggles my mind is that while government fails time and time again with no recognition or awareness of their failure with simple and stupid tasks like garbage cans, people will trust them with the infinitely more complex and important health care system. Are people really that gullible? I guess so.