America-centrism

There are several comic strips that I keep up with.  Unfortunately, my way of keeping up with them involves falling behind and catching up every couple of months.  I'm currently working my way back to the present in Non Sequitur, and ran into this strip.

The punchline has Jeffrey say, "So... I do all the work, and you get all the money?"
To which Danae replies, "Of course.  That's the standard CEO-engineer split."

I find that very interesting, on several levels.  The most important is it shows a lot about our current system.  I'm not sure it isn't that far off, for modern-day corporations.  But, for a long time (back when the country was far more successful), it wasn't at all the case.  In fact, it was frequently the case that the CEO was an engineer himself, where the company was created so that the engineer could make sure that things were done right.

But now we seem to have accountants and other bean counters running most of the big companies.  That looks like a good thing, as balance sheets are inspected, but it's actually a short-term benefit with long-term cost.

The short-term benefit is the accountant knows how to make the numbers look good.  The long-term cost is that they generally don't know how to improve the numbers.  All the effort goes into making things appear as good as possible, not into improving things.

For instance, firing people is a sign of massive failure, perhaps on several levels.  First, it means you hired too many people.  Second, it means you don't have enough work to go around.  Third, it means that you're probably bleeding talent that could help improve the situation.

Leaving talent on the sidelines is bad for everybody (except your competitors, of course).

This is one of the big problems that Microsoft has had over the last ten years or so.  Since Gates stepped down, they haven't had engineering running the ship.  They've lost an immense amount of talent, much of the talent they still have is demotivated, and they have no vision at all.  They still make money, but they seem less and less relevant as time goes by.

A Taxing Situation

I've known for a while that, last year, I paid more federal tax on the first gallon of gas I bought than Exxon-Mobile, with its $50B in profits, paid out. (I'm sorry, I'd like to say where I got that conception of the problem from... Maybe a Matt Taibbi-penned Rolling Stone article? If not, he's still a fantastic reporter; one of not many looking to stick it to the powerful. In any event, I can't find it and would be happy to have it pointed out to me.)

This Daily Kos diary discusses one of the strategies by which those taxes are avoided.

This sort of thing leads to a weird situation where I'm not at all sure there's any direct way to monitor. I think it leads to a need to just base taxes on corporate reporting statements, or something along those lines. Frankly, if you're going to do business in America, you should pay taxes in America. It really is as simple as that.

And it looks like it might be nearly impossible to actually trace the money. I don't know. Anyone see the problems with that approach? (Other than that it only works for publicly-traded companies, although I think making it only apply to publicly-traded companies isn't too big a deal. Remember, for those companies, they want profits to look as large as possible, so investors will be more likely to buy. Hence, more tax liability. Simple.)

Why are drug advertisements such a big problem?

Well, I've long thought that the big reason drug companies advertising directly to the consumer was such a bad idea was that it got people to go to their doctors, and ask for drugs. After all, pharmaceuticals cure all ills, right? Isn't that what the ads say?

My wife was talking to a business partner this evening about a drug (Xicam, maybe? I hadn't heard of it before). Apparently, it can cause loss of smell (that is, lack of detection of odors, not lack of causing; the latter would sell quite well, I'm thinking). This has been known for a while, but apparently not well known.

And I started thinking about why that would be. Well, it's a known problem with media consolidation that advertisers can affect stories told by the news. If you'd like to hear about a particularly disturbing case, get your hands on 'The Corporation', and find out how Fox argued (and won) a case in court proving that the news does not have any obligation to be truthful. Big surprise that it's Fox, right? But I'm sure that particular problem cuts across all the big media companies.

So, my point is, a second reason that drug companies advertising directly to the consumer is a double-plus-ungood thing: the companies have leverage to keep the news from reporting about problems with the drugs that are out there. *Yuck*

Oh, and the third reason: I'm really not looking forward to watching a football game, and having my preteen daughter asking me what an erection is. Yes, that's years off, but still...