Fidelity board opposes human-rights proposal

I got a proxy voting notice today from Fidelity, offering me a chance to sign off on a board of trustees and - if they had their druthers - oppose a shareholder proposal that certain funds divest of/refuse to invest in companies that the board can reasonably link to governments that support human rights abuses and genocide.

I'm not impressed. I mean, I am, but not in a good way.

Anyway, the proxy notice says nothing about which trustees support the idea and which oppose, but here's who the board wants to elect trustees: James C. Curvey, Albert R. Gamper Jr., Abigail P. Johnson, Arthur E. Johnson, Michael E. Kenneally, James H. Keyes, Maria L. Knowles and Kenneth L. Wolfe.

I figure, if you're standing for election to a body that doesn't give a damn about human rights, you're probably guilty of something.

A thought on the DJIA

My coworkers are understandably unsettled these days: We work at a newspaper, and if you've read a newspaper lately, you know we're... let's see, I'm trying to come up with a nice way of saying this that won't raise the eyebrows of my non-swearing readers... nope, no way around it, right now, our industry is fucked.

The optimists think that when the "economy" turns around, so will the picture for our industry, not to mention the current employer, which is still in the black, but not without some painful moves to stay that way.

So, how will we know when the economy, whatever that is supposed to mean, is OK again? When our revenue shoots through the roof and I get a fat raise? That would be a good measure, except I think it is maybe a little foolish to assume those two go hand in hand.

I'm told that a good indicator of the health of our economy is the Dow Jones Industrial Average. I've yet to hear a convincing argument to back up that proposition, however. Why should I think the best barometer for the vitality of the U.S. is the "behavior" of a market run by the people who got us into this mess?

Seriously. Stocks rise and fall based on expectations of earnings and growth, usually measured by the quarter. So if you aren't seen as likely to make a certain amount of dough in the next three months, your paper value goes in the tank. Is that really a sustainable way to run a country, quarter-to-quarter?

I mean, even the fundamentals of this supposed system are obviously flawed from a logical standpoint, let alone, you know, the empirical reality. Permanent sustained growth? How's that supposed to work?

I know there's a dissertation in here. But I also know the situation is hopeless in the absence of a mathematically capable populace (oh, and business writers. Another problem, eh?)

So in place of a solution, I'd just like to go a week without having to hear about the god damn stock market. *That* would be news worth sharing.

Notes from the meltdown

I got a letter the other day from the good people at Capital One, whose usual (weekly) correspondence consists of offers to transfer a balance to my Capital One credit card (now canceled after the letter, which was a change in terms for the worse) or to "upgrade" a loan I took out with them in 2007.

That loan came at a fortuitous time: We had an assortment of debts, from the now-paid off CRV to the costs and fees associated with being homeowners. OK, there might have been some frivolous stuff in there, too.

The loan terms were pretty good. They handed over a stack of loot eerily similar to what I needed with three years to pay, for about $1,900 in interest (7 percent, so you math whizzes can figure out how much I borrowed). I figure $50-odd a month is an OK price for peace of mind. I pay about that for Internet service, after all.

After about a year of payments, last June or so, I started getting the dear-valued-customer letters offering me the "increased flexibility" of a much larger loan. The most recent offer I got was to lend me $30,000, a portion of which would be used to pay off my current loan and the rest handed over with a minimum payoff plan of four years at 8 percent. To keep payments similar to what they are now, I'd have to opt for the 7-year payoff plan at 9 percent.

Seven years? Ouch. We're very fortunate to be out of woods with debt (unless, you know, you count the next 15 months of loan payments and the 2012 end point for the butterfly lady's student loans and the house), but I would like to remind anyone who thinks me overly smug that I work at a newspaper, which means that being out of debt is pretty god damn urgent.

Time for a depression?

Several years ago, I suggested a long run of high gas prices might be helpful, primarily because it would encourage car buyers to ask for vehicles more efficient than the ones on the market. That's happened, obviously, and although gas prices are on the downward slide now, I think enough car makers are committed to the new production lines that it won't be easy to switch back to huge fleets of gas guzzlers.

Besides, who's going to trust the cost of fuel to stay low?

Now, of course, there are much more interesting bits of economic news to chew on. Bank bailouts, automaker bailouts, home foreclosures, car loan delinquencies (nearly $23 billion at risk!), etcetera.

I've tried to be circumspect about all this, but why don't we at least entertain the idea that a good long recession, perhaps amounting to a depression, might actually be a good thing?

In the short run, obviously, the answer would be: No, that would be a Very Bad Thing for most people. But maybe in the long run, a depression would be the harbinger of a time of great opportunity, innovation, wealth and positive social change.

Would that be too much to hope for? I'd like to hear the well-reasoned, dispassionate argument to the contrary...

Distributed work force

I am not among those lucky enough to have a work-from-home gig, though the 10-minute walk to work sure isn't too much off. Except for the having-to-wear-clothes part, I suppose.

I'm not sure about other papers, but ours is certainly at the point where we really don't need to have a newsroom per se. I am pretty sure all we'd need is a reliable way to connect to the servers at work and probably one person to act as a newsroom representative to the public, which thankfully continues to visit us in person on a fairly regular basis.

As for other departments? Well, this is probably oversimplified, but we've got:

• A business office - internal and B2B bills.
• A circulation department - sets up subscriptions, takes complaints, plans single-copy sales, etc.
• An advertising department - ad sales people do nearly all their work out of the office.
• An advertising composition section - they digitally compose the ads and produce certain publications not handled by the newsroom.
• The press and mailroom - The latter being where all those fliers get inserted into your paper, as well as the distribution point for the finished product.

I'm probably missing something obvious.

It seems to me we could pare down to having department managers on site, if they felt that was necessary, plus one or two reps from each department except for the press and mailroom, the only parts of the factory that actually do stuff with tangible materials.

I suppose if there's ever a need to replace the building, we'd go to some sort of pared-down storefront and off-site printing and call it good, but I'm guessing the motivation to do that is low. Taxes are cheap here (about $16,000 last year for property tax, anyway), I'm pretty sure we own the building, etc.

But it wouldn't hurt my feelings if going to work consisted of turning on my computer at home and maybe meeting up with my staff occasionally for coffee :)

For your inconvenience

I've made two visits to post offices recently. One was on a Sunday, at Narita International Airport outside Tokyo and to the Walla Walla post office at Sumach Street and Second Avenue.

Although I don't speak much Japanese, I was able to mail a parcel from Narita for a reasonable cost with no hassle in about five minutes. That time included the two postal workers carefully packaging my item in a box, which they sealed, and for me to fill out the forms and pay.

My visit to the Walla Walla post office Monday afternoon didn't go quite so smoothly. One similarity: There were two postal workers in the office. As for me, I had a sealed priority mail flat-rate envelope to send. Twenty-five minutes after walking in, I had my receipt in hand and the envelope was off.

I don't think the postal workers were to blame, but who would ever know? It was lunchtime, so customers were plentiful, and some had what appeared to be bizarre needs: to have an individualized sales pitch about each of the available boxes the post office sells to ship items; to apparently have help filling out the whole! passport application at the counter; to negotiate for the release of a single piece of mail posted by the customer but also the subject of some arcane afterthought.

If ever a post office needed one of the self-service kiosks, it is this one.

What's wealthy?

For that matter, what's wealth?

Those definitions surely depend on who's being asked, and how much money/property they have. I'd say wealthy starts pretty low: Maybe $100,000 a year if you live in a town such as mine, maybe $200,000 in a snazzier place, like Santa Monica. But you'd need assets, too, to meet my definition. I'm a little fuzzy on that; I guess if your expenses aren't high and you make $100,000 a year, you can get some assets pretty quickly.

How about $100k a year plus $250k-$500k in property/investments/gold bars under the mattress? Sounds good to me.

The Associated Press and I do not see eye to eye: An Anne D'Innocenzio story about spending on luxury items pegs wealthy at $350,000 and above. I think that's overkill. According to the comprehensive wikipedia entry on household income in the United States, about 1.5 percent of households have annual incomes above $250,000, and just under 16 percent are over $100,000.

Maybe the "real" number is somewhere in the middle.

Or maybe it's better to concoct a non-monetary definition of wealth, or one that combines dough with quality of life. And maybe *that* is just a strategy people who don't have a lot of cash use to keep up with the Joneses.

Needful things

As usual, Japan is way ahead of the rest of us. It is embarrassing to me to hear people say we're the No. 1 leader in all things, because we so obviously are not.

To wit:


I'm trying to figure out what the coolest use would be for one of these ultra-thin, ultra-flexible displays. I mean, there's a whole basketful of obvious choices: A TV you can easily hang on the wall would be nice, but it would have to be pretty big, I think. If the wizards who come up with these things can ever overcome the physical obstacles to making high-fidelity, ultra-thin speakers, we'll be in business...

What are you paying me for?

Besides my 40-hour gig I do other things for money, too. The way I see it, the transactions I'm in, the person is buying either a) something I made; b) something I am doing for them; or c) both.

I do not think the buyer is purchasing "my time," and I doubt the run-of-the-mill customer thinks that's what they're getting when they hand over the cash.

Nevertheless, people frequently say, "I'm not sellling X, I'm selling my time."

I suppose. But when a customer says, "I'm not buying X from you, I'm buying your time," I think that maybe reality is being stretched a bit too far.

Call this semantics if you think that'll stick. I call it bullshit. You want to buy my time, you just give me some money, and I'll go read a book.

The free market

An Associated Press analysis piece on the closure of a Freightliner factory in Portland (Oregon, not Maine), I'm struck by a couple of details:

• 84 percent of Americans work in service jobs (I guess we have to take that figure on faith; the story didn't cite a source). I like being in the oddball sixth. I'm not saying parts of my business couldn't be outsourced (they already are, if you count wire-service copy, imported software for page composition and that kind of thing), but I'm pretty sure operations that gather local news will always need to have at least a few local people on the payroll.
• "Free trade" is a misnomer. Until I edited it out, "free trade" was used twice in the story to describe certain policies of the current administration. If the trade was truly free (I'm thinking of NAFTA here), I wouldn't have to pay duties to bring textiles in from Guatemala now, would I. Color me a cynic here, but I think "free trade" means about as much as "free market."
  

Tax time

According to an AP story I read today, the IRS has already issued 73.6 million refunds to the tune of $174 billion ($2,366 per refund, the story says). That's a pretty nice loan program the government has going for itself.

Let's assume that Joe and Mary Taxpayer invested that $2,366 conservatively, in a 12-month CD (rates listed today at bankrate.com suggest they'd get a 4.8 percent return). That'd be a nice little pile of ice-cream money, about $115.

Let's assume the federales had the same idea. Of course, they can't save up for a year and then invest the money, so let's say they put half the money in a six-month CD (I'd love to see that document), for a return of 4.5 percent. That'd be a nice little pile of ice cream money, too, about $3.9 billion.

As I've written previously, the national taxpayer advocate has the annual job of coming up with the top 20 (or more) problems facing the American taxpayer. I notice she (her name is Nina E. Olson) has nothing to say about this business.

Maybe this is all for the best - overpayment ensures the bill will be covered, whereas given our country's deplorable savings rates underpayment might simply lead to nonpayment. Still, I'm not that fond of having Big Brother playing parent with my money.

Subtraction by addition

Most people expect their earnings to grow, and not just at the rate of inflation. You're not really getting ahead if you still can't afford to buy a goddamn ice cream cone when you want one.

From a personal standpoint, earnings growth is probably an unalloyed good, although if you look at the schlocky crap that people like Donald Trump and Saddam Insane buy when they have a lot of money, it is hard to see how more money is always better.

On a grander scale, growth can cause a lot of problems, too, but those are largely ignored by politicians and the mainstream national media.

So, what's that got to do with subtraction by addition? Bear with me.

If you run a company that has investors and/or shareholders, you're usually expected to turn a profit, and show growth. If you're not going forward, you're going backward, right?

Well, maybe. It seems to me that there are two ways to make those earnings grow:

• Make something new or better and sell it.
• Cut costs.

In an ideal world, Choice A would predominate, but I don't know many people who live on that world. That leaves cost-cutting.

The easiest way to cut costs is to cut people. The leftovers then need to work harder, not smarter, or maybe do more with less, or whatever. If you're squeamish, though, you don't want to go around laying people off, especially if you don't have a good excuse.

Now your best bet might be subtraction by addition. Keep your workforce static, but add a few little jobs here and there and you'll get more revenue for the same outlay. You may even be able to encourage the workers to participate in this by making the added work fun, engaging or both.

Where's the harm? There might no be any, until one of your key players quits and you realize that all those little extras you tacked onto her job makes her a unique cog who can't be replaced. That old job description you have in your hand pales in comparison to what she actually *does* for you.

Besides that pitfall, I'd reckon that upper managers - who make the decisions about adding the work without adding to the staff - are generally ill suited as judges of whether they've added too much, because they generally have little idea of what each of their worker bees really does in a day. They're looking at the whole machine, not its parts.

Just an odd grumble, or maybe an econ thesis I'll never get to.