Category: Rant

Politicians Need Illegal Immigrants

Why, you ask, do politicians need illegal immigrants? Simple: economics. Illegal immigrants don’t show up in labor statistics or the official work force. Thus:

– when the economy is good, illegal immigrants provide a labor boost, increasing productivity without increasing official payrolls. Illegal immigrants also don’t get health insurance or any other benefits, making them the cheapest labor for companies. Politicians can claim credit for economic improvements on their watch.

– when the economy is bad, illegal immigrants can be terminated from the work force quickly and invisibly. They cannot claim unemployment and they do not show up in unemployment reports; as a result, politicians can claim that an economic downturn is not as severe because jobless claims didn’t increase very much.

– illegal immigrants cannot vote. A politician can continue to disenfranchise illegal immigrants with no political consequences because there’s no voting repercussions.

Given that the current status of illegal immigrants provides multiple positive incentives for politicians and few negative ones, is it any wonder that progress on a pathway to citizenship has not been made?

I’m always amused when I see someone bill themselves as a thought leader in their field (heck, my own company’s marketing department does it to me), mostly because the term thought leader is a joke. You are either a leader or you are not. It’d be like having a thought quarterback in the NFL, a thought pitcher in Fenway Park, a thought general on the battlefield. Do leaders need to think? Of course! But then they need to demonstrate the true leadership part and do.

Brilliant execution of a good plan beats no execution of a great plan every time.

My final turn of phrase on this silly term that needs to be retired: a thought leader is someone who is thinking about leading – but probably never will.

Die In A Fire

Of the many expressions online that I really dislike, topping the list has got to be “die in a fire”. Like virtually every other Internet expression, it’s bandied about carelessly, and the people who use it probably don’t think about it a whole lot. So here’s a bit of perspective in the hopes that at least for the more thoughtful, careful, and socially sensitive people in the group of folks I like to call friends, we can retire this awful phrase.

When you’re caught in a fire, the first thing that generally happens is that the hair and surface skin burns, usually very quickly. Anyone who’s singed themselves while cooking or tending a fireplace has gotten a taste of what this is like. The skin cracks, the hair burns off, and the nerve endings all fire at the same time, communicating only one thing – you’re in a heck of a lot of trouble and pain.

As your body heats up from the fire, the fat underneath the skin melts. As with all animal fats, it melts at a relatively low heat point, instantly causing some skin to slough off in flakes and sheets. Your eyes will be especially affected – the eyelids are thin tissue and will be destroyed relatively quickly, but the liquid eyeball itself will boil first, then burst, and only then burn.

If you’re exposed to direct flame, you will catch fire just like a wick in a wax candle. At this point, if you’re lucky, you’ll have a low tolerance for pain, fall unconscious, and never wake up.

If you’re not lucky, you may live long enough to watch your body fall apart. Incidentally, the voice box is relatively well protected by heavy cartilage and muscle, so if you’re still conscious, you can still scream.

Once the skin and surface tissue have melted and burned away, the proteins making up tissue and muscle are the next to cook, then burn. Internal organs heat to the boiling point, then explode, and as the muscles burn away, they too dry up, wither, and burn away.

If the fire’s not particularly hot, what will be left will be a skeleton with carbonized tissue attached to it. If the fire is sufficiently hot, the proteins that bind the minerals in your bones will burn away as well, causing your bones to fall to ashes.

This is what it means to die in a fire. To wish that on anyone, even casually or in jest, is to wish them one of the most painful ways to leave this mortal coil.

If you’d like to see what happens when you only get injured by fire, take a look at Youssif, an Iraqi boy doused in gasoline and lit on fire.

Now, can we retire that expression?

post-script: in case you were wondering where the expression crossed my radar, someone invited to a Facebook group named People who Type Like This Can Die in a Fire. Needless to say, I declined the invitation (and the subsequent zombie requests as well)

Let’s talk briefly about polyethylene – specifically, high density polyethylene. It’s a dense plastic that is extremely strong and resistant to a bunch of things. Things like Tupperware are made from it. It in turn is made from petroleum – oil – in a lossy process that consumes 1.75 units of petroleum to produce 1.0 units of polyethylene.

Why is this important? Well, it seems that milk crates – those super-high density crates that virtually every college student has at some point – are vanishing at a rate far beyond the usual theft rates. The dairy industry investigated and found that the price for recycled polyethylene jumped from about 7 cents per pound to 22 cents per pound over the last two years. Recyclers were accepted stolen milk crates in bulk, chopping them up, and shipping them to China to be used to make consumer goods.

Think about that for a second. China, already one of the world’s largest consumers of petroleum, has companies paying 22 cents per pound for used polyethylene instead of refining petroleum to create new polyethylene. That means that in their manufacturing processes, it’s cheaper to recycle (or use recycled materials) than it is to manufacture new – which is not usually the case.

What does this mean? To me, it hints that the cost of petroleum and relatively limited supply is causing one of the world’s largest consumer goods manufacturing economies to choose recycled materials over new, and that means that the supply of oil is probably tighter than we think.

Peak oil, anyone? A harbinger of things to come?

In chatting with Marketing Over Coffee co-host John Wall, I reached a conclusion with him: Wal-Mart has unleashed an incredibly destructive force on America, one which is tearing the country to bits.

Lowest price mentality.

In sales, we usually talk about three dimensions of a product:

– Quality
– Service
– Price

Generally speaking, you want a balance among the three. Ideally, you want the finest quality, best service, and lowest price you can get, but you make tradeoffs and concessions in some areas for others.

What Wal-Mart has done is caused a deep imbalance by promoting lowest price as the only factor that matters in a product or service, so much so that people are willing to accept garbage quality and abusive service as long as the price is as low as they can get it.

Is Wal-Mart the cause of this mentality? No, but it’s been the biggest cheerleader with its Always Low Prices campaign.

John and I were discussing airlines. US airline carriers compete virtually solely on price, and that’s resulted in, as John calls it, airlines being transformed from amazing travel experiences to “a Grayhound with wings, complete with smelly seats”.

Here’s a stunning thought for you: what if Wal-Mart were responsible for digital piracy? What if Wal-Mart were the reason that musicians and independent software developers have a harder time than ever earning a living? After all, if lowest price is the absolute most important thing in the world to you, free is even better – even if it means breaking the law and violating intellectual property rights.

A relentless focus on getting things as cheaply as possible means that you as a consumer don’t care about much of anything else. If you’re willing to wear clothing that falls apart in six months, willing to eat unsafe food grown thousands of miles away by the lowest wage workers a supplier can find (legally or not), buy a DVD player that’s held together with duct tape and a prayer, why wouldn’t you download everything you could get your hands on, especially when the likelihood of getting caught is very low?

When do you pay for quality? Or do you mercilessly always choose price as the defining factor in your purchasing decisions? Will you break the law to save money, knowing that most likely, you won’t get caught?

What will you do for low prices?