Admiral Harry Harris, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, told the New York Times regarding T. R. Fehrenbach's definitive book covering the Korean War, "This Kind of War": "He says the United States was not ready. It is really a powerful book."
Fehrenbach did indeed write a scathing indictment of the readiness of the U.S. military after WWII, so much so that the fiftieth anniversary edition, released in 2000 -- the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the war, not the publishing of the book -- included in the new forward written by the 32nd Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, Gordon Sullivan: "That may have been true in 1962, but it isn't necessarily true today." The U.S. military could hardly have been less prepared in 1950. Fehrenbach wrote of the attitude at the time regarding discipline: "Basically, there were two ways to reduce abuses of power in the service. One was to overhaul the officer procurement system, make damned certain that no merely average man could ever be commissioned, and have fewer officers, but better ones. The other way was to reduce the power to abuse any body." We chose the latter. The Doolittle Board's The Report of the Secretary of War's Board on Officer-Enlisted Man Relationships, a/k/a the 1946 Doolittle Report, advised to sissify the Army, resulting in officers being unable to control their troops who would back-talk their commanders and engage mainly in activities that interested them, usually involving sex and/or money. The Marines avoided this nonsense and stuck to their traditions. Your author wonders whether Fehrenbach ever viewed the classic comedy movie Ninotchka, with Greta Garbo uttering the memorable line, referring to the Soviet purges of the 1930s: "The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer, but better Russians." In any case, we are reminded of the Obama and Biden Administrations' efforts to remake the military in a feminine, homosexual, and transgender image, 1950 revisited. The partisan and politically correct New York Times opined that "there were already thousands of transgender people in the military," but that laughable estimate originated with the Palm Center, an organization of LGBTs the sole purpose of which was to coerce the military into accepting LGBTs, hardly an unbiased source. The only other source of LGBT statistics is the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy, another LGBT lobbyist. We were unprepared for Pearl Harbor and the invasion of South Korea by the DPRK. Leftists are determined to make us learn the lesson of preparedness again. And it's no surprise that the military is having trouble recruiting, given that most potential recruits tend to be conservative, exactly the opposite of woke. Fehrenbach compared the poorly prepared Americans and ROK troops with the hardened troops of North Korea, who attacked all across the border at 4:00 am on June 25, 1950. The surprise attack caused the American and ROK forces to retreat to a small amount of territory on the far south-east corner of the peninsula, the Pusan perimeter, before the Inchon landings turned the tide. Then when "dugout Doug" MacArthur ordered his troops to move to the Yalu River and China invaded in the millions, both the Marines in the east and the Army in the west were forced to retreat. But the behavior of the Marines and Army could not have been more different. The Marines lashed their wounded to the tops of jeeps and trucks, truly their finest hour, while the Army, in a mad dash for safety, often left their wounded to be bayoneted later by the fanatical North Koreans. This is just one example why the Marines are so adamant about retaining the policies which have worked in many battles. Politicizing military culture will end in disaster. Fehrenbach started his book with an introduction to Korea, to which he usually referred by the name the natives use for it, Chosun. He noted that Chosun was a springboard for China, Russia, and Japan, the last of which annexed the peninsula in 1910. He explained: "The cause of collision was not the poor land of Chosun with its teeming millions, but vast and wealthy Manchuria, looming high beyond the Yalu. Manchuria is the richest area in East Asia, with iron ores, coal, water, power, food, and timber, and whoever owns Manchuria, to be secure, must also own Chosun." Ito Marquis arrived at Seoul as the official representative of the Japanese Government. Through threats and trickery, as well as a pistol pointed to the head of the prime minister, he was able to force the king and Cabinet to agree to Korea becoming a province of Japan, suggesting to the military commander in Korea, General Hasegawa Yoshimichi, that he "march his men about for exercise and that the horse artillery indulge in target practice" to convert the government of Korea into servile supplicants. In 1924, the Reverend Edward W. Twing of Boston, Oriental Secretary of the International Reform Bureau, visited Korea. His reports are some of the only ones we have of the time, given that Japan treated Korea as its private domain. Fehrenbach regaled us with the actions of Twing: "One day Mr. Twing saw a group of Korean girls of school age shout "Manzai" -- which means merely 'Hoorah' -- at passing Japanese soldiers. The Japanese immediately opened fire on them. Another group of school girls walking down the road, not even shouting, were set upon by the angry troops. The Japanese beat them with rifle butts, knocked them down, tore away their clothing. Then, as Mr. Twing related back in Boston, 'the soldiers treated them in a most shameful manner.' The Koreans had to be taught that they were inseparably citizens of the empire, whatever the class rating of their citizenship might be. They were taught so well that, during three months of 1919, more than fifty thousand of them were killed or at least hospitalized by the lesson. Above all, Mr. Twing reported back,the Japanese were out to teach Korean Christian converts that contact with the philosophies of the West was dangerous. And it was. Christian men and women were dragged into Shinto temples, tied to crosses, and beaten savagely. Young girls of Christian families were stripped, fastened to telegraph poles by their hair, flogged, and left exposed to public view." Twing had much in common with Armin T. Wegner, a second-lieutenant in the German army stationed in the Ottoman Empire in April 1915, who took photographs of the horror inflicted by Ottoman Muslims upon Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and other Christians. If not for Wegner's graphic photos, we might be influenced by Turkey's President-for-life Recep Tayyip Erdogan who condemned the Pope for classifying the slaughter of millions of Christians as genocide, preferring to term it merely a civil war, even though civil wars do not usually have the vast majority of deaths on only one side. Erdogan also declared: "Democracy is like a train. We shall get out when we arrive at the station we want." Another parallel with the Armenian Genocide is the treatment of Christian girls. Twing noted that Korean girls were stripped, tied to crosses, and left to remain on public view. The same thing happened to Armenian girls, with a movie, the "Auction of Souls," depicting the events. Fehrenbach summarized the section by stating that "survivors of Nanking, Malaya, and the Bataan Death March ... would have understood what Mr. Twing was talking about." Readers should remember that Fehrenbach's book was published in 1963, only a few years after Kishi Nobusuke, prime minister from 1957-1960 and Japan's most corrupt leader in modern times, was in power, and one year before Sato Eisaku, prime minister from 1964-1972, was in power, with Kishi being the grandfather of the current Japanese prime minister, Abe Shinzo, and Sato being Kishi's brother. Kishi was a Class A war criminal and due to hang until 1948 when the U.S. government decided it needed him to fight communism. Twing's reports should be taken into consideration the next time a Japanese politician claims that the 200,000 comfort women, women the Japanese military used as sex slaves, were "smiling volunteers." Japan also tried to destroy Korean culture, with Fehrenbach writing of "the great reforms the Japanese had [supposedly] instituted in Korea, and of which they eternally boasted": "The Japanese had reformed the ancient tongue of Chosun, Mr. Twing said, by abolishing it. Korean archives and treasures of literature were purified by burning, since there was no place in the bright new twentieth century for a separate Korean culture. Not only was Japanese the official language of Korean courts; it was the only one allowed in the schools." The policy was enforced ruthlessly and violently, with "mandatory flogging for minor offenses" and "the reintroduction of an ancient tool, the rack." If this was how the occupying Japanese treated Koreans before WWII, just imagine how savage they were during the war to POWs and all others who fell under Japanese control. The commander of Lieutenant Kikuchi Masaichi, commanding an airfield defense unit in Singapore early in 1945, was told regarding his 300 POWs: "When you're finished, you can do what you like with them. If I was you, I'd shove them into a tunnel with a few demolition charges." Japanese school textbooks only include two footnotes regarding the comfort women and the 1937-38 Nanjing Massacre where anywhere from 150,000 to 300,000 people were slaughtered. The Manila Massacre, with 100,000 deaths, does not even rate a mention. The despicable crimes of Unit 731, where hundreds of thousands of people were used as human guinea pigs in ghastly experiments ranging from being dissected alive without anesthesia to being exposed to all manner of chemical and biological agents were made much worse by the U.S. government granting their freedom in exchange for their knowledge and research materials. Not surprisingly, a 2006 survey of Japanese people found that 34% believed that the Tokyo Trials were an unjust and unilateral judgment of the defeated nations by the victor nations. One reason the Japanese can hold their ignorant point of view is that we foolishly allowed them to destroy most of the evidence of their crimes while we established the occupation, as compared to the Nazi death camps which were overrun while still in operation. On the other side, the Chinese Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution, Hall of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, and North Korean Sinchon Museum of US War Atrocities neglect to mention the fact that North Korea attacked first. China is militarizing the South China Sea, even though the entire world holds that it is shared between the countries in the region. China is extending its security borders far beyond its actual ones, similar to how it views North Korea as a buffer zone against the West. Some books never lose their appeal.
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To understand the magnitude of the industrial capacity during WWII in the US, we need to look at the manufacturers of a few weapons systems.
The M1 Garand was manufactured by Springfield Armory, Winchester Repeating Arms, Harrington & Richardson, and International Harvester. The M1 Carbine was manufactured by Inland Division of General Motors, Winchester Repeating Arms, Saginaw Steering Gear Division of General Motors, Irwin-Pedersen (operated by Saginaw Steering Gear), Underwood Elliot Fisher, National Postal Meter, Quality Hardware Manufacturing Corporation, International Business Machines (IBM), Standard Products, Commercial Controls Corporation, and Rock-Ola Manufacturing Corporation. Rock-Ola Manufacturing Corporation was a jukebox manufacturer, and of the rest of the M1 Carbine manufacturers, only Winchester was a firearms manufacturer. Tanks and parts thereof were manufactured by General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Detroit Diesel and pretty much every other automotive company. Chevrolet alone manufactured 60,000 Pratt & Whitney bomber and cargo plane engines; 500,000 trucks; 8 million artillery shells; 3,000 90 mm cannon barrels; 1 million tons of aluminum forgings; 1 million tons of grey iron castings; 2,850 tons of magnesium forgings; and 3,800 T-17 Staghound armored scout cars. But that's all in the past. There's no reason why the manufacture of computer and electronic components couldn't be moved back to the US, other than the whining of e-children miffed that their precious toys have increased in price and the deep disappointment of corporate parasites who have come to expect outrageous returns on their investments. "The idea of moving shoe manufacturing to advanced countries is a little bit of a farce," opined Ed Van Wezel, the CEO of Hi-tech International Holdings BV, an Amsterdam-based shoemaker that sells about 30% of its shoes in the U.S. On the contrary, if CEOs are not allowed to earn a king's ransom, with that ransom covering the jobs lost by employees whose jobs are outsourced, we can easily do it. New Balance, a company owned by former marathoner Jim Davis and his wife Anne, manufactures higher-end and customized shoes. New Balance is the only company which offers its shoes in multiple widths so customers can obtain an optimum fit, as compared to Walmart's one-Chinese-made-width-fits-all. New Balance makes about one quarter of the shoes it sells in the U.S. and estimates that its shoes cost 25% to 35% more than if they were made in Asia. The main difference between New Balance and the other shoe companies is that New Balance does not have to answer to Wall Street and its neurotic demands for higher profits. The US is the prize in terms of markets, along with the EU. All countries want to sell goods here. We have the leverage, but we refuse to use it because American capitalists have a direct line to Congress and the White House. Libertarians have always been wrong on free trade treaties and their effect on jobs. Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute argued during the Clinton administration: "The silliest argument against PNTR is that Chinese imports would overwhelm US industry. In fact, American workers are far more productive than their Chinese counterparts ... Moreover, Beijing's manufacturing exports to the United States remain small, about half the level of those from Mexico." Daniel J. Ikenson of the Cato Institute argued in 2006: "In fact, since China joined the WTO in 2001, US exports to China have more than doubled." He went on to say: "And the notion that importing from and offshoring to China is hollowing out American manufacturing is not supported by the facts." Ikenson later doubled-down on his vitreol, saying that "it is beyond doubt that certain Chinese policies have been provocative, discriminatory, protectionist, and, in some cases, violative of the agreed rules of international trade" and that "U.S. policies, politics, and attitudes have contributed to rising tensions, as have rabble-rousing politicians and a confrontation-thirsty media." Pat Buchanan pointed out in February 2007: "To the devout libertarian, free trade is not a policy option to be debated, but a dogma to be defended. Nowhere is this truer than at that lamasery of libertarianism, the Cato Institute." He went on to say: "For contrary to free-trade mythology, every nation that has risen to pre-eminence and power -- Britain before 1860, the United States from 1860-1914, Germany from 1870-1914, postwar Japan, China today -- has pursued a mercantilist or protectionist trade policy ... It is no accident all four presidents who made it to Mount Rushmore were protectionists." A look at Census Bureau trade data shows that the trade balance with China started off even in 1985, but became a rather ominous deficit over time, with a 2015 ratio of 483,244.7 / 116,071.8, both in millions of dollars, translating to 4.16 and not in our favor. Comparable figures for Mexico and Canada are 296,407.9 / 235,745.1 = 1.26 and 296,155.6 / 280,609.0 = 1.06, respectively. But then again, libertarians have never been proficient with history, math, or honesty. Walmart is the best example of a corporatist monopoly which would have been broken up during more enlightened times, with its ruthless demands for its suppliers to move production out of the US so Walmart can sell their products at a price no other retailer can touch. Libertarian jackals always warn that Walmart t-shirts would become more expensive if outsourcing were curtailed, like that is some sacrosanct measure of economic strength, ignoring the fact that the economy only grew at 2% per year during Obama, 2.7% during Bush the Younger, and 3.5% during Clinton, as compared to the 4% before that. Not coincidentally, Chinese imports have increased at a staggering rate since the 1990s. The Flint-Detroit corridor is the most dangerous one in the country largely because auto industry jobs have left. One would think that liberals would appreciate that outsourcing and H-1B visas hurt African Americans even more than they do other Americans. But since screwing the American worker has become one of the only bipartisan activities in Washington, politicians have joined forces to reduce life expectancy for white Americans. Not coincidentally, the same thing happened to Russians immediately after the implosion of the Soviet Union. Among the 10 countries for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks manufacturing employment, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden had higher manufacturing wages and lost smaller shares of their manufacturing employment than the US between 2000 and 2010. Those countries have socialized medicine, six or more weeks of vacation, and extended maternity benefits. Germany and other European countries have union representatives sitting on corporate boards. The US, on the other hand, lost 6 million manufacturing jobs between early 2001 and late 2009. It's not coincidental that China was allowed to enter the World Trade Organization in late 2001 after the Clinton administration led the cheerleading section for the event. Bill Clinton promised at the time: "We don't have to transfer technology or do joint manufacturing in China any more," but China did require most companies to transfer technology, as Siemens, Alstom, Bombardier, Kawasaki, ThyssenKruppp, and Weinig AG discovered to their financial detriment. In mid-2015, the ratio between average American CEO pay and worker pay was over 300-to-1, with some sources claiming a ratio of 354-to-1 or even 373-to-1. In 1965, that ratio was 20-to-1. In Germany, that ratio is 167, but workers there earn almost $6,000 more than the average American worker. Wall Street actively lobbies Washington to allow Chinese companies to buy American ones even if it's obvious that the Chinese company only wants the patents and other intellectual property, because Wall Streeters will make a killing on the deal. Even companies involved in chip manufacture, one of our remaining bastions, are being eagerly pursued by Chinese companies with Wall Street assistance. This confirms the old Bolshevik saying about capitalists selling the rope with which they will be later be hung, except that ordinary Americans will be dragged to the gallows along with them. Today's four largest job creation sectors, retail, restaurants, temporary staffing firms, and home health care, wouldn't be able to transform themselves into industries capable of weapons manufacturing. In other words, we could not act as the arsenal of democracy or win WWII today. But China could, though its arsenal would be of an entirely different nature. We should remember that China has been learning how to take down the Internet, stolen much of the design for the F-35, the fighter we have bet the farm on, and just about perfected its anti-satellite weapons, even though its use of them could fill orbital space with junk, preventing further launches of satellites or manned spacecraft. It would require more than eight years at a wartime tempo to replace the stocks of major weapons systems. The clock is ticking. I was in Volgograd in early September 2001. There was no problem finding a spot on one of the boats that cruised down the Volga River for an hour or so, with beer, vodka, and Russian pop music as the main attractions. I was told that during the time of the Soviet Union, there were three places all good communists were expected to visit: Volgograd, previously named Stalingrad, the scene of one of the most savage battles in history; Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Lenin; and the tomb of Lenin on Red Square. Volgograd has a number of war memorials, including The Motherland Calls, a statue which was the tallest in the world when it was constructed in 1967, and a large, cylindrical building with a giant hand and an eternal flame. When I visited, I could count the other visitors on two hands, though it would have been very crowded before 1991. I traveled to Moscow next. I visited the apartment of a woman who lived in the outer metro area. I was shocked to see that every single mailbox in the lobby had been jimmied open with a crowbar. The woman explained that this was normal, with people retrieving their mail at the post office. In her apartment, she kept a large bowl of Soviet coins which became worthless after the incompetent government of the 1990s unceremoniously switched to the new Russian currency, leaving the life savings of many people behind. When I visited Red Square, a experienced tour guide walked over and introduced herself. She asked if I wanted to visit Lenin's mausoleum, but I countered by pointing out that I had a camera, with signs warning that cameras were not allowed into the building. She simply inserted my camera into her bag and told me to walk with her, with the guards not paying us any attention. The mausoleum was only open three days each week with no line to speak of, even though Soviet-era photos of the area from my Russian textbook showed that the line stretched for blocks. I was in Moscow on 9/11, though I was unaware of the full impact until the day after. I stopped by a display of televisions in a department store and watched for a while, though I admit I did not appreciate the significance of the disaster because I was not familiar with the NYC skyline. When some twenty-something Russians heard my American accent, they turned and looked at me in the same sympathetic way people would after recognizing a guy whose daughter had been kidnapped, raped, and murdered. I was staying in a Russian hotel, one where only Russian was spoken. The television only offered the usual Russian fare, mainly music videos and idiomatic sit-coms. The next morning, I found a printed sheet in English on my door stating that the management was in solidarity with me due to the catastrophe that had occurred to my country. I might have been the only American in the hotel, which they would have known from my passport being registered as required by law. I traveled to an Internet cafe to read the news in English. As soon as the young woman renting PCs by-the-hour heard my American accent, she switched to English and blurted out that she was so sorry for what had happened to my country. I bought an even number of roses at a flower shop -- in Russia, one only gives an even number of flowers at funerals -- and traveled to the US embassy, but there were already too many flowers to count just outside the fence (the person in the photo is not me, but a Russian man saddened by the mass murder). Not many months later, George W. Bush and his neo-con henchmen invaded Iraq under false pretenses, erasing much of that goodwill. Russia's tactics left much to be desired with respect to the attack at the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow, with the latter's October 2002 death toll being high because authorities neglected to notify first responders and hospitals that the toxic gas used by the military rendered people unconscious and nauseous, with them drowning in their own vomit after being left on their backs. We had another chance to square things with Russia in early September 2004, when Islamists held hostage over 1,100 teachers, children, and their relatives at School No. 1 in Beslan in southern Russia. At the end of the siege, over 330 hostages lay dead, including 186 children, making Beslan Russia's version of 9/11, though Russia's incompetent, brutal military shared much of the blame. I visited the Baltic States a few years after my trip to Moscow. English was spoken by just about every young person and many older ones. An Estonian tour guide told me that the first time she had ever seen bananas was during the 1980 Moscow Olympics, though they disappeared soon afterward. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania became NATO partner countries in 1991, five days before the official dissolution of the USSR on Christmas Day 1991, because they had lived with the aftermath of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact since 1939, as well as British apathy regarding them. Soviet troops did not completely leave Eastern Europe until 1994, to which photos at the Budapest House of Terror Museum and other museums remembering the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe attest. NATO has no intentions of invading Russia, but the Baltic States and Poland have good, historical reasons for being wary of Russian intentions. Russia has no more historical ownership of the Baltic States than the previous rulers: Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Livonia, and Poland, depending upon the era. Russia has a serious fear of invasion. The Mongols, Napoleon's army, and the Nazis all raped and pillaged their way through the country. Stalin's incompetence and paranoia exacerbated the Nazi invasion, to be sure, though many Russians idolize him today because he is a symbol of a time when their country was feared throughout the world. Americans want the world to remember the 3000 victims of 9/11, but the Soviet Union lost over 20 million people during WWII, albeit after Stalin and Hitler divided Eastern Europe between them in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Many in the US laugh at Russian President Vladimir Putin's shirtless adventures, but the reality is that many Russians admire a strong leader, with that being not much different from the millions of Americans who idolize either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, not to mention the many Americans who watch the breathless adventures of shirtless Kardashians and Jenners. Would Putin have invaded Georgia and Ukraine, killed 298 souls on MH17 and then destroyed the evidence, ordered the murder of Russians living in Britain via radioactive polonium and nerve agent Novichok, and ordered his military aircraft to disable their transponders and play chicken with civilian airliners if Bush the Younger had offered to work together to fight Islamists? Putin probably would have done it anyway, but we might have slowed him down. I now have three eBooks published at Barnes and Noble: two novelettes and one short story.
Operation Forget-Me-Not is the story of a retired, non-woke US Marine colonel who loses his family in an Islamist suicide bombing, juxtaposed against the tale of a Yazidi woman who overcomes her horrific experience as an Islamic State sex slave to become a revenge-seeking Ezidxan Women's Unit fighter. Both are joined by seven former Marines who are more than they appear to be. A number of Kurdish and Yazidi fighters assist in the endeavor, along with one former US Special Forces captain. Their mission is to rescue a group of Yazidi girls before they are sold via auction and to rescue a Yazidi girl being sold via classified ad in Turkey. Pandora, Helene, and Phoebe Joyride in Space is a short story that regales readers with the adventures of three schoolgirls, Pandora (the jokester), Helene (for whom dalliances are a common theme), and Phoebe (the highly intelligent one), who borrow a NASA space cruiser from Pandora's mother for the day. Like any teenager who borrows a vehicle without permission, they get into trouble, though unlike the average teenager, these three do it far from Earth. The Demise and Resurrection of North Korea is a novelette on the subject of the aftermath of a coup in North Korea. The details of the actual coup are sparse and fanciful -- in truth, any removal of the North Korean leader might result in a bloody civil war and could lead to a five-way battle between China, Russia, the US, and both Koreas, if not WWIII -- with the consequences for the North Korean leader being reminiscent of the Book of Revelation. The details are borrowed from actual events in the country. I took my parents out for an early dinner on Veterans Day for the last six years. Every year, someone would buy our dinner. Sometimes they wanted to be anonymous and sometimes they came over and introduced themselves. My father was of an age where virtually every male had served in the armed forces, so it was a safe assumption for someone to make that he was a veteran.
This year I could not continue the tradition, so I visited their grave site at Fort Logan National Cemetery. My parents were buried immediately after their service, but the gravestone has not yet been added. The grocery store had flower arrangements of truly red, white, and blue flowers, but I liked a different arrangement better, so I bought two of them. The vast majority of grave sites did not have flowers or flags on them. I was there at 11:00 am, the official time of remembrance for Armistice Day and stayed for a while. As I stood there, a small number of people arrived by car to honor their loved one. Happy Veterans Day, Mom and Dad! I saw one of your old end tables in the ARC store -- your other children donated it, not me -- which was very sad. Today was cold and snowy, but it did make for a certain ambiance. I would have absolutely loved to make it seven dinners in a row. My mother, Edwina, fell and hit her head a few times in the past five or so years, with that contributing to her decline. She developed dementia, with even long-term memories not being reliable.
When I took my parents to an early dinner, she would often tell the server that the meal was the best she ever had, because she could not remember that she had eaten that dish many times before. She was in the room when my father passed away, but she did not appear to understand what was going on. I took her into another area to avoid her being in the room when the funeral home personnel took him. When we returned, her first words were, "Where's Dad?" I drove her to his funeral at Fort Logan, but she said almost nothing during the trip. When we entered Fort Logan with its long rows of gleaming white tombstones, she blurted out, "Why are we here?" All I could say was, "Dad's funeral." She had days when she would say she was confused. I could tell it really bothered her, but there was nothing I could do. Eventually she stopped mentioning her confusion. One experienced caregiver told me that dementia patients all go through the same transition. When they realize they are losing their mind, it bothers them immensely because they can still remember what it was like to have a working brain. It's probably more than a little frightening. When they become a little worse and can no longer remember being normal, they are more at peace. A caregiver said she had seen many people in that transition, crying and upset, but then they became, not happy, but no longer tortured. She would tell anyone who asked that she was named after her father, Edwin, who actually wanted a boy, but settled for adding an 'a' to the end of Edwin. Except that her father's first name was something else entirely. She moved to the memory care floor where dementia sufferers are common, though there are other poor souls as well. One table in the dining room was reserved for people who could not feed themselves. The caregivers on the floor were the best I have ever seen in terms of compassion. One was a hospital nurse who worked there on her day off. Most of the caregivers genuinely cared about the residents, with a few of them giving the nicer residents, like my mother, a kiss on the head. But care like that is not cheap. The cost was thousands per month. Some people eventually ran out of money and were forced to move to a grim, spartan Medicare / Medicaid facility where staff often treated residents like cattle. And if social Darwinists / Ayn Rand groupies have their way, even those facilities will be closed, forcing helpless people onto the street where they will die in short order. Another thing I was told is that dementia sufferers lose the sense of smell. There is research going on to see if dementia can be predicted based on a person losing certain smells. They need to either be in a memory care center or a place where chemicals are nowhere to be found, as they will drink toxic substances and not realize it. It's common practice to force dementia sufferers into memory care centers because they are difficult to deal with. But that makes their suffering so much worse, because they will always be in a strange place, as compared to allowing them to continue to live at home where they would be surrounded by familiar things. It would be necessary to remove all toxic substances and sharp knives. It would also be necessary to have someone, either relatives, paid caregivers, or volunteers, in the house during the day to keep them company and prepare their meals. Being in perpetually unfamiliar surroundings substantially increases their stress level. She continued to fall about every other week, sometimes requiring stitches. I can only guess, but she was probably looking for Dad or me. She asked the caregivers a few times to change the sign on her door to add his name. She was often told that he had passed, but it didn't stick. I would often find her sitting or sleeping in a chair in the hall, clearly waiting for me, not understanding that she was actually making it more difficult for me because I had to find her instead of simply going to her room. I never saw her doing it, but she must have visited the rooms of other people. Her favorite color was blue, matching her eyes, so we sometimes found blue sweaters that were too small for her. Stealing from other rooms or common areas isn't unusual in memory care centers. The staff actually places attractive, inexpensive items in the common areas knowing that they will be borrowed and eventually returned. I visited almost every day for thirty minutes or so just after lunch, bringing her a cookie and a cup of coffee. Every time she would say that the cookie was really good and I don't believe she was saying that just to be nice. I found it difficult to converse with her. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I should have concentrated on events from her past, as volunteer caregivers did to great success. I really thought she would live for a few more years, but then again, I was surprised when Dad died after less than two months in hospice care. I may be reading too much into it, but in the month before he died, my father would ask when I was returning, something he never did when we were younger. I didn't recognize it until it was too late, but he didn't want to be alone in his final days, especially with his nightmares -- and in an assisted living facility, residents are alone for most of the day. In her last week, my mother complained when I said I could only stay for thirty minutes or so. I kick myself for not recognizing the importance of her remark. Most residents had visitors only on major holidays. This facility had a buffet for holidays, but even then some residents had no visitors. I'm confident my parents received more visits than anyone else in the building, maybe ever. One day she was slower than I had ever seen her while using her walker, but somehow the alarm bell did not sound for me. I wondered if she had suffered a minor stroke. She got a little better over the next few days, so I hoped it was only a minor problem. If only. On her second-to-last day, I visited as usual. We talked and watched TV. She fell asleep, something she often did. I did not have the heart to wake her, so I left after looking at her for thirty seconds to make sure she was really asleep. The caregivers told me that on the morning of her last day, she complained of chest pains and pain in her jaw, both classic symptoms of a heart attack. They promptly sent her to the ER, but she only lasted a few hours. At least she did not have to spend a long time in the hospital. Given that heart disease does not run in the family, not to mention that she taught water aerobics for many years after retiring, it's likely that her heart attack was caused by the loss of her husband and the stress of living in a very strange place. She died a little over a month after her 91st birthday, while my father died a little less than a month before his 98th birthday. There's some kind of grim symmetry there. They had been married almost 72 years. With military cemeteries, families aren't given much choice as to times and dates. The service was scheduled for Halloween, which in Denver is notorious for snow. It snowed the night before, the day of her viewing, but on her service date, the sky was blue, though it was a bit cold. It wasn't nearly the hot summer day of my father's service, but it was fine. We won't forget either day. Happy Halloween, Mom! I wore a blue sweater for your service, a shade I know you would have liked. Now you're back with Dad, this time to stay. I'll visit again on Veterans Day. Around five years ago, my father, Al, who never smoked or drank alcohol, discovered blood in his urine. He went to the doctor, driven by my sister, as he stopped driving years ago, only to be told he had bladder cancer. On the way to the hospital, he declared that he did not want to go there, as it was clear this would be major surgery and might be the end of his life. He told my sister, "I want to go to Red Lobster," which she ignored.
Around half of his bladder was removed, meaning that he had to urinate quite often. However, he was able to return to the only activity left for him, going out to eat, with his favorite restaurants being Red Lobster and Outback. He only ever wanted one meal at each restaurant: Sailor's Platter at the former and Victoria's Filet at the latter. Red Lobster discontinued the Sailor's Platter for a time which really annoyed us, though it was eventually brought back due to popular demand. We were able to take him to both restaurants many times since then. Every Veteran's Day, a stranger would pay for our meal, though sometimes they were too shy to approach us directly, asking the manager to notify us. He started using a walker, though he postponed it as long as he could. His ability to walk became progressively worse each month. A few times while walking out of the restaurant, he started moving in slow motion, sometimes coming to a complete halt. He said that his legs just didn't work. I needed to carry much of his weight back to the vehicle. When we were growing up in the Chicago area, he kept the car radio tuned to an AM news station. He always watched the evening news on television, though that was before 24-hour cable news and the Internet. I don't remember exactly when, but he stopped watching the news in this time period. When I was there at the appropriate time, I'd offer to turn on the television, but he declined, saying that he'd rather rest in his recliner. Of course, the fact that his hearing and vision were rather poor no doubt had something to do with it. Hindsight is always 20/20, but we should have demanded that he use a wheelchair in the last year, though when we broached the subject, he told us he wanted to continue using the walker. One day when I was taking him to Perkins, just to try someplace different, I turned my head to watch where I was going. As I turned my head back to him, he fell onto the pavement. I was barely able to get him back in my truck and I'm really strong. I looked back at the handicapped ramp and realized that the transition between the parking lot and the ramp was not as smooth as it should have been. He had trouble walking at home, so off he went to the hospital again, where we discovered that he had a cracked pelvis. He spent a few days in the hospital and was transferred to a rehab facility because hospital stays cost Kaiser Permanente too much money. He hated that facility, as it was rather Spartan, with the cuisine being not much better than fast-food. And then he caught the flu, most likely from an employee who only worked part-time and therefore did not have sick days. The flu really hammered him, with his cough not going away for many weeks. He never recovered his strength after that. He eventually returned home, but he could not walk to the bathroom on his own any more. We hired a private company to supply care-givers to be at the house to assist him with going to the bathroom, with my business-owning brother paying for the service. One day my father started acting like a zombie, sitting in his chair but being unresponsive. We put food in front of him, but he just kept moving his hand around the tray. We weren't sure what to do, but after we discovered he had a fever, we called an ambulance to take him to the hospital. After another day of being mentally catatonic, he awoke, telling us that he wondered how he got to the hospital. He had no memory of his behavior at home or his ambulance ride. The doctors never did figure out what had been wrong with him, but then again, he had signed a DNR. The doctors recommended that he be put into hospice care. We found an assisted-living facility with more comfort than the rehab facility, once again on my brother's dime. My father arrived there just before Easter Sunday, which seemed appropriate given that he was Catholic. I brought him downstairs in a wheelchair for Easter brunch which was actually quite nice. I put eggs, bacon, and other breakfast items on his plate, but I saw that he could no longer use a fork, so I fed him myself. That was the first and last time he went to the dining room to eat, with all subsequent meals being brought to his room. I would often arrive either just before or just after lunch with a cup of coffee, though I had to insert a straw to allow him to drink it. However, there were more and more days when he was sleeping when I arrived and I could not bring myself to wake him up to say hello. Eventually he told me that coffee just kept him awake, which I took as a hint to stop bringing it. My sister sometimes brought a takeout Sailor's Platter at dinnertime. She told me that initially he ate every bite, but eventually he became disinterested in eating. One of the care-givers at the assisted-living facility, Melissa, stood out. She wore a cross around her neck, with her actions proving that it wasn't merely for show. She fed my father breakfast and lunch whenever she was working. She told me that some of the other care-givers thought there was little point in feeding a hospice patient. Eventually the only meals he could eat were soft ones, for example, mashed potatoes and gravy. He became very thin. Sometimes he would be in the aforementioned zombie state, though with his eyes closed, slowly waving his right hand around as if he was conducting an orchestra. My sister and I thought we'd improve upon the bed that was provided by hospice care. We moved his bed from home, one with controls to raise the head and feet. The hospice workers, who arrived every 2-3 days to give him a sponge bath or check on his health, then told us that it was necessary to use the provided hospice bed, as it allowed for the bed to move up and down to diminish the strain on worker's backs. So we brought his bed back home. One day I arrived before lunch to find him conversing with a volunteer, with him in a wheelchair, not a bed. He was as lucid as he had been for months. Being optimistic, something for which I'm not known, I thought he'd be around for a few more months. A few days later, I found him delirious, something which was not rare. He was telling me things I could not understand. He finished his story by telling me that he thought his only option was to kill himself. Perhaps he had just awoken from a nightmare; perhaps he was experiencing a daymare. I told him that it was okay, which seemed to calm him down a bit. My response was inadequate, but it was all I could think of. The last time I saw him lucid, I heard the care-giver ask him what he wanted, with his response being, "I want to get out of here." My visit was all too brief. He died eight days ago, early in the morning. I got to the facility just before they took him away. He looked just like he did the day before, only without the breathing. Melissa was the one who found him, even though she had been transferred to another wing, with my dad no longer her responsibility. Some would say he died peacefully in his sleep, however, given his daymare, I can only hope that was the case. He served in both WWII and the Korean War. His WWII duty was fairly low-stress, as he was assigned to guard the airbase on Ascension Island which was used as a halfway point for military aircraft traveling across the Atlantic Ocean as well as for anti-submarine operations, with the next stop going west being Natal in Brazil. The Nazis did not attack the island on my father's watch. The Korean War was another thing entirely, as he was a participant in the bloody battle at Heartbreak Ridge. He stayed in the Army and retired as a master sergeant. His military service entitled him to a military funeral. The service was held on May 25 at Fort Logan National Cemetery, about as close to being buried on Memorial Day as one could get. The US Army officer who gave the sermon had an accent I could not place at first, but then I realized he was Korean. He thanked my father for his service in the Korean War, as it contributed to his native country remaining free. Happy Memorial Day, Dad! I displayed your old US flag on the outside of your garage this weekend. I'll display it again on Flag Day on what would have been your 98th birthday. A long time ago, you joked that those displaying the flag on Flag Day were doing so in honor of your birthday. I'm sorry we couldn't make it to one of your favorite restaurants on your final outing. Look closely at the second photo in the Denver Post article regarding co-working and see how many things you can find that are wrong:
- Everyone is using their own laptop, i.e. the office is a BYOD (bring your own device) shop. Employees think it's wonderful, as they have their personal apps, but IT departments hate it because employees decide if they install questionable apps or have antivirus software, with all of these devices being behind the corporate firewall. It's not a coincidence that cyber-breaches such as the one at Equifax are multiplying like rabbits. When someone clicks on a phishing email, its malware will spread. - There is no separation of any kind between employees, so all personal odors will waft throughout the work space. If your co-workers eat beans and onions for lunch, wear strong scents, or eschew regular showers, there's no place to escape. And some people just stink. - Not one monitor is at eye level, forcing the person to look down all day. My neck hurts just looking at them, especially the ones using laptops with a display not much bigger than a smart phone. In the old days, we'd use telephone books to serve as a platform, but these companies don't have landlines. - Some people cannot help clearing their throats or making personal noises. One solution is to wear headphones, but if someone wears ear buds or the open style of headphones, everyone in the vicinity will hear the escaping noise. - Some people have annoying habits: knuckle-cracking, leg-bouncing, finger-tapping, etc. Quoth the raven, "ever more." - Any personal or business conversation, whether on the phone or nearby, will distract. - Movement of people will attract the eye. It's human nature. - There's been quite a few articles and lawsuits regarding sexual harassment in the office. Look at the people sitting across from one another. Every time one of them looks up, perhaps to ponder a point, they will be looking directly at the other person, which might not be interpreted innocently. Texting and other smart phone activities which require finger presses by the driver of a moving vehicle -- including, but not limited to automobiles, trucks, busses, recreational vehicles, motorcycles, mopeds, trains, tricycles, bicycles, unicycles, and all terrain vehicles -- traveling on any road which was financed even partially via federal funds shall be illegal. It shall not matter if the smart phone activity was accomplished in a hands-on or hands-free manner. The penalty for this behavior shall be equivalent to the existing one for driving under the influence of alcohol.
All law enforcement officers -- federal, state, and local -- shall be allowed to stop, detain, investigate, and issue citations for any driver suspected of texting and other smart phone activities which require finger presses. Law enforcement officers shall be allowed to do so after witnessing erratic behavior, receiving notice of erratic behavior via official channels, or witnessing a driver using a hand-held device, or if they are in the process of investigating a traffic offense. All motor vehicles built after the passage of this statute -- including, but not limited to automobiles, trucks, busses, recreational vehicles, motorcycles, mopeds, trains, and all terrain vehicles -- shall be required to disable texting and other smart phone activities which require finger presses via onboard and connected phones while the vehicle is in motion. Suppliers of wireless services for smart phones, cell phones, disposable cell phones, tablets, PCs, and all other computers capable of texting and other smart phone activities which require finger presses shall be required to establish and maintain a communal telephone inquiry service for law enforcement officers, making it possible for them to inquire if a particular user was texting in a specific timeframe, with the call being toll-free. If a user is illegally using a wireless service, with the service being unable to positively identify the user, the law enforcement officer shall be allowed to detain the user and confiscate the phone until positive identification is established. This statute shall take effect on the day after its passage. If any provision of this statute is declared unconstitutional, the remainder shall remain in effect. I started fooling around with electronics as a kid. I found an old AM radio and some headphones, but I could not make it work. I eventually realized that one of the tubes was broken. I learned this by bringing the tubes to the tube tester in a large drug store, as tube testers were common in those days (at least through the 1960s). Being only ten years old, the fact that the broken tube was no longer available stumped me.
So I wrote a letter to a magazine. I believe it was Electronics Illustrated. My letter was not a work of beauty, with it being something like, "I'm only ten years old, but I do not understand how to replace an XYZ tube now that it is obsolete." The next month's issue not only did not contain an answer, it contained a smart-ass remark from the editor: "I'm only 113 years old, but I don't know either." So that's the way adults are, I thought, just as nasty and unhelpful as children. A few weeks later I received a fat envelope in the mail. In it was an apology, of sorts, that explained how the editor thought his response was uprorious, but then he received some letters from sympathetic readers upbraiding him for being so insulting to a child, especially one who was interested in their hobby. In the envelope were all of the letters the magazine received (this was long before email). Most of them explained how to solve the situation, including references to a book which listed all tubes and equivalents thereof. But one letter stands out in my mind even today. The man offered to sell me some used equipment for $100, which was a lot of money to a child in those days. Even at my tender age, I knew something was wrong with his offer, not to mention that this was many years before eBay and other Internet sites made such transactions reasonably safe. I did not reply to his letter. I did not appreciate until years later that he was a predatory asshole who thought nothing of taking advantage of children, with this occurring years before Ayn Rand's social Darwinist philosophy became widespread. Make corporate taxes inversely proportional to the percentage of American employees firms have2/19/2017 The current tax system is a grab bag of special favors and arcane regulations, often favoring specific companies and/or friends of politicians. The effective corporate tax rate hovers around 20%, yet outsourcing is rampant because CEOs covet even higher compensation. This does not benefit the U.S.
We should delete the entire current system, every last statute, and replace it with a system specifically designed to increase jobs and reduce favoritism. The theory is rather simple in concept: corporate taxes would be inversely proportional to the percentage of American employees an entity has. There would be two parts to the calculation, direct and indirect employees. The former refers to the American workers a company has on its payroll. This portion is straightforward. The latter refers to foreign parts and services a company uses to produce its products, and to partial and completed products a company imports to sell in the U.S. Every company would be master of its taxes and could lower them simply by moving more operations to the U.S. We wouldn't need to worry about whether a company was American or foreign because the jobs a company brought to the U.S. would be the only detail of importance. Some examples will help to illustrate the concept. A company making furniture using American trees in the U.S. would pay zero tax. There wouldn't be too many companies on the zero end of the scale. One of those we-ship-it businesses with more copiers than employees would still pay a decent tax due to the foreign-made products being sold and the foreign-made equipment in use. However, an owner could actively seek out American-made products and reduce his taxes. Amazon and Walmart would pay hefty taxes because they import the majority of their products, even though they have a large number of employees in the U.S. All of the people producing items for Amazon and Walmart in foreign factories would be considered indirect employees. Many companies, e.g. Target, Cigna, Comcast, and many airlines, would be a mixed bag, because while they have many employees working in the U.S., they also have customer service, IT, accounting and/or other departments in India. Target would be hammered because it imports most of its products. Apple would pay a large corporate tax because all of its products are manufactured overseas, largely in plants which abuse their employees. Companies such as Microsoft which have located a large portion of their business in India would pay a high tax rate. Companies that only maintain a small office in the U.S. to track their foreign imports would pay a tax rate approaching 100%. The free ride would be over. Employees using H-1B, L-1, and other business visas would not be counted as Americans. We'd have to force corporations to reveal the depths of their outsourcing and business visa use. Speaking of free rides, we'd need to reverse the mindless acceptance of Uber's business model -- its investors and management hope to become a driving monopoly -- which is based on the federal government allowing it to ignore laws created long before ago with respect to labor agreements, not to mention its treating workers as low-paid contestants on Survivor. The best solution would be to force Uber to follow local agreements that taxi companies do, especially with respect to vetting its workers to prevent them burglarizing homes of passengers from Delaware to Denver and raping passengers from Boston to Anaheim. It is clearly unsustainable to allow companies to essentially transfer the salaries of middle class workers to CEOs and venture capitalists, not to mention that a senior executive proposed to dig up dirt on critics of the company, making it no different than Scientology. Discussions would need to take place in order to assign the value of all groups of direct and indirect employees. Walmart would be relatively easy given that the vast majority of its employees, both in the U.S. and overseas, are not well-paid. Apple would not be so easy, given that its management would claim that most of the work was done by its American designers. And we'd need to rework our free trade treaties to avoid bringing in Chinese-made products disguised as ones made by our treaty partner. But the increase in employment would result in enormous gains for American companies, the way things used to be. I've worked out for decades at school gyms, YMCAs, facilities at work, recreation centers, and health clubs. At every facility there was a certain etiquette. People didn't sit on machines or benches when they weren't using them, except for the clueless New Year's resolution types who rarely lasted more than two weeks. Guys were open to allowing someone else to work in with them (I met a number of friends that way). Cameras were never brought into the facility. People kept their workout a safe distance from others. And they never left their belongings on locker room benches except when they were getting dressed or undressed.
I cannot definitely state when things changed because different clubs have slightly different cultures, but it was at least five years ago. Now it is common to see self-proclaimed hipsters sitting on machines or benches while checking messages or texting. They are completely oblivious to the fact that they are preventing someone else from using the equipment. In the days before smart phones, taking video or a photo of someone was difficult because the devices were relatively large and cumbersome. But now, all someone needs to do is aim their smart phone at an unsuspecting person as Playboy bimbo Dani Mathers did to an older woman. Since the new year, a sign was posted to the effect that videotaping or photography in the locker room is not allowed. I would have thought that such behavior was contrary to common sense, but Glassholes have already demonstrated their lack of same via their use of Google Glass, essentially a smart phone integrated into glasses, to capture video of anyone at any time. Some enlightened bars and restaurants have banned the use of Glass and similar products. In previous years if someone wanted circuit training, i.e. exercise involving weights while keeping one's pulse near a certain target rate, he would use a machine, then run up and down the stairs, use another machine, etc. Some people used jump ropes, but they always moved to a corner of the club so to not injure others. But now a few self-important youngsters are using a machine and then jumping rope without moving away from the machine they just used. Just the other day I saw a narcissist do this without looking behind him, with the jump rope swinging about one foot from another guy's head, with the second guy moving his head to increase the distance between himself and the rope. There are signs in the health club notifying people that gym bags are not allowed in the areas with machines. I used to think the purpose of the signs was to forestall the dishonest from placing gym equipment in their bag and absconding with it, but now I realize there is another reason. Some selfish cretins simply drop their gym bags on top of equipment, preventing anyone else from using it. Usually this takes the form of dropping bags on top of benches or machines where the user needs to lie down on top of a padded surface. It used to be exceedingly rare to see someone monopolizing multiple machines. Now that behavior is seen every day, with them dropping a towel on one machine, a water bottle on another, and another item on a third machine, marking their territory like a dog on a walk. And it's not just guys, as women do it too. I try to avoid the machines being monopolized as long as I can, but I can only wait so long. If everyone monopolized three machines, the maximum number of people a health club could accommodate would be 1/3 the number of machines, excluding the cardio machines. This monopolization also extends to the locker room where egocentrics occupy the entire bench with their gym bag the size of a compact car and other personal belongings, leaving them there while they workout or take a shower. When another person needs to use that bench, he has only two options: wait until the owner returns or shove the offending items to the side of the bench. There is a great deal of obfuscation and duplicity with respect to H-1B visas. NYT columnist Thomas Friedman, the globalization cheerleader of The World is Flat fame, proposed to "[remove] all limits on H-1B visas for foreign high-skilled knowledge workers." Reuters, a user of H-1B visas, reported on 'specialty' occupations that generally require higher education, often using phrases such as "high-skilled workers." NYT columnist David Brooks, who only PBS considers to be a conservative -- okay, he's really a neo-con -- pleaded with us to support the "free trade and skilled immigration that fuel growth." Senator Marco Rubio, a charter member of the Gang of Eight which constantly pushes for increased immigration, declared: "I, for one, have no fear that this country is going to be overrun by PhDs."
If one does not understand the H-1B program, one might accept that these so-called high-skilled workers are necessary for the growth of our economy. The problem is that there are actually two very different parts of the H-1B visa program, with the two being intentionally conflated by parties with conflicts of interest. And your author, who possesses a B.S. degree, would not classify someone with one as "high-skilled." The first H-1B category consists of 20,000 visas reserved for applicants with an M.S. degree or higher. These people often end up starting companies and creating jobs. However, policing must be done to weed-out applicants from below average schools. The second consist of 65,000 visas reserved for those with a B.S. degree or higher, but practically speaking, they are always used for people with only a B.S. degree, often for applicants of ordinary talent from India. This category of visa is regularly abused, e.g. at Disney, Southern California Edison, Northeast Utilities, and Microsoft, often after forcing American workers to train their foreign replacements. There are currently around 400,000 workers in the U.S. on H-1B visas., though that number is only approximate because even the GAO admits that "the total number of H-1B workers in the U.S. at any one time -- and information about the length of their stay -- is unknown." One of the myths regarding H-1B visas is that companies are required to search for American workers before hiring foreign ones. Senator Charles Grassley, an expert on the subject, noted that "under the law, most employers are not required to prove to the Department of Labor that they tried to find an American to fill the job first. And, if there is an equally or even better qualified U.S. worker available, the company does not have to offer him or her the job. Over the years the program has become a government-assisted way for employers to bring in cheaper foreign labor, and now it appears these foreign workers take over -- rather than complement -- the U.S. workforce." Another myth is that there is a shortage of STEM workers, forcing employers to look outside U.S. borders. "If there was really a STEM labor market crisis, you'd be seeing very different behaviors from companies. You wouldn't see companies cutting their retirement contributions, or hiring new workers and giving them worse benefits packages. Instead you would see signing bonuses, you'd see wage increases. You would see these companies really training their incumbent workers," noted Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "None of those things are observable. In fact, they’re operating in the opposite way." "There is no doubt that the [H-1B] program is a benefit to their employers, enabling them to get workers at a lower wage, and to that extent, it is a subsidy," said Nobel economist Milton Friedman. Those who doubt that H-1B visas are a huge business should search for "H-1B visa" using their favorite Internet search engine -- and note the many firms making money on them. And while millions of Americans are unable to find full-time work -- U6, which takes into account people who have only been able to find part-time work, currently stands at 9.2% -- immigration has held steady at around one million per year since 2001, with the only blip in the data occurring due to 9/11 -- and no blip at all following the 2008 crash. There are other visa categories which are used to import foreign workers, including L-1A and L-1B which were designed to give multinational companies the freedom to transfer managers and specialists within the company to their U.S. offices, but they are regularly abused as an H-1B loophole. Senators Grassley and Dick Durbin found that some companies have hundreds or even thousands of them. And there is no cap on them. B-1 visas are intended to be used for temporary events, e.g. meetings, but they are regularly abused. Infosys, one of the top-ten users of H-1B visas, was fined a record $34 million for using B-1 visas to bring in long-term employees. There are five categories of entrepreneur visa -- O-1A Extraordinary Ability and Achievement, EB-1 Extraordinary Ability, EB-2 Classification and National Interest Waiver, EB-2 Advanced Degree Professional, and EB-2 Exceptional Ability -- which ostensibly require the employer to "certify ... that there are not sufficient U.S. workers able, willing, qualified and available to accept the job opportunity in the area of intended employment and that employment of the foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers." These are also regularly abused, though not nearly as much as H-1B, L-1, and B-1 visas. There's even a visa for nationals of a treaty country, E-1 Treaty Traders, which might be expanded if a stake is not driven into the heart of the TPP. Donald Trump should order the State Department to stop approving the second category of H-1B visas, and for all other visa categories, he should seek the advice of Senator Grassley, Senator Durbin, Ron Hira, and other concerned Americans with respect to eliminating corporate welfare. And companies which abuse visas must be barred from dealing in them for a number of years, as well as being fined an amount that inflicts corporate pain. AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) currently occupies second place in the PC and server processor business after Intel. The field was narrowed to three -- VIA Technologies is #3, though it is only responsible for around 1% of the market -- because of the enormous investment required to manufacture processors. Ten years ago, a company could build a silicon fabrication plant for $2-3 billion, but now the cost is closer to $10-12 billion. And as the lithography decreases in size, the required investment will only become larger. AMD's market share historically ranged between 5% and 20%, with many people believing that Intel refrained from crushing AMD only to avoid being charged with anti-trust violations.
But Intel is not a powerhouse in all areas of the processor business, as Qualcomm has 64% of the global cellular baseband chip market and 51% of the smartphone applications processor market. Other players in this market include HiSilicon (owned by Chinese Huawei), MediaTek (a Taiwanese spin-off from United Microelectronics Corporation), Marvell (a top supplier of SSD controllers), and Samsung. After trying and failing for a decade to dominate the mobile market, Intel is eliminating 12,000 jobs, and that in a twelve-month period which witnessed the loss of 72,333 jobs in the tech sector. Intel declared that its new focus will be on the cloud, but it's already a major player in that arena, having 95% market share in enterprise servers and more than that in enterprise cloud. Intel will also focus on the IoT (Internet of Things), the realm of chatty lawnmowers, eavesdropping televisions, come-hither baby monitors, gossipy oxygen monitors, tattletale mattresses, vincible buildings, and perceptive penis rings. AMD, on the other hand, does not intend to enter the IoT market, though it is betting heavily on corporate data centers. The push to migrate everything to the cloud will result in Big Data firms having access to your entire online life, quite a price to pay for access to music, videos, and data via any platform around the world. You are the product being sold, not the customer. The computer business is dog-eat-dog -- just ask CDC, RCA, Honeywell, Sperry Univac, Burroughs, and GE, all of which were former computer manufacturers -- and so AMD farmed out its fabrication business in 2009 with the creation of GlobalFoundries to manufacture its processors, making AMD a fabless manufacturer, unlike Intel which still controls its processors from beginning to end. AMD did this to obtain some much-needed cash to continue its business. AMD filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Intel in the 2004 to 2009 time frame for Intel's monopolist behavior, along with the European Commission and graphics chip maker Nvidia. Intel eventually settled for $1.25 billion to AMD, $1.45 billion to the European Commission, and $1.5 billion to Nvidia. After GlobalFoundaries was created, Intel threatened to terminate AMD's license to manufacture x86 processors because GlobalFoundaries did not necessarily inherit the licensing agreement. In October 2014, AMD announced that the Taiwan-born Lisa Su, who joined AMD in January 2012, would become President and CEO. Last June AMD was reportedly considering breaking up the company. Last September, AMD split its graphics chip unit into a separate business internally called Radeon Technology Group. Like Intel, it had failed to gain a foothold in the mobile market. One of the reasons Intel does not have a cash-flow problem is its use of H-1B visas which are used to replace American workers with cheaper foreign ones, mainly from India, with 6% of Intel's U.S. workforce being here on an H-1B visa. Intel depends on them to such an extent that it even has a Director of Immigration Policy, Peter Muller, who advocates not only for more foreign workers, but also for work authorization for their spouses to double the number of lost American jobs. Microsoft, Intel, and Facebook were three of the top-five companies lobbying Congress for more H-1B visas in 2013, with politicians such as Marco Rubio cheerleading the effort. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of H-1B visas are not used for people with advanced skills, with the exact figures being 65,000 for applicants with a B.S. and 20,000 for those with an M.S. or PhD. Not to mention that the H-1B visa program is not attracting the best and brightest workers. Another myth regarding H-1B visas is that it is illegal to use them to replace Americans. It's not. The law “is designed to make sure you can replace American at will, while making it look like you can't,” said John Miano, an attorney for Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. Moore's Law is often misquoted, with many people believing that it ordained a doubling of performance every 1-2 years. In truth, Intel's Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors would double every year. In 1975, he revised his estimate to cover a two-year period. The performance increase from Lynnfield (2009) to Sandy Bridge (2011) was 10-50%, hardly a doubling, with most models closer to 10-20% improvement. Moore's Law substantially slowed down with the transition to a 22nm lithography, starting with Ivy Bridge (2012). The transition to 14nm lithography, starting with Broadwell (2014), caused Intel to revise the tick-tock model into a tick-tock-tock one. The transition to 10nm lithography promises to slow it even more. AMD announced that it is licensing the design of its new Zen processor and SoC (system-on-chip) technology to Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Company (THATIC), a joint venture with China. This is something that Intel has never done, although it has partners in China and Israel, with Intel being the top private employer in Israel with many locations there. Worldwide, Intel has fifteen fabs and GlobalFoundaries has five. "Intel will give you a black box, but not the keys to the kingdom," Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research, said. The industry press articles that referenced the report from IDG News Service referred to the technology as x86 when in fact that specific technology is owned by Intel (the term "x86" stems from Intel's 16-bit 8086 in 1978 and 32-bit 80386 in 1986). AMD's 64-bit extension of it, x86-64, a/k/a amd64, is more important given that all current PC and server processors support it. AMD and Intel are tied together with golden handcuffs given that each licenses the other's IP. Both AMD and Intel are suffering from the shrinking PC market, though detachable tablets, i.e. tablets that double as laptops, may offer growth in the low single digits. Many people are still using five-year-old Intel Sandy Bridge or AMD era-equivalent Bulldozer and Piledriver processors with an SSD, with the days of PCs being overwhelmed by software a short time after sale long behind us. Intel has not done itself any favors with its naming scheme that mainly insiders appreciate. AMD reported that its Q1 2016 operating loss was $70 million, compared with a Q4 2015 operating loss of $99 million. One curious thing regarding the licensing arrangement is that Q1 2016 revenue was lower than expected due to lower demand for its graphics chips used in consoles and reduced demand from China. China accounted for 42.2% of AMD’s revenue in 2014. AMD may be betting on past behavior. The administrations of Bush the Younger and Obama gave hundreds of billions of dollars to ensure that pampered Wall Street executives could continue to purchase luxury cars, yet they failed to see the strategic importance of having the processor business centered in the U.S. and Europe. Having multiple, reliable sources for processors and chipsets is necessary to guarantee that our military and infrastructure hardware does not contain backdoors, whether in the firmware or baked into the silicon. Another issue regarding the announcement is that it claims that AMD is only transferring high-performance processor technology, but x86-64 architecture is used in servers, desktops, and laptops. China is not known for enforcing the IP of foreign entities, with the technology transfer to THATIC actually being under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a national research institution. AMD should have done its due diligence. China announced trial runs of its own magnetic levitation train less than two years after the opening of Shanghai's German-designed Transrapid system. The technology required for magnetic levitation trains could not possibly have been developed independently in a two-year period. Chinese engineers were filmed breaking into the Transrapid maintenance room in the middle of the night and taking measurements of the new train. "Dozens of Chinese manufacturers are shamelessly copying our machines," said Rainer Hundsdörfer, the CEO of Weinig AG, a German company that manufactures machine tools. "And when I point this out to the Chinese in their booths, they're not even embarrassed. On the contrary. They're proud of the quality of their copies and want to know how they can improve them even further," he added, referring to his discovery of copies of his company's products at trade shows. All of the leading railway companies wanted to do business in China which demanded cutting edge technology to be licensed to Chinese companies. Not surprisingly, China aggregated all of the various technologies to create its own world-class railway company. The Western companies received only a token amount of business, but now, not only are they locked out of the Chinese market, they have to compete world-wide with a company which has better technology. As Siemens and the other companies discovered, China plays by very different rules. As Der Spiegel noted, "zizhu chuangxin," or "independent innovation," is the Chinese way of describing how Chinese firms further develop foreign technologies. "Deutsche Bahn thinks first and foremost about Deutsche Bahn, and Siemens first and foremost about Siemens," explained deputy chief engineer of China South Locomotive & Rolling Stock, Lu Renyuan. "But, in China, each person thinks about how we can all advance our nation together." My first project at Martin Marietta, now Lockheed Martin, was Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV), an eight-wheeled truck chassis controlled by artificial intelligence (AI). The government agency sponsoring the work was Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the lead R&D agency for the U.S. military. My task was to write the main real-time control loop which I will refer to as RTCL because I don't remember its official name. All equipment on the vehicle would be controlled by RTCL in a binary sense, i.e. either on or off. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that it had to include a dead man's switch, a mechanism to stop the vehicle if things ran amok, even though the concept was not mentioned anywhere in the requirements handed down by systems engineering. My dead man's switch was actually quite simple; if RTCL ran through a small number of cycles without receiving input from Navigator, the project's name for the AI which would decide in which direction to point the vehicle, it would stop and safe the vehicle. The dead man's switch wasn't strictly necessary for the first test because a safety officer would walk alongside ALV holding a kill-switch attached to the vehicle via a long cord, but it would be essential for subsequent work when the vehicle was truly autonomous.
At the design review, I noted that the dead man's switch was indispensable, as it would be the only thing preventing an out-of-control vehicle from going on a slow-speed rampage. The systems engineering manager -- a jovial fellow who once remarked that none of the women he dated in Colorado knew how to give a proper blowjob -- exclaimed, "Boy, we sure put the right person on this task," with his group having missed such an important requirement. I joked that the vehicle should talk, like the 1928 Porter touring car in My Mother the Car. The dead man's switch was not the only surprise. The first time the vehicle traveled down the test track of slightly greater than one mile, it ran right off the road and onto the grass, forcing the safety officer to kill the engine. We quickly realized that there was very little contrast between the well-worn road, the dirt shoulder, and the brown grass. So management decided to oil the asphalt to make it as black as possible and paint the grass green. This gave Navigator sufficient contrast so it could determine where the road ended. Besides, Martin Marietta and the Air Force had already dumped so much hydrazine and other noxious chemicals into the ground that a little green paint wouldn't make any difference (the water taps in the small building next to our mobile homes up the hill from the main buildings had signs reading "not potable," with the area being a SuperFund site). Later I was told that RTCL had been used throughout the life of the project, the only software to do so. Perhaps others on the project did, but I never dreamed of autonomous cars similar to how Philip K. Dick's androids dreamed of electric sheep. But Google did. Autonomous vehicles, now often called self-driving vehicles, still have many of the same problems. Volvo's North American CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, became angry as his company's self-driving prototype occasionally displayed recalcitrance during a press event at the Los Angeles Auto Show, saying: "It can't find the lane markings! You need to paint the bloody roads here!" That's because its AI and associated sensors have trouble distinguishing between the road and the shoulder, and between the various yellow and white painted stripes and dashes. It's not a trivial problem. On a freshly paved and painted road, humans can easily drive down the center of the lane, but as the road wears, even they sometimes have trouble. An estimated 65% of U.S. roads are in poor condition, according to the Department of Transportation, with many parts of the country experiencing snow which temporarily obscures the road, not to mention snowplows which mar the surface by removing lane markings and other road indicators. Ford is testing its self-drivers in snow for these reasons, while Google's next testing venue is in sunny Phoenix, Arizona. Most of the self-driving has occurred in California, where snow is a rarity, so Google and the other companies have not really tested their vehicles in real-world conditions. That has not stopped some people from making outrageous comments, for example, Chris Urmson, director of self-driving cars at Google, who wants his 11-year-old son to never have to take a driver's test, which is a lot like saying that his son should not learn to swim because he'll probably never be thrown into deep water. But then again, given the high percentage of young people who think nothing of texting while driving, perhaps it is a good idea that the next generation never drives a motor vehicle. I want to see a self-driver running in one of Denver's summer hailstorms, when the pavement is a mix of water and ice, with visibility for man, beast, and beastly inventions sometimes dropping to just a few meters, not to mention the noise and damage that large ice particles can cause. The sensors of a human are protected by the car's exterior, but a self-driver's sensors are at the mercy of the elements. Not to mention the LIDAR sensors having an electronic cow with thousands of small, constantly changing reflections per second. An uncommon, but nonetheless possible scenario would be if a criminal or terrorist steps in front of your car holding a weapon pointed your way. With a normal car you can stomp on the gas and aim directly at him. If he moves out of the way, he'll be too busy to shoot at you. If he doesn't move out of the way, well, he knew the job was dangerous when he took it. But with a self-driver, the car will stop and allow him to shoot the passengers and/or carjack the vehicle. The day the car stood still, if you will, when it becomes your ex-machina. Some people suggest that cars should surrender control to the human in ambiguous cases, but that person will usually be taking a nap, texting, reading, watching a movie, or having sex. People riding mass transit already do these things. Good luck obtaining a quick, lucid response. But the real issue here is money. Google wants to eliminate drivers because it intends to use passengers to feed Google AdSense. The combination of smart phone data, verbal conversations, and destinations will be a goldmine for Google's advertisers. In 2012-13, Google was caught red-handed capturing Wi-Fi transmissions as its Google Street View cars traveled around the world. This was not done by accident, it was done intentionally, collecting so-called payload data, which includes names, addresses, telephone numbers, URLs, passwords, e-mail, text messages, medical records, video and audio files, and other information from Internet users. Google paid just $7 million for its actions. It was fined $25,000 by the FCC for "willfully" ignoring subpoenas and delaying investigations. All of these fines are a slap on the wrist given Google's 2013 earnings of $57.86 billion, the second consecutive year that Google earned over $50 billion in revenue. Leibowitz must not be good at math. In 2013-14, it was revealed that Google was reading and mining user emails even before users had a chance to read them. Google's legal team desperately wanted to avoid having a single class action suit because then it would be Goliath v. Goliath, instead of mere individuals taking on the 124th largest corporation in the world. Judge Lucy Koh -- the same one who handles Apple v. Samsung lawsuits and LinkedIn lawsuits (here's one regarding excessive emails and here's one regarding blind references) -- eventually gave Google what it wanted and dismissed any notion of a class action lawsuit. Koh, who controls much of the Internet via her rulings, has been nominated to the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by Barack Obama Later in 2015, despite publicly promising not to do so, Google mined the emails of 40 Million K-12 students, collecting the browsing history and other data for use with Google AdSense. This episode proved just how low Google would sink, given that students are often required to use school-approved services. Google knew its actions were unacceptable because it had signed the Student Privacy Pledge, agreement signed by 254 technology companies. The pledge begins with: "We Commit To: 1) Not collect, maintain, use or share student personal information beyond that needed for authorized educational/school purposes, or as authorized by the parent/student. 2) Not sell student personal information." It's safe to say that the conversational tidbits Google collects in vehicles won't be limited to, "Are we there yet?" It started in July 1971 with National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger's secret visit to China. Later that month, Richard Nixon wanted to grease the rails for his reelection and announced that he would visit China the following year. Shortly thereafter, in October 1971, we threw Taiwan under the bus and neglected to veto the UN resolution which replaced Taiwan with the PRC. Then in February 1972, Chairman Mao Zedong welcomed Nixon to China, with every president since Nixon stopping by, from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama. George W. Bush was the most frequent traveler, with visits in October 2001, February 2002, November 2005, and August 2008.
The first economic sucker punch to strike was NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), which, contrary to popular belief, was created by George H. W. Bush who signed a draft of it in October 1992, but he had to leave it to Bill Clinton to finalize, which he did in two stages, in September and December 1993. Clinton slickly promised: "NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement." Daniel Griswold of the libertarian Cato Institute breathlessly declared in July 1998 that NAFTA "has been a success by any measure." Griswold also opined that "NAFTA and other market reforms softened the severity of the crisis and spurred Mexico's recovery," but to paraphrase from Genesis 4:9, are we our neighboring country's keeper? Giving PNTR (permanent normal trade relations) to China was next. PTNR, also known as most favored nation status, is a required element of free trade. It was passed in October 2000, almost at the end of Clinton's reign. Once again the Cato Institute stood on the wrong side of the American worker, with Deroy Murdock professing that PNTR "will pressure China from inside and out" and that "Americans will enjoy more Chinese-made apparel and appliances at reasonable prices if PNTR passes." Of course the question we should have asked was, would Americans still have good jobs to purchase those low-quality imports from Walmart, Home Depot and other firms? The Cato Institute's Doug Bandow cajoled: "The silliest argument against PNTR is that Chinese imports would overwhelm U.S. industry. In fact, American workers are far more productive than their Chinese counterparts ... Moreover, Beijing's manufacturing exports to the United States remain small, about half the level of those from Mexico." The knockout blow came when we allowed China into the WTO (World Trade Organization) in December 2001. Clinton had disingenuously pledged that granting PNTR to China would "increase U.S. jobs and reduce our trade deficit." George W. Bush refused to slow the WTO train even though a Chinese military pilot had intentionally directed his aircraft into a U.S. EP-3 spy plane in April 2001, forcing it to land on Hainan Island where the plane was reverse engineered by Chinese intelligence personnel and the crew interrogated for ten days. Bush was so concerned that the incident might derail China's WTO membership that he wrote a personal letter to the widow of the Chinese pilot who caused the crash. Then one month after 9/11 he flew to Shanghai to work on the Doha Development Agenda in Shanghai to facilitate even more free trade. The Cato Institute's Daniel J. Ikenson promulgated in 2006: "In fact, since China joined the WTO in 2001, U.S. exports to China have more than doubled." He went on to avow: "And the notion that importing from and offshoring to China is hollowing out American manufacturing is not supported by the facts." Not according to CNN which recently reported that manufacturing jobs in the U.S. actually increased from 1994 to 2000, but then sank like a stone after that, with a loss of five million. Pat Buchanan astutely noted in February 2007: "To the devout libertarian, free trade is not a policy option to be debated, but a dogma to be defended. Nowhere is this truer than at that lamasery of libertarianism, the Cato Institute." He went on to say: "For contrary to free-trade mythology, every nation that has risen to pre-eminence and power -- Britain before 1860, the United States from 1860-1914, Germany from 1870-1914, postwar Japan, China today -- has pursued a mercantilist or protectionist trade policy ... It is no accident all four presidents who made it to Mount Rushmore were protectionists." 1985 was the year that Chinese imports into the U.S. became equal to U.S. exports to China and also the first year Census Bureau trade data is available. The below graph depicting trade with China from 1985 through 2015(see Census data here) depicts a lopsided trade relationship, good for China and multinational corporations which import goods, but not so good for the average American workers who witnessed their jobs being whisked away to foreign lands. The below graph depicting trade with Canada from 1985 through 2015 (see Census data here) is interesting, especially for 2015 when it dropped below the level of that for 2011-14. The U.S.-Canada trading relationship was until recently the greatest the world had ever seen, but now China has taken Canada's place. The balance of U.S.-Canada trade really hasn't changed much since 1985. The below graph depicting trade with Mexico from 1985 through 2015 (see Census data here) clearly shows the effect of NAFTA, as in 1994 exports pretty much equaled imports, but that's not true any more. Note that, contrary to Bandow's assertions, imports from Mexico are only about 3/5 those from China. The below graph depicting trade with Central America and the Dominican Republic from 2005 through 2015 (see Census data here) via CAFTA-DR (Dominican Republic - Central America Free Trade Agreement) illustrates a fairer agreement. Neither party dominates the other, though the U.S. has benefited the most for eight out of the eleven years the treaty has been in effect. Most Americans would probably not mind if most years were similar to 2013 given the abject poverty in these regions. That said, we cannot say that it has been a roaring success given the unprecedented levels of gang and drug-related violence. The below graph depicting the overall balance of trade from 1960 through 2015 (chart uses Balance of Payment basis; see Census data here) shows a number of things, but keep in mind that the graph is inverted, in other words, the more negative our balance of trade, the higher the graph rises. Perhaps I should have referred to it as the imbalance of trade. First, it hints at economic problems of the times. From 1972 to 1975, the trade balance went from -6,416 to 911 to -5,505 to 8,903. Your author suspects this blip originates in the 1973 gas crisis, when for the first time Americans started buying more gas-efficient foreign cars. At first people stopped driving, which slowed their buying, but after the gas crisis departed, many returned to purchasing gas hogs. There is no comparable blip for the 1979 gas crisis, but that was not nearly as bad as the first, not to mention that many people had already bought a foreign car. Second, it shows a clear correlation between the entrance of China upon the world stage and our increasingly negative trade balance. Our last positive trade balance was in 1975, with the value of 8,903 being the highest figure supplied by the Census Bureau (the second-highest was 7,006 in 1964). But then the trade balance went negative for good and almost quadrupled between 1976 to 1977, from 7,820 to 28,352. In 1982, the trade balance was 27,510, about average for the period of 1977-82. But in 1983 it jumped to 52,409, in 1984 it jumped to 106,702, and in 1987 it jumped to 152,119. And third, it indicates a precipitous rise just after the passage of NAFTA. The trade balance rose at a downright disturbing pace until 2006, when it leveled off just in time for the Wall Street crash. The trade balance became much better because many people lost their jobs and did not buy anything, foreign or domestic. The trade balance has mostly regained its depressing volume, but it has not climbed back to the level of George the Younger's final ruling days because job growth has been pathetic. At this point you might be thinking that employment moves in the same general direction, so it's all a wash. Not hardly. The ever-increasing trade deficit with China cost 3.2 million jobs between 2001 and 2013, with job losses in every state. As the below BLS graph (duplicate it yourself by visiting the BLS website and setting the starting year to 1948) indicates, the labor participation rate has dropped ever since the late 1990s. Currently it is equal to the rate for 1978, coincidentally when the balance of trade was just starting to become overt. Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch savaged NAFTA on its 20th anniversary and documented that it has been an unmitigated disaster, comparing it to the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) which has been rather difficult to kill. Public Citizen noted: "The reductions in consumer goods prices that have materialized have not been sufficient to offset the losses to middle-class wages under NAFTA. U.S. workers without college degrees (63 percent of the workforce) have likely lost an amount equal to 12.2 percent of their wages under NAFTA-style trade even after accounting for the benefits of cheaper goods." Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have called for the end of free trade and the beginning of fair trade because the former benefits mainly multinational corporations. Countering them are Ted Cruz who recently announced that Phil Gramm would be his economic adviser, with him being one of the people most responsible for the 2008 crash, Hillary Clinton who previously declared the TPP to be the "gold standard," and the Cato Institute which doubled-down on its previous statements, maintaining that opposition to the TPP is based on "nine myths." Remember Einstein's definition of insanity. |
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January 2023
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