(What is a seared conscience - as with a hot iron? It is
systemic in this country by a general attitude of 'it's not my problem or
responsibility' because there's no accountability. So it continues
until.....TSHTF!
Which it is about to! - CL)
Corporate America is, of course, corporate. As a former CEO I am fully-aware of, and generally have no quarrel with, the premise of a corporation. It has one purpose: To Make Money for the Shareholders.
Period.
It has no soul, morals or otherwise. It can't have those attributes because it's not alive.
Woketopia is not the natural course of corporate behavior. That's hubris, usually singularly-so within a few people. They get into positions of power and because the others in power, and there are always others, have no balls. Had they balls they'd point out that such woketopia garbage was inevitably going to damage the firm. Maybe not immediately, but certainly.
The reason we have laws in a civilized society is that without them corporations -- large or small -- will seek to maximize profit and since there is no soul to keep said behavior in check it will be wildly destructive to society as a whole.
Yet corporations are really nothing more than agglomerations of people insulated from the direct consequences of other than willful criminal conduct. .
A partnership does not have this feature; in a partnership a business loss is personal; it reaches beyond the walls of the business into the personal affairs and wealth of each and every partner on a ratable basis. In a corporation this is never true.
Partnerships make sense only when all the people who hold said ownership interests can control outcomes. This is why we have corporations; without them nobody in their right mind would place their hat in the ring without direct control over potential financial or criminal liability-generating acts.
We've decided, for good or bad, that the trade-off is worth it. That's a debate for another time; this Ticker focuses on the perverse incentives that we have refused to put a stop to.
Wednesday morning some jackwad working on a house near mine -- either the water/sewer folks themselves or someone contracted to connect to them didn't bother calling the locator service and got out the backhoe. They dug up a lateral hardline feeder for the cable internet that feeds my house -- but not just my house, as it was the lateral hardline they dug up, not the drop.
I called that in and, when I figured out what had happened and that the drop hadn't failed, called Spectrum back to tell them that the techs they were dispatching this morning had better be equipped to fix a lateral as the problem was clearly not in my home or the drop to it. They assured me that was the case.
Well, it wasn't the case. Two trucks rolled up with..... inside techs. The guys with the ability to fix a drop provided they didn't have to dig or trench and, of course, they did not have the correct cable or splicing gear to fix the hardline.
It wasn't declared an "outage" by their automated equipment because the cut was on the feed to the last pedestal. In other words, had it been 200' further up the line it would have shown enough people offline to be an "outage" instead of a "problem."
Now the annoyance factor of them having to call it back in locally this time, and have guy with the correct gear show up is on them; the annoyance of the other couple of hours of outage here is not the end of the world for Sarah or myself. We have backup connectivity, and it works. I'm writing this article using it.
No, the problem is Spectrum's. They sent two trucks with dudes in them out to a residence on a wild goose chase where if they had believed the customer, who told them what to send, they might have sent the correct guy and gear yesterday instead.
So they took somewhere in the neighborhood of four man-hours, plus fuel, plus wear on the vehicles dispatched from wherever their office is that they start from every day and such for exactly..... nothing.
Did the stupid stop there? Nope. At about 1400 here come two more trucks! Why? Because indeed the guy across the street was off too. Which I told them. Which their idiot call center dude maintained was "just me" and thus didn't mandate calling it an "outage." Which was complete crap and thus they didn't waste two trucks of dudes on a junk call it was four on two separate junk calls, plus the one guy who actually showed up and fixed it.
How hard would it have been, even if the call center didn't believe me, to ask for a picture? No problem; I could have trivially sent them one to prove that I wasn't full of crap; the ripped-up cable was openly exposed in the trench and still is.
But their automated system apparently needs to see "some number" of people offline in a given area to call it an outage. Short of that they don't and can't override it; they call it a "customer trouble ticket" no matter what they're told or how often they're told it, and thus do stupid things. Since the call goes to some god-forsaken place and not a local dispatch center, which by the way will never call you back either to talk with you when someone with a brain is on the other end of the line what outcome do you get?
Stupidity.
This is a result of it's cheaper to have the calls all go to one center.
Just like when a 100-fibre bundle was chopped by a much-larger backhoe over toward Maryville earlier this year and wiped out basically everything from there in an arc to Gatlinburg on a holiday weekend. Why? There was no second link coming from a different direction so when the fiber got cut everything goes off.
Why no second fiber from a different direction? It costs money and thus without a requirement to spend said money in a non-competitive environment, which is inherent any time you have limited rights-of-way (and you do for such services) they won't.
How about the Christmas Bombing in Nashville? Same deal. But in that case there was an actual legal requirement that the feed be redundant along with the switching. Neither was true but both were legally required in the contract solicitation. The bomb goes off, the switch gets disrupted and the fiber cut. As a result there is no E911 service all the way from Nashville up into the SW corner of Virginia for several days because the provider who won the contract decided not to comply with its terms.
Or how about Texas and other states last winter? Yes, it's cheaper to use electric booster pumps on a gas pipeline as an electric motor requires less maintenance (none, really) than a fuel-driven compressor. It's also "greener", so they say, and thus they can and do virtue signal. But a natural-gas fired compressor runs so long as there is gas in the pipe and it does not break, where an electric motor doesn't run when the solar panels and windmills don't produce power. How many people had severe property damage due to burst pipes and such as a consequence? How many died? Who was held criminally and civilly accountable for said damage because they deliberately eschewed a known-better alternative in terms of reliability -- a choice made because it was "greener", they were virtue signaling by genuflecting to Greta and her goons while at the same time "saving" some maintenance costs?
NOBODY.
And who let them do this in the first place? The state regulatory boards for said services who were also genuflecting in front of those very same nutjobs.
Will a corporation always make this sort of choice absent consequences? Yes. In every case. Is this acceptable for business-required or even emergency services required infrastructure? No, never. Is it acceptable for a residential guy like me when it comes to Internet service? Probably. But not for business connectivity, which they charge more money for, and certainly not for E911 which becomes a life-critical problem when it fails. And not when it comes to piped gas and grid power in freezing weather either, especially when you have local regulations banning effective backups such as a wood stove.
Who's gone to jail for this? Nobody.
And nobody will either.
Why not?
Because you won't build one of these in front of the offices of the local, state and federal legislators and cops and make clear that either they enforce laws and regulations prohibiting this bull**** -- now and forevermore -- or you're going to take heads.
This is the core problem with nearly everything that is going on in the world today, including Covid.
It is not the fact that corporations have no soul, because you can't change that. You can't legislate a soul into existence. But what you can do is hold the officers and directors criminally and financially accountable -- as in prison -- when they directly violate the law or commit open fraud in a solicitation, provision of data or otherwise. You can extend that same punishment to government agencies and the people who work there.
This does not mean you hold people criminally liable for errors until and unless it rises to the level of negligence. It does mean, however, that you hold them criminally liable for deliberate decisions to screw someone by either concealing data that is critical to the public interest (whether by direct concealment or intentional misrepresentation) or when they agree to do something and then do not. It also means you must set reasonable standards in the first place so you have concrete metrics which to measure and then impose said punishment.
We haven't done any of that.
Does Spectrum care that they blew between four and eight man-hours because they were stupid? Probably not. It'll be another 10 cents of your bill that goes to pay that this month, and as for the actual trunk line repair the idjit that dug it up should get the bill for that, since they didn't call for a locate before using the backhoe. Without effective competitive pressure which will never exist when there is a constrained right-of-way and thus you can't have multiple firms out there providing the service and expect reasonable pricing the only other option is regulatory in a form and fashion that the financial consequences of stupidity outweigh the profits.
Of course nobody wants to have THAT conversation, especially when it comes to the medical system -- do they?
There's only 500,000+ dead Americans that were killed as a result of not doing so and every single one of them is on us for our willful and intentional refusal to get off our ass, issue that demand and mean it.
Let me know when that changes for you.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=244403