Healthcare

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action is Crippling America
Locked Cogs: Death by HR

Locked Cogs: Death by HR

I’m starting a new series of posts on a new book tracing the decline of competence in organizations due to affirmative action hiring, and how it is leading to economic stagnation and declining growth for everyone.

It’s a new Age of Incompetence, with deadwood managers at the heart of our government and regulated institutions like banks and hospitals leading to costly failures and decay in performance of their functions. From the mortgage meltdown that brought down the world’s economy in 2008, to the disastrous launch of the healthcare.gov website for Obamacare, major segments of business and government in the US have grown more expensive and less competent over the past few decades. Billions of dollars of waste in government contracts for IT projects, weapons systems, and service failures at the VA are in the news every day. Public schools are widely seen as mediocre, and in the poorest urban districts they are failing to provide a decent education for the students who need good schools the most. Costs for regulated services like schools, colleges, medical insurance, drugs, courts, prisons, and infrastructure like roads and bridges rise far faster than inflation, while times to complete major projects stretch out to decades, and many fail completely and are cancelled after billions have been spent.

We will trace the factors that have hobbled growth and damaged organizational competence. From overregulation to HR departments that actively sabotage the hiring of the best candidates for jobs, bureaucratic mindsets and by-the-book mediocrities placed in positions of responsibility are crippling the organizations affected.

Silicon Valley and the tech industries are the next targets. If you’re a manager at a tech company, we’ll suggest some ways to protect your people from HR and its emphasis on credentials and affirmative action over the best fit for a position. Corporate leaders need to be sure their HR departments are managed to prevent infiltration by staff more interested in correct politics than winning products. And we’ll show why appeasement of diversity activists is a dangerous strategy that may make your organization a target for further extortionate demands.

The idea for this book came from the author’s personal experience seeking a mortgage from Chase Bank in 2012. I owned a large house free and clear which I was selling, and was trying to get a mortgage for a much smaller and cheaper house because rates were so low—2.75% on a 15-year fixed mortgage. Given that I had much more than the amount of the mortgage in stocks and cash, plus a more valuable house for sale with no mortgage, I assumed it would not be so difficult. But the amount of paperwork required was enormous, with every detail of every account documented multiple times. Unexplained, lengthy delays took months. This was true everywhere in the country, as every lender had to sell to one of the government buyers — Fannie, Freddie, or VA, which were the ultimate funding for nearly all mortgages being made, and where crackdowns on the low-documentation (“liar”) loans and sub-prime loans had led to an overreaction.

After months of drama and repetitive responses to their information requests, the loan was funded just in time to complete the purchase of the house. All seemed well, but I got a letter one week later demanding proof of insurance, which had already been provided to the bank and approved by Fannie Mae in the packaged-up loan. I had been working with a executive-level expeditor (one key sign of problems is that Chase had to set up an office of expeditors just below upper management to force its own bureaucracy to make reasonable decisions), so I got him on the phone, and he set up a conference call with a VP in their servicing division, a woman with an uneducated accent who stonewalled — “That’s just how we do it, Sir.” No amount of talking would get her to concede that Chase’s approval and sale of the loan to Fannie Mae was ipso facto evidence that insurance coverage on the house had already been proven as of a few weeks earlier. Both I and the expeditor gave up on her and I never heard from them after that. While it’s true that the VP title at a bank is handed out to thousands of managers, her complete lack of interest in common-sense solutions to prevent waste and customer anger was a sign that efficiency and customer satisfaction were of little concern to her.

I started to investigate and discovered that a generation of affirmative action policies has placed mediocrities at major decision points in most large companies, government agencies, and highly-regulated institutions like schools and hospitals. A small percentage of deadwood can be routed around, but over time feedback effects from the generalized lack of accountability and lowered standards for performance cripple the institution. We see this in the failures and extreme cost overruns of almost all large government projects and a tolerance for incompetence so long as policy manuals are followed to the letter. This effect is largest in government and education, but also visible in larger companies where HR departments are staffed by progressive sorts who believe in correcting non-progressive thoughts. In high tech, women and minorities dominate HR in part because companies wanted to balance their male-and-Asian-heavy engineering staff to make their numbers look better, but now are just realizing they’ve created an internal enemy to product quality and excellence in staffing engineering teams. (A corporate manager comments: “How do you know HR is lying? Their lips are moving…”)

The diversity activists want group identity to replace competence and merit in hiring — or they want to collect contributions and consulting fees to harass some other organization instead of yours. Whether your company satisfies them by dumbing down your teams or pays them off, you will find it harder to compete when hobbled by their demands.

From Healthcare.gov to the VA, billions of dollars of tax money are being wasted by governments more concerned with politics and the skin color and sex of the work force than competence. The last engines of growth, tech companies, are under pressure to hire based on diversity rather than performance. It’s time to say no to mediocrity.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples OrganizationsDeath by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

 

More reading on other topics:

Jane Jacobs’ Monstrous Hybrids: Guardians vs Commerce
The Great Progressive Stagnation vs. Dynamism
Death by HR: How Affirmative Action is Crippling America
Death by HR: The End of Merit in Civil Service
Corrupt Feedback Loops: Public Employee Unions
Death by HR: History and Practice of Affirmative Action and the EEOC
Civil Service: Woodrow Wilson’s Progressive Dream
Bootleggers and Baptists
Corrupt Feedback Loops: Justice Dept. Extortion
Corrupt Feedback Loops, Goldman Sachs: More Justice Dept. Extortion
Death by HR: The Birth and Evolution of the HR Department
Death by HR: The Simple Model of Project Labor
Levellers and Redistributionists: The Feudal Underpinnings of Socialism
Sons of Liberty vs. National Front
Trump World: Looking Backward
Minimum Wage: The Parable of the Ladder
Selective Outrage
Culture Wars: Co-Existence Through Limited Government
Social Justice Warriors, Jihadists, and Neo-Nazis: Constructed Identities
Tuitions Inflated, Product Degraded, Student Debts Unsustainable
The Morality of Glamour

On Affirmative Action and Social Policy:

Affirmative Action: Chinese, Indian-Origin Citizens in Malaysia Oppressed
Affirmative Action: Caste Reservation in India
Diversity Hires: Pressure on High Tech<a
Title IX Totalitarianism is Gender-Neutral
Public Schools in Poor Districts: For Control Not Education
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
The Social Decay of Black Neighborhoods (And Yours!)
Child Welfare Ideas: Every Child Gets a Government Guardian!
“Income Inequality” Propaganda is Just Disguised Materialism

The greatest hits from SubstrateWars.com (Science Fiction topics):

Fear is the Mindkiller
Mirror Neurons and Irene Gallo
YA Dystopias vs Heinlein et al: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again
Selective Outrage
Sons of Liberty vs. National Front
“Tomorrowland”: Tragic Misfire
The Death of “Wired”: Hugo Awards Edition
Hugos, Sad Puppies 3, and Direct Knowledge
Selective Outrage and Angry Tribes
Men of Honor vs Victim Culture
SFF, Hugos, Curating the Best
“Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists?”
Science Fiction Fandom and SJW warfare

More reading on the military:

US Military: From No Standing Armies to Permanent Global Power
US Military: The Desegregation Experience
The VA Scandals: Death by Bureaucracy

On Bruce Jenner and Gender

In between books, so I have a minute to comment on issues of the day.

Let’s start with Bruce Jenner and his public pronouncement that he thinks of himself and plans to live as a woman. This is instructive partly because of various reactions: some feminists resent a privileged white man muscling in on their desire to be both utterly equal and specially protected. One spokeswoman for that point of view demanded he get a vagina and suffer pay discrimination before being allowed to call himself a woman.

Others were all for his announcement and supportive of the blow he was striking in public for coming out as who you feel you really are, until he also mentioned she sees herself as a Christian, conservative Republican. Fuses blew and some partisans disowned him — not “the right sort” to be striking a blow for anyone’s freedom.

I’ve known transgender people both pre- and post-op, as well as other diverse sorts. The feeling that your body does not go along with the gender role you feel comfortable as is real and efforts to do something about it are understandable. But it’s interesting that what activists say they work toward — complete equality of the sexes — if achieved, would reduce the expectations of stereotyped behaviors from either sex and make this discordance less uncomfortable. There are people who aren’t bothered by the equipment they have and just bravely act the way they wish to, disregarding social convention, and there always have been. The idea of a physical sex change operation is recent and still somewhat impractical; we can imagine the day when medical science allows a real genetic and physical modification that makes one sex the other, and vice-versa. Science fiction has it covered, with some highly-advanced societies of people with very long lives who choose to change sexes occasionally for variety.

But why? I support everyone’s effort to achieve the self they want. But counselling very young people to start considering a sex change operation — instead of supporting them in being who they want to be in the body they have — seems like a mistake. The numbers of people who go through the operations and come out the other side regretting it are larger than activists prefer to acknowledge. It’s like going along with peer pressure to get lots of heavy metal tattoos and realizing later you didn’t need that permanent change to be a rebel, or to be who you are. Making it Conventional Wisdom that any gender confusion should be solved by hormones and surgery is making it harder for people with that problem to make the wisest decisions for themselves.

The worst political issue related to this now is the sneaky subversion of the law of medical necessity, which has been quietly changed to include sex change operations as “medically necessary.” Most people assume that means you must have a treatment or you will die or be incapacitated; being unhappy because your body doesn’t match your feelings does not really qualify. But by slipping this in to regulations, then requiring insurance and state health care to cover all “medically necessary” treatment, you get bizarre and undemocratic outcomes like a $300K sex change for a state prisoner, when law-abiding citizens go without care outside the prison. This incites a horrible and unnecessary conflict between traditionalists who rightly feel they were snookered, and people sympathetic to the transgender, for whom good results for victims trump any consideration of who pays and whether such payments are just.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples OrganizationsDeath by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

 

Vitamin D: Anti-Dementia?

Vitamin D

Vitamin D


Via Instapundit, “New Study Supports Links Between Dementia And Vitamin D Deficiency” in IFLScience:

Adding to an ever-growing body of evidence, a new study has found that vitamin D deficiency is associated with a substantially increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s and dementia. While previous studies have drawn similar conclusions, this is the largest, most robust study carried out to date. The results have been published in the journal Neurology.

Vitamin D is an essential vitamin that is produced by the body upon exposure of the skin to sunlight, but it can also be found in small amounts in certain foods such as oily fish. It plays a variety of roles in the body and over recent years our understanding of how it helps to maintain optimum health has dramatically increased. For example, it’s thought to reduce the risk of certain bone diseases, bacterial and viral infections and autoimmune diseases.

Interestingly, some studies have hinted that vitamin D may play a neuroprotective role. In support of this idea, several recent studies have found links between vitamin D deficiency and the risk of dementia and cognitive decline. However, one study also found no associations in men.

To find out more, an international team of researchers, headed by scientists at the University of Exeter, enrolled 1,658 adults aged 65 and over who were able to walk unaided and were free from dementia, cardiovascular disease and stroke. Vitamin D levels were assessed at the start of the study and the participants were then followed for six years in order to investigate who went on to develop Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia.

The researchers discovered that participants with a moderate vitamin D deficiency had a 53% increased risk of developing any form of dementia, and those with a severe deficiency had a 125% increased risk. Similar results were also found for the risk of developing Alzheimer’s, which is the most common form of dementia. Interestingly, they found that there was a threshold level of 50nmol/L vitamin D in the serum, below which the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s was markedly increased.

While this shows vitamin D deficiency is associated with increased risk of dementia, it does not prove causation; it’s possible that since oily fish contain lots of D, the Omega-3 fatty acids and other components of fish oil, which has already been shown to reduce dementia, are responsible, since people who regularly eat oily fish won’t suffer D deficiencies. And any number of other cofactors may play a role.

What’s the story on vitamin D supplements? A few years ago, medical professionals themselves were taking 2000-4000 IUDs every day believing these larger doses would be protective against a variety of degenerative diseases. The evidence since is inconclusive. Here are some studies:

Vitamin D and Cardiometabolic Outcomes: A Systematic Review
Vitamin D and calcium: a systematic review of health outcomes.
Vitamin D supplementation for prevention of mortality in adults.
The effect of vitamin D supplementation on skeletal, vascular, or cancer outcomes: a trial sequential meta-analysis

For more on supplements and life-extending habits:

Getting to Less Than 10% Body Fat Like the Models – Ask Me How!
Low-Dose Aspirin Reduces Pancreatic Cancer
Daily Aspirin Regimen Reduces Cancer Rates
Almonds: Superfood, Eat Them Daily for Heart Health
Fish Oil Supplements Ward Off Dementia
Lower Back Pain: Acetaminophen (Tylenol, Paracetamol) Useless
Cleanses and Detox Diets: Quackery
Gluten-Free Diets: The Nocebo Effect
Scams: Multi-Level Marketing, Herbalife
Fish and Fish Oil for Better Brain Health
Salt: New Research Says Too Little May Be Unhealthy

Daily Aspirin Regimen Reduces Cancer Rates
Aspirin And Cancer - The Guardian

Aspirin And Cancer – The Guardian

I posted here about the large reduction in pancreatic cancer among older people taking aspirin long-term.

A study reported in the Guardian says that low-dose aspirin dramatically reduces most forms of cancer, and recommends everyone from 50 to 65 years old take a 75mg tablet every day:

An aspirin a day could dramatically cut people’s chances of getting and dying from common cancers, according to the most detailed review yet of the cheap drug’s ability to stem disease.

More than 130,000 deaths would be avoided over a 20-year period if Britain’s 50- to 64-year-olds took a daily aspirin for 10 years, because the beneficial effects continue even when the aspirin is stopped, the authors say.

A research team led by Professor Jack Cuzick, head of the centre for cancer prevention at Queen Mary University of London, concluded that people between 50 and 65 should consider regularly taking the 75mg low-dosage tablets.

Cuzick said that taking aspirin “looks to be the most important thing we can do to reduce cancer after stopping smoking and reducing obesity, and will probably be much easier to implement”.

In a briefing to journalists, the scientist added that he had been dosing himself for the last four years, keeping the tablets beside his bed. “I take aspirin as part of a bedtime ritual every day and I can achieve that quite easily,” he said.

However, to obtain the newfound benefits of the drug, people would have to take aspirin for at least five years and probably 10, the review said.

For more on useful supplements and life-extending habits:

Getting to Less Than 10% Body Fat Like the Models – Ask Me How!
Low-Dose Aspirin Reduces Pancreatic Cancer
Almonds: Superfood, Eat Them Daily for Heart Health
Fish Oil Supplements Ward Off Dementia
Lower Back Pain: Acetaminophen (Tylenol, Paracetamol) Useless
Cleanses and Detox Diets: Quackery
Gluten-Free Diets: The Nocebo Effect
Scams: Multi-Level Marketing, Herbalife
Fish and Fish Oil for Better Brain Health
Vitamin D: Anti-Dementia?
Salt: New Research Says Too Little May Be Unhealthy