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Death by HR: Thiel, Trump, Palantir: Regulation as Partisan Weapon

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel – Image by Dan Taylor.

Peter Thiel became a billionaire by co-founding Paypal (with the even-more-famous Elon Musk), then using the $55 million he received for its sale to eBay to invest in other startups, notably Facebook. He’s also becoming famous as a maverick, a gay iconoclast who spoke in support of Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention and has been suggested as a possible Trump Supreme Court pick. However unlikely that is, it would be at least interesting.

He gained more fame in his takedown of Gawker Media by funding Hulk Hogan’s privacy lawsuit against them, which I wrote about in The Justice is Too Damn High! — Gawker, the High Cost of Litigation, and the Weapon Shops of Isher.

The latest news is the Dept. of Labor’s suit against one of the companies Thiel founded, secretive Spook-connected unicorn Palantir, which uses big data analytics algorithms developed at PayPal to combat fraud. Palantir’s software is used by intelligence agencies, government, and industry to detect patterns of hacker and terrorist activity in big datasets. Since much of its revenue comes from government contracts, threats to end Palantir’s government contracts threaten its existence.

The Dept. of Labor (DoL) opened an investigation in 2010 to scan applications for a narrow set of jobs at Palantir to determine whether any bias in hiring was evident. In their filing, the DoL claims Palantir’s applicant pool was predominantly Asian, but those hired were mostly white:

For the QA Engineer Intern position, from a pool of more than 130 qualified applicants — approximately 73 percent of whom were Asian — Palantir hired 17 non-Asian applicants and only four Asian applicants … The likelihood that this result occurred according to chance is approximately one in a billion.

The unstated assumption is that statistical tests of “adverse impact” are good enough to prove illegal discrimination — that the applications of all protected classes were equally strong in the aggregate, and therefore the only acceptable outcome would be hiring in proportion to the applications received from each class of applicant.

This is self-contradictory, of course, since if the DoL wanted to they could claim statistics prove Palantir somehow discriminated against all applicants except Asians in attracting an applicant pool so disproportionately Asian compared to the local job market! And as Palantir states in its response, the DoL made no effort to determine how many of the applicants were even close to qualifying for the positions.

In Death by HR I wrote about the EEOC and its occasional use as a political tool to demonstrate an administration’s commitment to a protected class. Some scapegoat company is picked at random and a suit is brought despite a very weak case, so the government attorneys are often slapped down by annoyed judges.

This case starts to look like something worse — the intentional use of prosecutorial discretion to punish political enemies. Peter Thiel is the only Silicon Valley figure to publicly support Donald Trump, a fact which was known when the decision to file suit was made. We’ve seen an apparently corrupted decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for willful violations of secrecy statutes and other actions of the DoJ which demonstrate that Administration-connected figures can violate the law with impunity.

The Administrative State is largely unaccountable, shielded by Civil Service rules and employee unions in the Democratic coalition. With a president of their party, the bureaucrats are impossible to rein in using the budgetary authority of Congress, since any attempt to control them will be vetoed or result in the government shutdown faceoff. If the Administrative State grows bolder in favoring the party that feeds it through selective enforcement, there will be no turning back from the repressive superstate I wrote about in Substrate Wars.

The technology community should be alert to the dangers it faces in flirting with DC politicians. Google’s image is already being damaged by its favoritism toward Democrats, and Twitter has lost its freedom of speech cred by giving censorship authority to self-appointed social justice activists. Meddling in elections is a dangerous game, since even if you win, your partisan actions are remembered, and the regulatory state can come down on you when it’s run by a new administration.

The TechCrunch story is a typical writeup.


Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, to be published Oct. 17th but available now for pre-order 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:

The Justice is Too Damn High! – Gawker, the High Cost of Litigation, and the Weapon Shops of Isher
Regulation Strangling Innovation: Planes, Trains, and Hyperloop
Captain America and Progressive Infantilization
FDA Wants More Lung Cancer
Corrupt Feedback Loops: Public Employee Unions

Death by HR: eARCs for Review

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations is scheduled for official release October 17th, and it can’t be reviewed until then.

I’d be happy to send an eARC (Electronic Advanced Reader Copy) to anyone who is willing to read it then write a quick review on Amazon or Goodreads on the 17th or after. Send an email to JebKinnison@gmail.com with your preferred reading format (epub, PDF, mobi) and I’ll get one to you.

I’m still not satisfied with the subtitle. The book is really about all the bureaucracy HR imposes on companies, not just affirmative action / diversity programs that do more harm than good. But AA is one good example of a government-pushed initiative being enforced by HR in a way that hurts everyone: the company, the diversity hires, and the economy as a whole.

Here’s the description:

Over a third of adults under 35 now live with their parents. Young men are working much less and playing video games much more as they fail to find good jobs, and the rates of marriage and family formation are way down. More people of all ages have given up trying to find a job. Meanwhile, companies report a shortage of skilled workers, and many good jobs remain unfilled for months or years.

Human Resources (HR) departments are widely disliked, and job searchers are generally advised to directly contact the hiring manager directly if they really want to be considered for a job. There are good reasons why HR acts like an arm of the government bureaucrats pressuring companies to hire more protected minorities and women–because that’s what they are, in many companies.

From the bestselling author of Avoidant comes a fresh look at HR and the hiring of mediocre employees favored by affirmative action programs. It’s a new Age of Incompetence, with brain-dead, unaccountable employees holding sinecures at the heart of our government agencies and regulated institutions like banks and hospitals, protected by affirmative action and union policies. The rot is spreading as pressure from state and federal regulation of companies has increased, promoting an internal compliance bureaucracy that has devalued the best job candidates and employees and promoted affirmative action and diversity over team productivity.

The result has been ever-more-costly failures and a steep decline in performance. 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 to make up for bad family backgrounds. Costs for regulated services like schools, colleges, medical insurance, drugs, courts, prisons, and infrastructure like roads and bridges rise far faster than inflation, while time to complete major projects stretches out to decades, and many fail completely and are cancelled after billions have been spent. And the rot is spreading as government pushes businesses to adopt similar employment policies, with HR enforcing government mandates that compromise competitiveness and give overseas companies the advantage.

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 (AA) 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 next battlefield after high tech is discretion in hiring–which the activists believe must be limited to force employers to hire any candidate “qualified” for a job as soon as they apply. Only a few radicals are proposing this kind of blind hiring now, but continuing successes in getting firms to bow to their diversity demands will result in a list of new demands. We have already seen Seattle pass an ordinance requiring landlords to rent apartments to the first applicant who qualifies. And similar movements in hiring–supposedly to prevent discrimination by eliminating management choice of who to employ–are coming soon.

This book may make you angry, but it will show you how you can fight back by resisting HR and its policies.

Death by HR: Yahoo Anti-Male Discrimination Case

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

This wrongful firing and anti-male discrimination lawsuit was filed in February but just updated with a demand for trial. The Mercury news story, “Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male employees, lawsuit charges,” by Ethan Baron, has these incriminating allegations:

“When Savitt began at Yahoo the top managers reporting to her … including the chief editors of the verticals and magazines, were less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female,” the lawsuit said. “Savitt has publicly expressed support for increasing the number of women in media and has intentionally hired and promoted women because of their gender, while terminating, demoting or laying off male employees because of their gender.

“Of the approximately 16 senior-level editorial employees hired or promoted by Savitt … in approximately an 18-month period, 14 of them, or 87 percent, were female,” the lawsuit said.

“Mayer encouraged and fostered the use of (an employee performance-rating system) to accommodate management’s subjective biases and personal opinions, to the detriment of Yahoo’s male employees,” said the suit by Scott Ard filed this week in federal district court in San Jose.

Ard, who worked for Yahoo for 3 ½ years until January 2015, is now editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley Business Journal. His lawsuit also claims that Yahoo illegally fired large numbers of workers ousted under a performance-rating system imposed by Mayer. That allegation was not tied to gender….

Ard, hired at Yahoo in 2011, said in the suit that until Savitt and Liberman took over management of the firm’s media section in early 2014, he had received performance reviews and stock options reflecting “fully satisfactory” work. But in June 2014, Liberman told him that his role as head of editorial programming for Yahoo’s home page was being given to a woman Liberman had recently hired, the suit said.

Then in January 2015, during a performance review phone call, Liberman told Ard he was fired, effective that day, because “his performance was not satisfactory.”

The full filing is available here, and worth skimming. Damning if the allegations are backed up by testimony. Yahoo, of course, is denying all. Expect a settlement. But it’s yet more evidence that Yahoo has been mismanaged.

[saved copy of the filing]

More reading on other topics:

Death by HR: EEOC Incompetence and the Coming Idiocracy
The Justice is Too Damn High! – Gawker, the High Cost of Litigation, and the Weapon Shops of Isher
Regulation Strangling Innovation: Planes, Trains, and Hyperloop
Captain America and Progressive Infantilization
FDA Wants More Lung Cancer
Corrupt Feedback Loops: Public Employee Unions
Jane Jacobs’ Monstrous Hybrids: Guardians vs Commerce
Death by HR: How Affirmative Action is Crippling America
Death by HR: The End of Merit in Civil Service
Death by HR: History and Practice of Affirmative Action and the EEOC
Civil Service: Woodrow Wilson’s Progressive Dream
Corrupt Feedback Loops: Justice Dept. Extortion
Corrupt Feedback Loops, Goldman Sachs: More Justice Dept. Extortion
Sons of Liberty vs. National Front
Trump World: Looking Backward
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:

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
Science Fiction Fandom and SJW warfare

More reading on the military:

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

“Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,” Cover Reveal

Death by HR Print Cover

Death by HR Print Cover

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations is available on Amazon Kindle. The cover for the print version is finished, as you can see. Someone asked me if I realized the gears won’t turn in that configuration — I told him that was the point.

I’ll post again when the book goes live Oct. 17th, and when the print version is available soon thereafter. But feel free to support the launch by pre-ordering the Kindle version. Early readers who want to read it right now and promise to post a fair review can email me at jebkinnison@gmail.com and I’ll send you an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) in the format of your choice, with the promise you’ll end your review with “I received an advanced copy of the book in return for my honest review.”

The text on the back cover:

Over a third of adults under 35 now live with their parents. Young men are working much less and playing video games much more as they fail to find good jobs, and the rates of marriage and family formation are way down. More people of all ages have given up trying to find a job. Meanwhile, companies report a shortage of skilled workers, and many good jobs remain unfilled for months or years.

Human Resources (HR) departments are widely disliked, and job searchers are generally advised to directly contact the hiring manager directly if they really want to be considered for a job. There are good reasons why HR acts like an arm of the government bureaucrats pressuring companies to hire more protected minorities and women—because that’s what they are, in many companies.

From the bestselling author of Avoidant comes a fresh look at HR and the hiring of mediocre employees favored by affirmative action programs. It’s a new Age of Incompetence, with brain-dead, unaccountable employees holding sinecures at the heart of our government agencies and regulated institutions like banks and hospitals, protected by affirmative action and union policies. The rot is spreading as pressure from state and federal regulation of companies has increased, promoting an internal compliance bureaucracy that has devalued the best job candidates and employees and promoted affirmative action and diversity over team productivity.

The result has been ever-more-costly failures and a steep decline in performance. 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 deadly 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 to make up for bad family backgrounds. Costs for regulated services like schools, colleges, medical insurance, drugs, courts, prisons, and infrastructure like roads and bridges rise far faster than inflation, while time to complete major projects stretches out to decades, and many fail completely and are cancelled after billions have been spent. And the rot is spreading as government pushes businesses to adopt similar employment policies, with HR enforcing government mandates that compromise competitiveness and give overseas companies the advantage.

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 (AA) 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 next battlefield after high tech is discretion in hiring—which the activists believe must be limited to force employers to hire any candidate “qualified” for a job as soon as they apply. Only a few radicals are proposing this kind of blind hiring now, but continuing successes in getting firms to bow to their diversity demands will result in a list of new demands. We have already seen Seattle pass an ordinance requiring landlords to rent apartments to the first applicant who qualifies. And similar movements in hiring—supposedly to prevent discrimination by eliminating management choice of who to employ—are coming soon.

This book may make you angry, but it will show you how you can fight back by resisting HR and its policies.

More Reading:

Death by HR: EEOC Incompetence and the Coming Idiocracy
The Justice is Too Damn High! – Gawker, the High Cost of Litigation, and the Weapon Shops of Isher
Regulation Strangling Innovation: Planes, Trains, and Hyperloop
Captain America and Progressive Infantilization
The Great Progressive Stagnation vs. Dynamism
FDA Wants More Lung Cancer
Corrupt Feedback Loops: Public Employee Unions
Jane Jacobs’ Monstrous Hybrids: Guardians vs Commerce
Death by HR: How Affirmative Action is Crippling America
Death by HR: The End of Merit in Civil Service
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:

Diversity Hires: Pressure on High Tech
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
SFF, Hugos, Curating the Best
Science Fiction Fandom and SJW warfare

More reading on the military:

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