As a small part of my retirement plan I came up with the business idea of creating a bumper sticker that can hopefully catch fire and sell a million. So here it is, designed by yours truly, expressing the root cause for the problem with ‘Merica. Shoot me an e-mail @ billtoner.email@gmail.com and we can arrange for a $3 PayPal transfer.

I cruised past the 40 year mark last year in the high tech industry. It’s been a ride with ups and downs for sure. The recession of the early 1980s. The dot com boom of the 1990s. The recession of the early 2000s. Times have been good and times have been lean.

I had the good fortune of getting steered into role as a DevOps engineer for the twilight of my career. Good in the sense that it’s a job title that is in high demand. I haven’t felt this much job security in a long time.

For about 36 of those 40 years, corporations have had the upper hand in employment. All are at-will employers, but suffice it to say most corporations have a cattle mindset when it comes to headcount. Attrition hardly ever mattered much. Everyone is easily replaceable. Oh, you’re leaving? Best of luck to you.

There have been 2 exceptions to this. During the dot com boom I saw engineers leave for startups at shocking rates. Tektronix during the 1990s was a great place to work, but people were being woo’d away with signing bonuses and salary increases to the tune of about 5 a week. That was the first time I ever saw management and HR have to huddle up and try to figure out what to do about attrition. “We have to stop this.”

I remember thinking how great it was that employees finally had the upper hand. We get to decide what might be fun things to get involved with and they have to listen. The corporation has motivation to treat us well lest we might up and leave. They HAVE to be nice to us.

For years I toiled at Boeing as an Flight Controls Engineer, which you’d think would be in pretty high demand but actually not. The skillset wasn’t that transferable. Boeing was the definition of how corporations treat employees like cattle. By the very nature of the beast, any corporation that boasts 8 layers of management can’t help itself but make the poor souls at the bottom of the rung feel pretty inconsequential.

Okay now add to that environment an economic slowdown in aerospace complete with layoffs and the company really has the upper hand. If you want to complain about something, you have to talk with your feet. That’s your only option – get another gig. Even then they shrug off the loss like yesterday’s newspaper.

Enter the 2010s and the Amazon Cloud. That was the beginning of another turning point that put supply and demand back in favor of the little guy. Suddenly cloud certification became a big ticket to a higher paying job and if you were good you could even be a little choosy about which opportunities to get involved with. The bonus money started to look really healthy. If you’re fortunate enough to work for a profitable company, the incentives are nothing to sneeze at.

At the start of the 2020s, even with the pandemic, DevOps engineers have had the upper hand for a while. I’ve seen a raft of departures lately from people who worked at companies with rock solid careers in place. They are getting enticed away with offers for higher compensation and better work. Management is starting to get nervous again. If this keeps up another round of HR meetings will take place to try and figure out how to stop the bleeding.

In some cases, nothing less than a management epiphany will reverse their fortunes. Case in point is jobs that included on-call. On-call comes with the dreaded requirement of being chained to your house for a week or more at a time. For those of us who do it, it blows. One thing that would make the requirement a little more palatable is if companies would compensate for it — and I mean really compensate for it, not a token $50 a day for the inconvenience of having to be at the ready 24/7. I proposed this to a mid level manager at a previous employer and he wasn’t having any of it. “I want people who love what they are doing and passionate about it.” Translation: Willing to work for free. To be fair, some companies have figured this out and have gotten creative about ways to compensate or otherwise comp the time for the inconvenience it causes. But not everyone gets it yet, and those that don’t will suffer higher attrition, at least in this market. Next year could be a whole different ball game.

It’s Econ 101, really. Supply and Demand. It would have been nicer if more than 4 years out of those 40 had been tilted towards the little guy, but as they say, “first world problem.”

Rush Limbaugh was a sorry excuse for a human being. The examples of this are well documented from making fun of Chelsea Clinton (a minor at the time), to mocking Michael J. Fox’s disability, to his cheering of AIDS victims to suffer.

There are 2 things that are truly sad about this, none of which has anything to do with Limbaugh. The first is, rags like the Wall Street Journal have the audacity to write opinion pieces focusing only on the impact Limbaugh had on the so-called conservative movement, ignoring his egregious behavior as a not-so-clandestine racist. The second is you, the Limbaugh listener. Common sense should have told you to turn that ignoramus off.

Freezing Texans, you know, the ones who are burning their fences to stay warm, aren’t fans of limited government right now. But they were when they voted for Greg Abbot for governor, and Ted Cruz and John Cornyn for Senator.

Every state has to make choices about limited government vs. the welfare state model. Texans chose to go it alone on the power grid and are now paying a price. This is what my father used to call natural consequences. Maybe it wasn’t the right decision, but spending a few nights in the cold might fix that for the next time. All good.

In the midst of the crisis Texans found their senior senator Ted Cruz hopping a flight to Mexico to enjoy some rays while the food lines grew longer and the water shortages persist. As Atlantic write David Graham pointed out, Cruz’s sin was not so much hypocrisy because all politicians can be accused of that in some form, but that he failed to use what power he had to lift a finger for his constituents. Taking a page from the Trump playbook, he bolted for a warmer climate and recreational opportunities for himself.

The thing to watch according to Graham, is whether the response by elected leaders is performative versus useful. Witness last night’s Fox News interview with Gov. Abbott who, try as he might, tried to put the blame on the Green New Deal, which as we all know hasn’t even materialized yet. So far the response has been predictably performative.

As Ed Burmila aptly but it, there are no libertarians on airplanes. Deregulation sounds great until it’s you on the deregulated flight.

This goes against everything I was just reading about the Dalai Lama’s teachings about seeing my neighbor as another human being just like me, but I’m personally hoping for a bloodbath of embarrassing moments at the impeachment trial. Not that I’m an aspiring Buddhist anyway.

The reason goes back to how dangerously close we came to having a fascist regime with a small army of cult followers running the country. Republicans can’t be trusted with supporting free and fair elections so the only short term solution is to make sure there are less of them. They are already cooking up ways to make voting more difficult in 2022 where they are in control in Arizona, Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Taking a page from the Benghazi playbook Democrats should drag culpable republicans through a public spectacle of a senate trial with the goal of pasting as much egg on their faces as possible. That’s exactly what they did to Hillary Clinton with the Benghazi hearings and it was very effective at putting a stain on the Clinton brand.

I have no fantasies that Trump will be convicted and I suspect the impeachment managers know the outcome of the final vote is inevitable. That would depend heavily on 17 senators doing the right thing (they won’t). But that’s not the point this time. This is more like getting sued and opening up the process for discovery. Yes, let’s please do review what just happened publicly.

Tens of thousands of people have left the Republican party since the failed insurrection attempt on Jan. 6th. If Democrats play their cards right they can make the Republican brand so toxic by the end of the senate trial that nobody should want that moniker next to their name. It’ll take years to rub the stink off.

With apologies to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, this is how the game is played now, or we risk not having a democracy for much longer. Republicans might go through some things this week, and I’m less interested in seeing the final weigh in of the main ticket and more interested to see how many Congressional Republicans get dragged along for the ride.

The Serenity Prayer often comes to mind in today’s toxic political climate.

God grant me the serenity 

To accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference.

I can be up in arms about Trump and Republicans all day long but have little power to change it. At the state level Republicans were clear enablers of the Trump agenda and there’s little I can do about that either, except vote every couple of years.

What I do have control over though is my relationship with you. At any time I get to decide if you’re out. I don’t do this lightly or without some level of thoughtfulness. I’ve got friends who voted for Trump in 2016 based on the canard that Republicans are better for the economy. I’m happy to debate this issue all day long, but if that was your reason and you voted for Trump once because of that, I can forgive you. While I thought there was plenty of evidence that the Trump administration would be a disaster to climate, public health, racism, and yes, the economy, I don’t expect everyone to see it my way. That’s why I’ve been debating Republican friends over policy for 35 years.

However, if you witnessed the spectacle of the past four years and still said yeah, he’s my guy, you’re out. Nobody should have an excuse to be that blind, I’m very sorry.

As I read various publications about the decline of the Republican party, two things become apparent. One is, changing demographics do not favor Republicans. The other is, not all Republicans are dumb.

According to Emma Green, a writer for the Atlantic, about a third of Millennial voters identify or lean republican. Among Millennials, more people are non-religious than part of any faith group including evangelicals. Clearly republicans haven’t done anything of late to attract the youth vote. The ones I talk to are hostile towards boomers for bankrupting the treasury.

This math however, should give democrats little if any comfort. Why? Because republicans cheat. Redistricting is already underway at state houses across the land. Republicans in Arizona are hard at work trying to cancel vote by mail. If you don’t have the numbers then I guess you have to devise ways to come out ahead.

2022 is shaping up to be a race between Democrats trying to take advantage of demographics in their favor vs. Republicans devising new ways to suppress the vote. It’s hard to say how it will turn out but the race is on.

It’s always fun reading American History and being in awe of the patriots who led the charge like George Washington and John Adams. In David McCoullagh’s biography of John Adams I was struck by the level of personal sacrifice involved by the leaders of the revolution. General Washington spent months out in the freezing cold chasing down his own soldiers from deserting. John Adams spent months on ships at sea traveling to Europe where heaving several times a day was expected behavior and the probability of reaching your arrival was around 70% – or in other words, a 30% chance the ship doesn’t make it.

This brings me to the protagonists of Jan. 6th. Leaders of the “Save America / Save the Steal” movement. They exhibited so much courage they had their limos deliver them to the site where they gave speeches that riled the crowd up about the need for a ‘revolution.’

Lin Wood

“TIME TO START KICKING ASS”

Rudy Giuliani

“TRIAL BY COMBAT”

Donald Trump

“SOMETHING’S WRONG HERE. SOMETHING’S REALLY WRONG. CAN’T HAVE HAPPENED.” AND WE FIGHT. WE FIGHT LIKE HELL AND IF YOU DON’T FIGHT LIKE HELL, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO HAVE A COUNTRY ANYMORE.”

Unlike Washington and Adams however there was no personal sacrifice involved. Following the speaches, after promising to join the revelers, they promptly got back in their limousines and went to their favorite TV viewing rooms.

The Leaders of the Movement making a b-line for their TVs

What has the GOP acting all wonky about Georgia? This.