Peter Does Not Approve

Last week, at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, I co-led a session on “Leading in Uncertain Times” with my friend Dahna Goldstein. At one point, while discussing layoffs, an attendee asked a question that I heard as “Aren’t layoffs a good opportunity to lose the organizational dead weight?” and before I had time to edit my reaction, I just blurted out “I don’t approve!”, getting quite a laugh from the room – a good feat when one is discussing layoffs. On Monday, my nptech doppelganger, Steve Heye, blogged about the conference and included the meme to your left, leaving me to conclude that there is no better excuse for a long overdue rant blog!

So here are some other things that I don’t approve of:

• Unequal pay. Yesterday was Equal Pay Day, a day so named because if one were to take the 93 days of 2017 that to that date and add them to the 365 days of the full year, that would be the number of days that a woman has to work to earn as much as a man doing the same job, per the current wage gap. And, as Lily Ledbetter pointed out at the “Salesforce World Tour” event that I was at, lower pay means many things, including lower retirement earnings. Salesforce shows a lot of leadership here – they have now twice made salary adjustments to address this gap. One three years ago when they first acknowledged that they, like most companies, and particularly tech companies, engaged in this discrimination; then this week, after buying out 14 companies and inheriting their equal pay problems. Here’s hoping that other tech companies start following their lead!

• The Internet of Things. If you gave 50 monkeys 10 years to write software designed to internet-enable appliances, automobiles, and consumer electronics, they would probably come up with a more ethical and secure product than we’re seeing from the current bunch of manufacturers. We’ve had the dolls that talk to the children and then broadcast all of their responses back to the manufacturer; the TVs that do the same thing. We’ve had the hundreds of thousands of cameras hard-coded with the same password, which were subsequently hacked so that the devices could be used to take down half of the internet. We’ve had the vibrators that sent their users moans and squeals back to the
  

  Picture by Pete Toscano

  manufacturer. And this week we got a device that checks to see if your garage door is closed from a manufacturer who will brick the gadget if you give them a bad review on Amazon. It’s not just the complete disregard for security that allows bad actors to say, hack your car and steer it off a cliff – it’s the bad ethics of the former retailers/now service providers who can void your investment by simply unplugging their server – or deleting your account. This whole futuristic trend needs to be regulated and run by people who know what they’re doing, and aren’t completely inept and immoral.

• The Walking Dead. My son and I watch this show religiously, and we’re beginning to wonder why. As one of my heroes, Joe Bob Briggs, used to say “There’s too much plot getting in the way of the story!” I’ve read the comics (or, more accurately, the compendiums), that take me a bit past the Negan storyline, and they do things much, much better than the show by keeping the story moving without stretching out the violence to completely cringe-worthy extremes. Bad things happen, but they propel the story, as opposed to drowning it.

• The White House Budget Proposal. I try and keep the politics subdued on this blog, but that’s hard to do when the proposed budget zeroes out funding for the Legal Services Corporation, where I work. It’s hard to see how our patriotic mission – pulled right from the constitution – isn’t worthy of the relatively small amount of federal funding that we receive. We insure, as best we can at our funding levels, that Americans have equal protection under the law. Because, in most jurisdictions, the court only appoints an an attorney in criminal matters, not civil matters like foreclosures, family law, domestic abuse, and consumer fraud. Defunding LSC would unfairly deprive a vulnerable populace of the access to justice that our country was founded on. They’ll be at the mercy of unethical landlords, banks, and abusers who can afford attorneys. The courts are overwhelmed with defendants who are poorly prepared to defend themselves, but have no other choices if they can’t get legal aid. We’re optimistic that Congress, who sets the budget, will reject this recommendation and continue to fund us, but it’s shocking that the White House can’t see the core American principle that we seek to protect.

There are plenty more things that I disapprove of, like the overhead ratio, beer made with cherries, and don’t get me started on any recent Batman or Superman movie! What’s irking you these days?