Infrastructure Megaprojects: Jobs

Over the last fifteen years the American middle class has been gutted. Unemployment, while dropping slowly, is still high. Underemployment is worse; maybe more people have full-time jobs, but at reduced wages. This is the fundamental economic problem we face. It directly affects the lives of millions of Americans, and is the cause of much of our budget deficit. (Government tax receipts dropped like a stone when all those people lost their jobs, not to mention all the welfare they suddenly needed.)

I think the government could do more to help people find work. We've talked about building huge things, like power grids and aqueducts, which provide direct employment. But what about helping people find existing jobs? Or incentivizing the creation of better ones?

As an added bonus for the deficit hawks out there, or perhaps those who think government should be run like a business, consider this: if the government spends $1k helping me get a better job, how long before the government gets that $1k back in the taxes I pay and the welfare I no longer need? From a strictly financial perspective, spending money helping people get jobs is one of the best investments our government can make.

So suppose you're looking for a job, and can't find one. What can stop you?

Information 
You can't get a job you don't know exists. The government could create a central jobs bank, a single location where employers across the country could post job openings. And when I say employers across the country, I mean all of them. Pay employers to post job openings, and you'll have a database of every job everywhere quite rapidly. Figure there are ten million job openings in the country at any time. At $100 per opening posted, that's $1b. Chump change on the scale of the projects we're talking about.

Naturally, no matter what system you set up, someone will try to game it. We'd need to pay employers, not just for submitting an opening, but only if the job is filled by someone, and you can confirm who that someone is. That should take care of most cases of fraud. You'd also need to put limits on how often you could hire for the same position, or the same person, and promotions from within couldn't count. There will still be flaws, but for the most part it's workable. You don't shut down a functional project because of 1% waste.

The other downside is that this could completely destroy every other online jobs site. Who could survive against a negative-profit competitor? But consider, the government has a terrible track record lately with building complex websites. So perhaps a better idea is to contract the service out to existing job sites. Have a central database, but give easy hooks for Monster and Dice and whoever else to mine the data and list the results. Leverage the market, instead of trying to replace it.

Education
So now we have a giant list of every job in the country. For many, that means you can now be absolutely certain that you'll never make more than you're making now unless you retrain. So we link the jobs listings with data on training programs; each listing says "here are the qualifications, and here's how you get the qualifications if you don't have them." Link directly to a list of relevant educational programs, and all available financial assistance for each. As a bonus, this gives the government more data to target educational assistance.

Experience
Now you've found a job, and you have the paper qualifications. But you can't get any of them; they all say 3-5 years experience required! (Particularly funny when they want ten years experience programming in a language that hasn't existed that long...) How do you get experience when all the job openings require you to have experience? Chicken, egg.

Decades ago, companies had apprenticeship programs. They would actively train replacements for older employees, taking someone with no experience and turning them into whatever they needed. These programs are mostly gone. Companies don't plan decades in advance now; they're focused entirely on maximizing immediate profit. This is leading many industries into a disaster: as older employees retire, there's literally nobody with their skillset to replace them!

The government could incentivize apprenticeship programs. For a rough estimate, say the program is two years long, and that the government paid the entire compensation of the apprentice. For $10b, we could easily fund a hundred thousand apprenticeships, and probably more. We end up with a more skilled, more employable workforce, and those more skilled employees will almost certainly pay for themselves: the more money they make, the more taxes the government receives. Again, if you're the sort to say that government should be run like a business, I'd call that a good investment.

Competition
American companies often complain that they can't find skilled workers in the United States, and push for H-1B visas. We need to import workers, they say, to fill this skills gap. But there is no skills gap! There are plenty of American workers able to do the jobs in question. The inability to hire a $25/hr worker at $10/hr is not a skills gap. I'm all for immigration, but we don't need to be purposefully importing low-cost workers to compete with Americans for jobs.

Also, failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. If these companies hadn't dismantled their apprenticeship programs, they'd be in a better position. I'm not inclined to screw American worker to make up for a corporate lack of foresight.

Location
Okay, say you've found a job you're qualified for, but it's too far away. You need to move, but you need a moving truck, and gas, and a place to live, and a deposit, at a minimum, not to mention lost wages in between jobs. You may also need temporary housing while you look for a permanent place. Moving's expensive, especially over a long distance. For people barely making ends meet, it may just not be an option.

Let's take the naive approach first and throw money at the problem, just to get a sense of the scale of things. Assume we have a million people moving across the country every year for work. If you just handed each one $5000 in moving assistance, that's $5b a year. Easily affordable, especially when you consider that putting someone to work in a better job gets the government tax income it didn't have before. That $5000 should come back easily within two years in most cases.

One specific expense the government could subsidize is real-estate agents. Many people moving a long distance for work wouldn't spend the extra money for a professional to help them find a place to live. But that kind of local professional is exactly what you need in that situation: you need someone who knows the local market and can find you what you're looking for quickly and efficiently.

Transportation
You've found a job, you're qualified for it, and it's in your city. But you can't afford a car, and you can't afford to move close enough to the job for walking or biking to be viable. What do you do?

Obviously, someone's going to have to drive you. If there are bus routes or trains already, great! But if you live or work outside a high-density area, that's not going to help you. You're going to need something more point-to-point. The government paying to facilitate that transportation could make all the difference between employment and unemployment.

Assume a 20-mile commute, which is pretty common these days. We could pay for a taxi, but that could cost $450/wk. We could rent a car for under $200/wk, plus $35 in gas, which sounds better. Assuming the standard 56 cents per mile, we're not going to do any better than $115/wk for a single-passenger vehicle; if that vehicle comes with a driver, they'll probably make enough per week for their time that we're back up to rental car levels. For single-passenger, a rental car may be the best we can reasonably do. So that comes to over $10k/year, which most people aren't going to pay in taxes with a better job. If you're getting someone off other forms of welfare, though, it may pay for itself.

Now, if neither home nor work is completely isolated from other travelers, we can reduce cost further with multiple passengers. So we're back to what I've proposed before: incentiveized carpooling. Pay people to carpool, set up a system to make it easy (or leverage an existing system like Uber or Lyft with modifications for multiple riders). The cost of helping this one carless person get to work could easily be cut in half, or better. Plus there will be fewer cars on the road, which is good for everyone.

Unpredictability
So you've found a job, you can get there, but they keep changing your hours. You work two hours this week, fourteen next week, you have no regular schedule, and you'd better be available 24-7 in case they call you in. And if you show up for a scheduled shift, you might be sent straight home. Don't like it? Too bad, you're replaceable.

This is what's wrong with a completely unregulated labor market: there are vastly more suppliers (workers) than there are consumers (employers). Without regulation, market forces dictate exactly what we see: wages go to nothing, and quality of life for the workers drops to nothing. Remember, the market is a tool for telling us what will happen. Like all science, it says nothing about what should happen, any more than observing nature tells us we should be eaten by predators because we can't fight back.

This means some form of government regulations are the only solution; by nature, market forces don't result in the outcomes we as a society prefer. We want people to have decent lives, and to be able to make a living working. So we're working counter to market forces, and that's okay, so long as we do it well.

If you're scheduled to work a shift 48 hours before shift start, you should be paid for that shift, even if the manager screwed up and scheduled too many people. If you're on-call, you should be paid like you're on-call. If you have a work schedule that works for you, you should be able to keep that schedule without arbitrary changes. In other words, you should be able to have a job.

What does "close the border" actually mean?

I had this conversation on the Tennessean comments page, wherein Larry Tanner was saying we should "close the border". I asked for clarification, tried to provide some of my own, and everything got honest in a surprising direction. It was refreshing, when most people just spit out talking points and call each other names.

The original topic was Obama's requested appropriations to execute the law relating to the present refugee crisis. Keep in mind, I am not with the below advocating any course of action, nor am I condoning any of Larry's positions. I am simply saying we all need to be clear about what we're suggesting should be done.

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Larry: I wouldn't be against this if a portion, probably a large portion, was used to close the border to illegal immigration. Without the border being closed, this would only be a Band-Aid requiring more billions to care for the next wave of "children" which are sure to come.

Stephen: Define what the border being "closed" would look like. I mean, it's not like these children are crossing undetected or unimpeded. They cross the border and turn themselves in. What do you want, a giant two-thousand mile impenetrable wall?

Larry: Impede them. I know the feds won't do this but the Texans can and are doing this as we type. The gist of the letter was money. Take care of the ones that are here until we can send them back and stop completely any more from getting their grubby little toes in the Rio Grande.

Stephen: How?

Larry: Threaten the Mexicans with sanctions or tell them to stem the tide or we'll come to the south side of the border and do it for them. Might take out a few drug cartels while we're at it. You're the engineer, how would you do it? Excuse the question, I already know your answer.

Stephen: I'm not necessarily disagreeing with that solution. But I do think it's important to say that's what we're talking about, because I don't think many people have thought about it in those terms. We are talking here about invading and occupying a part of Mexico. That's not a trivial thing.

Invading Mexico has consequences. We need UN approval, or we risk a huge amount of goodwill from the international community. And we actually need that goodwill, believe it or not. We burned a huge amount invading Iraq illegally, and I don't think we could get away with that again.

Now, that said, Mexico is in large part a failed state, and I think we need new international legal structures for handling failed states. If we're threatened from Mexican territory, and the Mexican state can't control their territory well enough to eliminate that threat, we should have some legal means of recourse. I wrote about that here.

In a lot of ways, what we're contemplating is worse than the Iraq invasion, because there is no end game! It's not like we'll eventually leave. We're basically permanently annexing a piece of Mexico to create this hypothetical border zone. In so doing, American soldiers WILL die, and the financial costs will be enormous. The political will may simply not be here internally to sustain an occupation.

Now, compare the cost of your proposed invasion and occupation of part of Mexico to the cost of the uncontrolled border. Which costs more? I really don't know, but I'm betting it's not as easy a decision as it looked before we started talking about it in these terms.

Larry: Nothing is easy these days. I read your link and a lot of thought was put into it and I agree with you on a lot of things. I think you put more importance in the UN than most. Too much in fact. It isn't the organization it once was. If we don't address the southern border and secure it we may very well find ourselves in a position the Israelis are in today with Hamas.

Stephen: The UN as an organization isn't so bad, as long as you don't expect it to be more than it is. If the world is going to get together and say "this kind of thing is not okay", the UN is the place those kinds of statements happen. It has no actual power, nor was it ever intended to. So if we were going to occupy part of Mexico, for any reason, the UN would be where the world discussion about whether that was okay or not would take place.

What I'm really interested in is that we don't act unilaterally on something like this, which violates agreements we've made to not do that. We don't need to look like the bad guy any more than absolutely necessary, because that hurts us in the long run. And we need to make sure we don't set precedent that can be used against us. The UN is the forum for that kind of thing.

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Failed States

The modern state is based on territorial integrity. Here's the cartoon version: we divide the world into regions with clear borders, each region with a government. The government of a region are the only ones allowed to use force in that region. If the government of a region uses force on another region, that's called a war.

But what if a government can't control its territory? What if the people of a region use force on another, without the permission of the government? This describes much of the conflict in the world today. Huge swaths of the world are failed states, areas where no government has control.

Think about what that means for a moment. Civilization as we live it is only possible because life is made predictable. The government guarantees my security, unless you do certain pre-defined things. That allows me to gather wealth without worry about it being stolen by someone with more guns than I have. That in turn allows me to have leisure time, lets me invest, get an education, and not spend every waking moment worrying about bandits taking everything I have and killing me. Removal of chaos improves quality of life. Failed states lack that guarantee.

Further, what if a group in a failed state wants to attack another state? Terrorists, militias, drug cartels, such entities threaten other states. But the usual means of handling such situations don't apply. If you don't like what the Taliban is doing (and who does?), negotiating with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan is pointless. They don't control the relevant territory. Similarly, the Palestinian government may not be able to prevent all Palestinians from attacking Israel, and the Mexican government clearly can not shut down the cartels shipping drugs into the United States.

The concept of failed states is one of the great geopolitical problems of this century. Their very existence challenges all the rules we've put in place to deal with states. But how do you change it? If other armed groups can challenge the local government, how can this be resolved? Someone has to end up the biggest fish the pond again. Either the borders are redrawn, or one side defeats the other and takes the whole state. The former is usually the kind of civil war that ends up in tens of thousands of deaths, and the latter rarely ends in functioning democracy. Dictatorship may be stable in the short term, but in the long term you can't deprive a populace of what they want forever. Trying leads right back to violence. So unless your state lucks out and gets a particularly enlightened dictator who can successfully transition to democracy, you end up with a succession of dictators and civil wars. (See the above map.)

Surely there must be a better option.

For a region to be successful, security of the people in that region must be guaranteed in a predictable fashion. That guarantee can only be made by a stable power with definite rules, and sufficient force to take on all potential adversaries. In short, an area needs rules and force. Either can be developed internally or externally. Failed states, by definition, can not control their territory with internal force.

What about external force? Well, if an external force enters your country and starts enforcing its own rules, we typically call that an invasion and colonization by an empire. Frowned upon these days. But what if an external force enters a country and starts enforcing local rules? What if you've got (at least by historical standards) a quasi-benevolent empire? That would be state-building. We've seen this happen in a number of cases, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes it's a dismal failure, but it can work.

So take the Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany after the second World War, probably our most successful endeavor. I suggest the world should use that example as a base for a long-term project to restore civilization to these chaos regions, one small sliver at a time. It may take centuries, but it may be the only way to build up a failed state into a successful one that can stand on its own. Someone comes in, kicks out all the armed gangs from one city or small region, and secures the area long enough for economy and infrastructure to be put in place.

So how would this happen? If there's enough government to ask, we can go by invitation. ("Hey, we'd like to come spend a hundred billion dollars fixing your country for the next three generations. Good by you?") But if there's no government to negotiate with, it has to be by external consensus. The UN would have to agree that a region would benefit from (mostly) peaceful intervention, and there would need to be evidence that the local populace would respond positively. Only then would intervention be considered.

But who provides the force? There are two prongs to this, after all. You send in construction workers and educators and bureaucrats and whoever else it takes to train a populace to modernize. But you also have to send military force, because security was the original concern. That force could operate under the UN, but they don't have much of an army. The actual force is most likely provided by nearby neighbors able to spare the materiel. This runs into problems with areas the size of Africa, where it would take literally centuries to work from the outside in. But this is envisioned as a very long-term project.

So either we go in by invitation, or the UN gets together, declares some area to not be part of a functioning state, and takes over administration, security, education, etc. How do we get out? There has to be an exit strategy, a definite series of steps towards internal democratization, with more and more being taken over by locals over the years. There have to be definite metrics and milestones, constant improvement every year, or people will stop believing in the goals. It will start to look like an unending occupation.

Now, there are a lot of failed states. How do we pick one? The one with the richest neighbor? The one with the most destabilizing impact on the world? North Korea is an obvious choice by those criteria, being close to South Korea, China, and Japan. But good luck with that! Haiti is another obvious choice, being practically on the USA's doorstep. Or perhaps the US and Europe should go for broke and fix Somalia, which has been near the top of the list since anyone started keeping track.

Okay, so this is crazy. I know it. But think about it this way: we spent over a trillion dollars destroying Iraq, and half that destroying Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, including thousands of our own. And what have we bought with all that blood and treasure? Nothing. We are no safer. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan are no safer (excepting Kurdistan, they're almost certainly better off). We could have taken that money and multiplied the GDP of Haiti by a factor of ten, and that's just by throwing money at the problem. Education and infrastructure would give vastly better returns than that. That's ten million people whose lives would be permanently improved, instead of millions ruined.

Here's my point: if we're going to spend that much on another country, let's get something for it. Let's be a force for good in the world. Let's build things, instead of destroying them.

Of course, I'm not saying we should spend that much on another country. I'd sooner see us spend it here. That will be my next series of posts.

If you could pass one law...

Someone on Quora asked "If you could pass a law, what law would it be?" My answer got into an interesting discussion, which I'm reposting here.

If "law" includes constitutional amendment, I would pass an amendment giving the federal and state governments power to regulate campaign donations and spending. Our democracy collapsed when the Supreme Court ruled that money was speech in the 70's.
Wolf PAC

Someone questioned why I'd want to hinder freedom of speech for groups. 

I responded that every individual in that group would have exactly the same rights and influence as every person outside that group. In other words, groups don't have rights. Individuals in groups do.

Our goal is to have a stable society. The most stable society is a functional democracy, wherein the collective will of the people is expressed and executed. This is my premise.

Now, observations. Unlimited political donation gives some individuals and groups more influence than others. Looking at what happened in politics since the USSC legalized corporate donations, the will of the people has been utterly ignored by the federal government on most or all issues. This can be statistically demonstrated.

Unlimited money in politics breaks democracy, thereby making our society less stable. On these grounds alone, it should be disallowed. All other concerns are secondary.

Someone then claimed that freedom was more important than stability, and that the most stable society would be dictatorship.

Dictatorship is not stable. Dictatorships are plagued by violent rebellion, even more violent suppression of rebellion, and then state collapse when the dictator falls. Look at the entire middle east to see how that goes. At best, dictatorships give the illusion of stability in the short term. Let's not be fooled into thinking that actually translates to stability.

As an observation about humanity in all contexts, if you try to prevent people from getting what they want, they will fight. Democracy gives people what they want. That's why it's stable, at least within the bounds of what's possible given uncontrollable circumstances.

"Freedom" is an abstract buzzword that many use without conveying useful information. Drop the language, and look at what actually happens. Okay, so I'm not prevented from buying elections, and some claim that that fact makes me free. But what does it make everyone else? It makes them my slave, because I just bought the government! What you're describing as freedom is actually disenfranchisement and slavery of the poor. There's no freedom about it!

In fact, let's go there. Compare it to slavery. People were once free to own other people. That freedom was removed. Slaveholders were made less free. Was that wrong? Of course not, because in so doing, other people were made more free.

No liberties are absolute. They're all games of balance between one person's desires and another's. I'm suggesting everyone should have equal influence over their government, which is the fundamental concept of America. To suggest that campaign donations should be unlimited is to take that premise and throw it out, so the rich have more influence than the poor.

I understand reverence for the Bill of Rights. But unlike some, I also understand its place. The Bill of Rights is a tool that exists for the express purpose of protecting one principle: government by the people. If it fails to protect that principle, we fix it. The Bill of Rights is the servant, not the master.  

Moving Borders

Much of modern geopolitics is based on the idea of territorial integrity. A state has these borders, and they are not to be changed. When we invaded Iraq, our stated goal was to ensure a unified country was left behind. When countries try to change the borders of other countries, the international community freaks out, and often lots of people die.

Territorial integrity, like most political concepts, is a nice fiction. There are still border changes. There always have been, and always will be. We're naive to think that the arbitrary lines we've drawn on the map this century will last the rest of time, as if they're different from the arbitrary lines of the past.

Let's look at Iraq for an example. Why is Iraq falling apart right now? Because fundamentally, Iraq has no reason to exist as a single country. There are three major groups, all with their own interests and territory, and none of whom really have a desire to be unified with each other. (Overly broad general statements, obviously.) Iraq came into existence because foreign powers drew the borders, and it's stayed in existence by brute force of the central government. With that force gone, there's nothing holding that country together. The same phenomenon is pulling Syria apart.

Most border changes come about due to war. And war, we would all agree, is an expensive and risky proposition, best avoided. There may be circumstances where war is the best available option, but when it comes to the kinds of wars that lead to border changes, that's not generally the case. We should try to find a better general solution.

(I should say at this point that I am not, with this writing, advocating any particular instance of border change. I am interested in systems that work, and in keeping people alive, not in achieving any particular political end. This should not be interpreted as commentary on any particular revolution, war, or secession movement, past or present. If I choose to comment on those things, I will do so in an unmistakeable manner.)

There's a correlation between war and border change, but which causes which? Does the war cause the border change? Does the desire for border change cause the war? Or is there some third factor that causes both? Clearly, war is a consequence, not the root cause. In many cases, people resort to violence when all peaceful means of achieving their desires have been cut off. (This is one of the reasons why democracy is more stable than totalitarianism; you can't deny people what they want forever.) To avoid violence, therefore, we need some means for people to have what they want. It must be possible for the will of the people to be recognized and executed, even if that means redrawing the map.

Now, redrawing national borders shouldn't be taken on lightly. We can't be talking about a unilateral, simple majority, one-time vote. If secession is too easy, the world becomes unstable instantly. But the barrier also can't be insurmountable, or the pressure buildup leads to the same instability. Wherever we draw the line, it needs to be fixed, so people on both sides know what to expect, and can't complain about the rules being rigged.

Since self-determination is the principle people are typically fighting over, obviously we need to hold a poll. Suppose a part of a state wants to secede. We poll everyone inside the region in question, to find out what they want. But they're not the only interested party; we should also poll the rest of the country. (For multi-sided issues like Iraq, or areas that want to leave one country and join another, we'd need to expand this. Things can get exponentially complex. Right now we'll just address the simplest case.) We have to be sure that the poll is valid, that votes are counted accurately and cast without coercion. Uninvolved international observers are required. There would also have to be some agreement on who gets to vote, age limits, sex, citizenship, that sort of thing. There's going to have to be some serious negotiation going on before the actual vote is held.

But what are the people actually voting on? Obviously if we're talking about redrawing national borders there are an infinitude of possible outcomes, and while only some finite set of them are of interest, it could still be a very long list. There's going to have to be a lot of discussion beforehand about what possibilities are of interest, and the list will have to include the status quo ante.

That means plurality voting won't work; it's fundamentally broken for more than two ballot options. We need either some sort of ranked-choice system, or approval voting. I prefer approval voting for American elections, but in a case like this a Condorcet system might be more appropriate. However, approval voting has one significant advantage over ranked systems: approval can clearly show when no option is acceptable to a majority of the voters. That's useful information in a situation like this.

So we can hold a vote, and gather the opinions of all relevant people in a detailed and accurate fashion. What now? Obviously you can't just treat them as one big vote; the whole point of this is to give the majority in a region a way to win out over the rest of their country without violence. So we need a system for combining the two sets of preferences into a single outcome, in such a way that the votes in the seceding region are equal to the votes outside that region.

The simplest idea is to weight the regions by population. If the main body of the country has ten times the population of the area that wants to secede, give the area that wants to secede ten times the weight. Then combine all the votes into a single count. Unfortunately, the simple idea leads to some absurdities. By this standard, if a region of one person wanted to secede, it would take a unanimous vote of the rest of the country to stop them! Clearly that's not stable. So we reduce the weight by some negotiable factor. This way the people doing the leaving get more weight, but the people being left still count for something. It tends to force people to find an acceptable middle ground.

(This gets more complicated still if the area that wants to secede isn't clearly defined, and that's one of the issues being voted on! Presumably you'd have to evaluate each choice of borders with different weights, depending on who would be on which side of the line. To fully develop this set of rules for every possible circumstance is clearly impossible.)

And this is all theory. It's nice to have a mechanism that could be implemented. Making people accept it, that's a whole different problem. You can hold all the polls you want, but some people don't really care about the outcome of polls. But not everywhere is like that! If such a system were in place, how many secession movements would we see try it in more peaceful areas? How much better would it be for the central governments in those countries? After all, a successful and popular movement that's suppressed by the government makes that government less legitimate. And an unpopular movement that's clearly identified as just being a few troublemakers also helps. There's no downside.

Unless, of course, you're just particularly attached to keeping the map from changing for the rest of time. I, for one, am not.

Ukraine protests

I'm not an expert on Ukraine, international politics, riots, or really much of anything besides electrical engineering and being a first-class smartypants. But there are some things going on that I find distressing.

The Euromaidan is a series of massive protests and riots that have been going on in Ukraine for two months now. These protests are huge. Overthrow-the-government huge. You see, Ukraine was right on the edge of signing a big agreement with the European Union. At the last minute, they backed off in response to pressure from Russia. Russia wants Ukraine to join a post-Soviet customs union. The current President of Ukraine is pretty much in the back pocket of Vladimir Putin, the strongman running Russia for the last decade.

Since by most polls, the Ukrainian public supports associating with the EU much more than associating with Russia (and really, who wouldn't?), this obviously made lots of people very angry. In response to early protests, the Ukrainian government passed (I use the term loosely) new laws making protest illegal.

So now there are huge protests in Kiev, tens of thousands demanding the resignation of the government. Police are getting more and more violent, including several deaths. I'm starting to have flashbacks of the start of the Syrian civil war. And I seriously doubt that Russia would let an allied despotic government next door be overthrown.

We may be watching the start of a new Russian empire.

Now tell me: have the news sources you follow mentioned any of this? The entire thing is being streamed, live! A catapult built by the protestors had a twitter feed! And CNN's top story was that Lady Gaga was no longer banned in China.

I'm doing a better job reporting than CNN. I wish I could be proud of that. Better information here.