Do No Evil, My Ass

On March 11, I was informed by Google that this site had been removed from its index.  Here's the text of what I received:

From:	Google
Subject:	Removal from Google's Index
Date:	March 11, 2009
To:	‹ Previous | 2 of 2 | Next › Recipient

Dear site owner or webmaster of hespos.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

The following is some example hidden text we found at http://www.hespos.com/:

Alprazolam Tafil Alprazolam And Alcohol Alprazolam Fedex Alprazolam Overnight Alprazolam Dosage Alprazolam Addiction Alprazolam Overdose Purchase Alprazolam Buy Alprazolam Online Alprazolam Xr Alprazolam Xanax 2mg Alprazolam Kill You Alprazolam Grapefruit Juice Alprazolam 25mg Alprazolam Extended Release Alprazolam Abuse Anxiety Alprazolam What Does Alprazolam Look Like Alprazolam Card Master Alprazolam Half Life Xanax Buy 2mg Alprazolam Alprazolam 2mg Picture Alprazolam And Pregnancy 2mg Alprazolam Online Pharmacy Alprazolam Buy Cheap Alprazolam Vs Lorazepam Alprazolam Degradation Photo Alprazolam Pic Acne Alprazolam Cause Alprazolam Free Prescription

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from hespos.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.

We would prefer to keep your pages in Google's index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-been-hacked-now-what.html. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.

Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

It's not like this site is a commercial enterprise, but I like people to be able to find me (and certain things I've written) when they look for me on Google.  So this is kind of a big deal, but nothing Earth-shattering like losing thousands of dollars in ad revenue or anything like that.

What makes this situation infuriating is that, much like when I was a part of the AdSense program, Google likes to point out problems but not tell people where they found those problems.  If you recall, I ditched AdSense because Google sent me a similar e-mail in which they claimed they witnessed fraudulent click activity on my site but wouldn't give me specifics.   I was left wondering not just how to fix the problem, but what the problem was to begin with.  Furthermore, Google likes to keep people at arm's length and refuse to answer questions or address issues.  They want you to fix what's "wrong" and when it suits them, they might reconsider your participation in the program.  When they get around to it.

Turns out that I did spot a piece of comment spam that managed to sneak through Akismet.  It looked similar to what was identified above, and I killed it.  But it's one of tens of thousands of comment spams I get in any particular month.  The notion that if a single one happens to slide through at around the same time that Google's spiders visit my site, I could have my entire site de-listed is just plain silly.

You may recall that in 2006 I posted something about a panel I participated in at the Hyperlinked Society Conference at Annenberg.  That was the one where I asked people to consider that there was an evil side to Google's attribution of value to links, and that comment spam was a manifestation about this.  Basically, my argument was that if links have value (and they do), then there will be people who try to game the system, which presents us with a metric shitload of problems.  I took some heat from Jeff Jarvis when it came time for Q&A, and if I recall correctly, he said Google's democratization of links was the best thing to ever happen to the hyperlink.

But what about when we don't feel like participating in the arms race anymore?

Over the few years I've been blogging, I've upgraded my content management system countless times, including two major overhauls when I switched from Blogger to Movable Type and then from Movable Type to Wordpress.  I've tried countless anti-spam plugins, captcha mechanisms, and schemes to keep the comment spammers from loading up my site with ads for boner pills, Mexican pharmacies and the DRTV products du jour.  And I'm really tired of it.  I have a few choices here:

1. Continue the arms race. Go find more anti-spam plugins.  Keep upgrading.  Let the technology distract from the content.  (Not an option anymore.  Sorry.)
2. Turn comments off. (Not an option.  Turn comments off and it's no longer a blog.)
3. Just let Google have its way with me. Looks like my only real option.

What's ironic about this whole situation is that comment spammers are entirely Google's creation.  If Google never devised PageRank to begin with, comment spammers wouldn't exist.  I wouldn't have spambots crawling all over it constantly, trying to find a way in to advertise boner pills.  I wouldn't have to put time into protecting my site from spam.  In a way, Google is blaming me and penalizing me for a problem IT created.  To add insult to injury, it's being standoffish about cooperating in a meaningful way toward resolving the issue.  ('Yeah, just deal with your temporary 30-day suspension.  Do a deep-dive investigation of everything on your site and just PRAY that you caught the particular thing we found on your site that we found objectionable.  Otherwise you'll have to resubmit for reconsideration.')

In conclusion...

"Do No Evil," my ass.

Stepping Over a Line

I totally agree with the notion that TARP funds and other bailout monies ought not to be used to fund executive bonuses.  That totally makes sense.  Why should taxpayer funds be abused in this way?  Anyone who doesn't meet a projection of financial success ought not to be rewarded, especially with money that's supposed to loosen the credit markets. But as the sentiment of mainstream America swings like a pendulum, it often swings too far.  And we end up with people criticizing other people for making too much money.  If we continue down this path, we're in a lot more trouble than anyone ever thought.

An economic environment where people take risks but are shamed out of collecting the rewards is a poor place to make a living.  It means that the people who push the economy forward - small business people, investors, executive management at larger companies - won't take risks.  They'll latch on to the money they do have.  And it will make things worse.  A lot worse.

But it seems like we're heading down that path.  Watch the network or cable news shows.  There are a lot of stories bubbling up.  Not all of them are about abuses of TARP funds.  Some of them are about revelations concerning what a CEO makes in comparison to what his workers make.  These stories try to shame a CEO into taking lower pay because they ought to "in this economic climate."

What these stories neglect to mention is that a CEO doesn't make whatever the hell he feels like paying himself.  If the company is a public one, it's got a board of directors that approved an executive compensation plan, and can apply pressure if it feels its CEO is making too much money.  Yet, how many stories are you reading about boards of directors doing that?

What many of these stories also forget to mention is that many executive managers elect to take deferred compensation for past milestones met.  Sometimes a CEO might defer his compensation until the following year, electing to keep capital within the company.  Perhaps, due to a tax situation or other extenuating circumstances (cash flow?) a CEO might elect to take deferred compensation even though they're entitled to it during that particular year, according to their compensation agreement with the board.

Pressuring executive management to leave money on the table that they're entitled to is what Ayn Rand called "looting."  It's worse if the pressure comes from the general public, especially if they're not investors in the company in question.  It's yet worse when people neglect to hold the board of directors accountable rather than executive management.

If this idea that people aren't allowed to earn more than a certain amount during a recession manages to take hold in mainstream America, then we're well on our way to stepping over the line when it comes to providing a fertile environment for businesses.  If we don't have a business-friendly economic environment, people with the money to invest in business (and thus, jobs and local economies) take it elsewhere, and we end up screwing ourselves.

This isn't to say that we ought to avoid keeping a close eye on TARP funds - I do agree that taxpayers ought not to be forced to line the pockets of the under-performing ultra-rich.  But we can't let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction such that making too much money is a crime against America.  If it does swing that far, we're all up a creek.

Examining Capitalism

I've been thinking a bit about some of the weaknesses of capitalism - something I haven't done very often.  I used to be something of a laissez-faire capitalist, but I'm seeing quite a bit of how centralized control of money can make for a very imperfect system.  By way of a hypothetical example... If you were to invest in building a new agri-business company by increasing process efficiency for the farmer, that's great.  You invest in making new seeds that produce disease-resistant crops with higher yields and you start to run your competition out of business.  This is good.  The fit survive and innovation is rewarded.

Take that same agri-business company, and develop seeds that produce plants that won't reproduce.  You leverage your reach into the marketplace and your capital to make it deceptively easy for farmers to plant your seeds.  They're faced with a choice - plant your inferior seeds and give you a recurring yearly revenue stream or plant the competition's seeds and pass along a higher cost to the consumer.

See how the drive toward efficiency produces an inferior product?  It actually rewards it.  This is partly the dynamic that we see in play with big box stores, large conglomerates and yes, agri-business.  We don't end up rewarding innovation.  We end up rewarding large pools of capital.

This is one of the things that is broken in our capitalistic economy.  It rewards large concentrations of wealth and it forces smaller companies into dumb business decisions.  Like that famous Wal-Mart-Vlasic case study where Vlasic is forced to produce gallon jars of pickles that consumers can't finish and that they can't profit from.  There's little choice but to let Wal-Mart win, lest they go to the competition.

Why was I thinking about this stuff now?  Well, with the looting of the U.S. Treasury, we're putting more wealth into fewer hands.  This can't be good.

Let Them Fail

I've been saying for a while that the $700 billion figure for the bailout is nothing more than a conservative stake in the ground and that through assumption of debt and acts other than the direct disbursement of cash, the federal government's gifts to the ultra-rich will extend into the trillions. Go read this article on Bloomberg.  Then, if you're still conscious, come back.

Seven and three-quarter trillion dollars is a sum so incomprehensively large that most Americans can't get their heads around it.  It's so huge as to be meaningless to most people you'd run into on the street.

The Bloomberg reporters try to put this into context, apparently because they seem to be one of the only ones who understand how important it is for people to grok exactly how much money this is.

The money that’s been pledged is equivalent to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It’s nine times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office figures. It could pay off more than half the country’s mortgages.

I dunno about you, but my household's share of that sum is $72,000.  The government wants to take $72,000 from my family and give it away to corporations.

For what?  We can't still be talking about bad mortgages and the securities tied to them.  Look at the last sentence of that quoted paragraph.  This money could pay off more than half the country's outstanding mortgages.  You could probably knock half off everybody's mortgage at this point and watch the capital that's freed up jump-start the economy.  (Of course, that's a ridiculous notion, but it goes to show that Congress would have us believe that this is a much bigger bogeyman.)

What we're seeing here is the flagrant looting of the U.S. Treasury.  If President-Elect Obama doesn't do something, our futures will be given away, consequence-free, to the ultra-rich.  Plain and simple.

What's the solution?  Stop throwing good money after bad and Let Them Fail.  Someone will buy up their assets and make them work more efficiently.  Citigroup isn't worthless.  Neither are the Big Three American auto manufacturers or the big financial institutions.  Someone will revalue those institutions, or pieces of them, and make them work.  But for that to happen, we have to remove the safety net and Let Them Fail.

Yes, it will suck.  Yes, we will all have to suffer.  It's better than the alternative, which is the notion that we move from a democratic system of government and a capitalistic economic system to a corporatist system, where the government is merely an instrument that allows large corporations and the ultra-rich to extort money from the people.

Under a system like that, large corporations and the executives that run them will play under a different set of rules.  They'll be able to run their companies as they see fit, with no consequence for failure.  You and I will make up for their inefficiencies as we're tasked with bailing them out when they fail and keeping them in a position of power - one where we don't really own our own property, since our property can be taken at will from us by corporations via the federal government.

Of course, it might not get that far.  Consider that, if the dollar is significantly devalued, those with large sums of money might be the only ones who can afford to maintain their lifestyle.  In short, it won't matter if you make $250,000 a year, the threshold at which President-Elect Obama believes you to be wealthy.  That $250,000 won't be able to pay for the lifestyle you're used to under today's expectations of the value of the dollar.  Only someone making over $1,000,000 a year will be able to afford that lifestyle.  Get it?  The ultra-rich are lengthening the yardstick.

Do something, President-Elect Obama, before there's no middle class left to defend.