President In Over His Head
The Coast Guard has quietly posted their after-action report on the big oil spill from last year, and it's not exactly flattering to the CIC. The criticisms seem mainly to be about the PR disaster, which is amazing considering the White House seemed to be solely focussed on the PR aspects:
Asked about the report, sources with knowledge of White House and DHS involvement went even further, saying the administration "looked at this as a political problem, not an operational problem."
I have to admit, this isn’t so much surprising as merely evidence of what we’ve all felt from the beginning. Really, most of us here knew this before he was even elected, but this administration has repeatedly shown themselves to be amateurs. The presidency is almost always a learning experience, even for the most seasoned executives who take the office; but Obama has shown a complete inability to even keep his head above water. From the simplest events (hosting dignitaries) to the most troubling (Libya), he gets caught off guard. Two weeks ago, John Podhoretz commented that,
We’re going on four weeks now, or more, that Barack Obama has been reading My Pet Goat.
Frankly, it seems to me to have been going on for two plus years.
The thing is, we expect a president to have to learn on the job; a little. But we also expect him to actually get it figured out at some point.
I Say It’s My Birthday
It's my birthday, too, yeah.
I say it's my birthday.
I'm gonna have a good time.
I'm glad it's my birthday.
Happy birthday to me.
You know what would be a great gift? If you'd go leave a message of support for these people.
Thanks,
Dan
BTW, Malkin coming to Marquette U.
Herman Cain Announces Crap Sequel to “The Indian in the Cupboard”
It's called No Muslim in My Cabinet:
I recommend that you watch the whole thing, because the context of what he's saying, and the qualifications, because they're important. Still, he gave them a soundbite that they'll beat him with.
I like Herman Cain, but he might have been less categorical.
That said, sharia has no place in United States courts, any more than canon law does.
Walmart Sex Discrimination Lawsuit 28Mar2011
Sorry, no witty title for this one. I've been following this issue since at least 2007, as you will see below.
Here's a recent piece on the ongoing dispute, which is reaching the Supreme Court:
Christine Kwapnoski hasn’t done too badly in nearly 25 years in the Wal-Mart family, making more than $60,000 a year in a job she enjoys most days.
But Miss Kwapnoski says she faced obstacles at Wal-Mart-owned Sam's Club stores in both Missouri and California: Men making more than women and getting promoted faster.
She never heard a supervisor tell a man, as she says one told her, to “doll up” or “blow the cobwebs off” her makeup.
Once she got over the fear that she might be fired, she joined what has turned into the largest job discrimination lawsuit ever.
The 46-year-old single mother of two is one of the named plaintiffs in a suit that will be argued at the Supreme Court on Tuesday. At stake is whether the suit can go forward as a class action that could involve 500,000 to 1.6 million women, according to varying estimates, and potentially could cost the world’s largest retailer billions of dollars.
....
Columbia University law professor John Coffee said that the high court could bring a virtual end to employment discrimination class actions filed under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, depending on how it decides the Wal-Mart case.“Litigation brought by individuals under Title VII is just too costly,” Mr. Coffee said. “It’s either class action or nothing.”
Illustrating the value of class actions, Brad Seligman, the California-based lawyer who conceived of and filed the suit 10 years ago, said the average salary for a woman at Wal-Mart was $13,000, which he said was “not enough to hire a lawyer and bring a case.”
You mean the EEOC is ineffective? Well, knock me over with a feather!
Of course, it's because lawyers would love a big payday. Let's pretend your hypothetical $13K-making-woman wants to sue (obviously, she's only a part-time worker); even if you worked on contingency, what kind of raises was she likely out of? At most a dollar or two an hour? That doesn't make much for damages. But if you've got hundreds of thousands of such women, ka-ching!
Thing is, "proving" sex discrimination for such a large group involves statistical analysis.... and there's a weakness there that I hope Walmart will point out with its own statistical experts. Back in February 2007, when I first heard about this case, I wrote the following letter to the WSJ (which did not get printed):
The recent article on Walmart's appeal as the the class action status
of the sex discrimination suit puts me in mind of a pervasive problem
with using statistics to "prove" discrimination on various bases.The issue is called Simpson's Paradox (see Wikipedia article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox). It is entirely
possible that in every single Walmart store women do better than men
with regards to promotions, salaries, etc. but on a companywide basis
they do worse. This may seem illogical, but this crops up all the time
when there isn't a uniform distribution of various groups amongst the
individual stores.A famous example of this was a study of Berkeley grad school
admissions in the 70s. It seemed that men were far more likely to be
admitted to grad school than women. Clear sexual discrimination,
right? Sorry, no. You see, admissions to grad school are decided on a
department-by-department basis. So if there were sex bias, you'd have
to see which departments were the culprits. It turned out that in
every department, women had a higher admissions rate than men. What
had happened is that, in general, women tended to apply to departments
that had the highest rejection rates and men tended to apply to
departments that had the lowest rejection rates.According to the article "Sex Bias in Graduate Admissions: Data from
Berkeley" (Science 7 February 1975: Vol. 187. no. 4175, pp. 398 - 404
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/187/4175/398.abstract ), "The
bias in the aggregated data stems not from any pattern of
discrimination on the part of admissions committees, which seem quite
fair on the whole, but apparently from prior screening at earlier
levels of the educational system. Women are shunted by their
socialization and education toward fields of graduate study that are
generally more crowded, less productive of completed degrees, and less
well funded, and that frequently offer poorer professional employment
prospects."I don't quite agree with their own bias here, because they're also not
taking into consideration that one of the largest culprits in this
study, education, is oversubscribed because most of the people going
for graduate studies here are public school teachers and
administrators for whom promotions and raises are contingent on higher
degrees (no matter how irrelevant to their own job performance), even
back in the 70s. And though it's probably still doctrine in the ivory
tower that women are vastly "overrepresented" in education, out in the
real world people recognize that women are more inclined to working
with small children than are men, and that many mothers like the
convenience of the teaching profession.It is more than possible that a similar dynamic is going on at
Walmart. I doubt that their wages are the same across the country, as
most retail employees are going to be drawn from the local population
(is someone going to relocate to be a store manager? Perhaps, but
doubtful on the salaries they make), so the wages are going to be very
dependent on the local wage market. Wages in rural Missouri are likely
to be lower than wages in suburban Chicago, for instance. It could be
that stores where retail wages are lower find far more women as
employees, and perhaps these areas also have fewer promotion
opportunities. It could be that men are more likely to work at Walmart
only for the higher wage stores,where due to volume, there are more
managers.I agree with Walmart that as promotion and wage decisions are made
locally, the proper comparison should be on a local basis, so as to
prevent the kind of confounding result one gets from Simpson's
paradox. I hope whoever Walmart brought in as an expert witness did
explain the disparity between the plaintiff's evidence of a national
disparity and the store-by-store evidence. This is not to say that sex
discrimination is going on in none of the Walmart stores (and it could
even be that in some stores, women are preferred over men), but that
national statistics mean nothing without looking at a store-by-store
account.Mary Pat Campbell
Sr. Actuarial Associate
Kew Garden Hills, NY
I've moved and had more than a couple title changes since then, but the issue still stands.
That's not exactly the legal point up in front of the Supreme Court, but it is a HUGE problem with almost all statistical claims of discrimination, whether sex-based, race-based, or other.
The problem is that the "base rates" aren't the same.
For example, we often hear the hoary old stat about women making 77-cents to a man's dollar earned. Really? For one, the women in the workforce skew more inexperienced than the men, for a variety of reasons, and even when you restrict comparing full-time to full-time, you realize you're comparing elementary school teachers to high-powered lawyers. One of these groups has a lot more women in it.
There have been analyses where they go profession-by-profession, checking off educational attainment, experience in the field, hours worked, responsibilities, specific job, etc. Oh look, women tend to be paid on a par with men... or sometimes more. IF they pick professions similar to men's. And negotiate their salaries, as do men. But sometimes, women have decided certain things are more important than money.
I happen to have made a choice that's not terribly common with regards to my working life, but it's been negotiated with my various employers and with Stu -- I'm doing the traditional breadwinner thing with stay-at-home spouse. I do quite a bit more childcare than my father ever did... and I work an extra job, too.... but with the internet the current world of work has changed.
I will be keeping an eye on the Supreme Court case - a monster class action suit like this is almost undefendable BUT could be a real error if they try to use a couple particulars plus statistics that can be skewed in the way I mention. I hope Walmart is getting its own statistical experts, because they should have them.
(And hey guys, given my relative inexperience, my billing rates are low.... just FYI..... I've been an expert witness on a patent case before......)
RELATED: Women scientists at MIT realize that life under affirmative action isn't all it's cracked up to be. But they've got money now, so that's good.
Slow Lerner
Rathke admits radical anti-capitalist still on SEIU payroll:
ACORN founder Wade Rathke has been busy mocking the story that broke on The Blaze earlier this week about a multi-front plot to target JP Morgan Chase in an attempt to crash the stock market. We’ll look at his criticisms in a second. No need to bury the lede here. Rathke seems to answer the question we’ve been asking all week — does bank plotter Stephen Lerner still work for SEIU? Rathke says Lerner is still very much on the SEIU payroll:
Lerner has not been “fired” by SEIU as they report. He was placed on paid leave last fall to think through his contribution to the union, but was certainly present at the recent international executive board meeting.
This is important for several reasons — not the least of which is that this ties the plot to destroy the American economy much more closely within the ranks of the organization that time and time again President Obama has declared to be most important to him strategically and politically.
School fails to follow up on allegations of forced oral sex in classroom, gives itself an "A".
More on our friend, Professor Cronon. Previously on POWIP here and here and here.
WEAC want you to Vote Tiny Tim.
Had the federal government passed a law (in the best interest of the people, naturally) mandating that every household in America purchase a handgun and learn how to use it in order to protect themselves and in turn save the government money on police protection, that law would be a constitutional issue for the courts to decide in the exact same way ObamaCare — a real federal law requiring every American purchase health insurance — is also a constitutional issue. Regardless of your political persuasion, any intellectually honest individual understands that the government requiring an individual purchase something is exactly why our founders created a judicial branch. That’s what they’re there for. What they’re not there for, however, is to use judicial fiat to overturn an election. But that is exactly what the Left in Wisconsin is counting on happening just a few days from now on April 5th.
Do please read the whole thing.
Arianna Huffington an ingrate? $300 million from AOL for her stable of unpaid bloggers says it ain't so!
“I consider it the height of ingratitude that Arianna sides with Van Jones whose hapless management of Arianna’s California gubernatorial campaign made her finish with less than 1 percent of the vote, yet I’m the one who resurrected her Van Jones-created demise to help create for her the very institution she’s now using to shut me up,” Breitbart, who helped Huffington set up her hugely successful left-wing website, told TheDC. “The ingratitude is monumental and for her to be silent on the race question for cynical partisan reasons shows everything you need to know about this woman’s character. There’s a thread of hope in my heart that she will do the ethical thing and tell her audience what she really feels about my not being a racist.”
This is what happens when you blog too much: threads in your heart.
Mofo Town
Via ABC, Men's Health lists America's Angriest Cities.
Burlington, VT is last on this list, because everyone's too stoned to be angry.
Death of a Cosmonaut
The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."
This extraordinarily intimate account of the 1967 death of a Russian cosmonaut appears in a new book, Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, to be published next month. The authors base their narrative principally on revelations from a KGB officer, Venymin Ivanovich Russayev, and previous reporting by Yaroslav Golovanov in Pravda. This version — if it's true — is beyond shocking.
Hiding the Decline Explained
Via I Hate the Media, a Berkeley Prof explains the scandal in which the scientists were "exonerated."
Still, shouldn't you take the train? The numbers don't add up.
Obama's wonks are considering taxing us by the mile, which I've argued amounts to a tax on rural folk. As Heather Radish pointed out in a comment, taxpayers already subsidize metro transportation systems to the tune of 50-90%, with a good deal of the cost associated with municipalities not even trying to get a grip on transportation worker wages and benefits.
Via the lovely and talented Liz Stephans at The B-Cast, Louis Farrakhan makes the case that Americans aren't human beings at all, but beasts:
If you're a failing school, you can qualify for federal grants by firing administrators and then rehiring them under different job descriptions. That's called accountability.
Other withheld information includes discovering the NAACP's influence on the Holder DOJ's decision to overturn a decision against the voter threatening, nightstick wielding New Black Panthers in Philly. FOIA requests are for the little people.
Among the little people are amateur athletes who took liar loans from outfits like Countrywide, and as my insider disclosed, as a matter of urging and policy as issued by the "Office of Thrift Supervision." They go to jail while Angelo Mozilo skates. Via Glenn:
“Mr. Mozilo’s company made billions in profit, some of it on liar loans that he acknowledged at the time were likely to be fraudulent and which did untold damage to the economy. And he personally was paid hundreds of millions of dollars. Though he agreed last year to a $67.5 million fine to settle fraud charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, it was a small fraction of what he earned. Otherwise, he walked. Thus does the Justice Department display its priorities in the aftermath of the crisis.”
The terms are similar to those imposed on Franklin Raines: you bad, bad fraudster; you're going to have to give back a third of your many millions in criminal racketeering gains. Oh, and Jamie Gorelick.
But it's terrible the way these wingnuts drag the names of good and noble public servants through the mud.
Dumbest defense of Professor Cronon yet: he's a whistleblower. More posts on Cronon.
That's easy: radical jackasses substituted their agenda for the pursuit of knowledge in the academy, and he fit right in.
Latest fascinating installment of Ulsterman's interviews with White House Insider. Could it be a hoax? Well, yeah, but if so, it's one of the most fascinating I've ever read. Key part is where he gives some idea of just what the scandal out of Chicago that is supposed to have Obama shaking in his boots might be:
Regarding Rahm and the election – the mayoral race. I know you already did some work on this – good work. People…not enough people, were really paying attention to what was going on with that race. It was so very clear to those who were paying attention just how forceful the Obama White House, and when I use that term I basically mean to say Valerie Jarrett – how forceful Valerie Jarrett was attempting to remove Rahm from the ballot. Burt Odelson was the attorney who was the main guy, the one who was putting up the strongest legal challenge, right? The same Burt Odelson who is the legal extension for one of Chicago’s most powerful labor unions – #134. He also played a hand in trying to get Obama’s good buddy Alexi elected to Obama’s former Senate seat. I know you covered some of this- but it’s worth repeating here now. Alexi of course is Broadway Bank. The Broadway Bank. A failed bank with ties to the mob. A failed bank that housed Obama’s own campaign financing back in the day. A failed bank that magically had the feds give a pass most recently regarding some very odd accounting practices.
Easy Breezy Sunday Public Pensions and Finance 27Mar2011
Hey, might as well clear out some more stories while I've got a breather!
GENERAL ISSUES
Dean Baker is breaking out his calculator again!!!!! Watch out!
"Eighty-eight of the 126 largest public pension plans assume a rate of return exceeding 8 percent a year, according to the Wall Street Journal. By way of comparison, the S&P 500 achieved a compound average annual growth rate of 5.69 percent over the past 20 years."
Okay, get your calculators out boys and girls. If I look up the value of the S&P 500 for March 1991 I get 375.22. The S&P closed yesterday at 1313.8. This gives a compounded annual rate of return of 6.46 percent.
Okay, Dean, I'm going to waste a little time and see if the WaPo was as far off as you say. (It was, by the way -- then I went to look back to see when was the last date that the 20-year annualized return was close to what WaPo said, and it was July 2010). I'm having a hard time getting total return data, though, so I can't check what he has to say about dividends. I see someone had put something up on wikipedia on total returns, but I don't see where they got their dividend info from.
States pass the budget pain down to the municipalities. Duh. Municipalities can go bankrupt, and states cannot. So that's one reason to do this particular money play. But it's good to cut off the cities that can't support themselves... because the people have moved away. Sometimes it's time for a city to die, and propping it up means driving people in general away from the state.
ARIZONA
Arizona jumps on the pension reform bandwagon, targeting the usual suspects: double-dipping, DROPs, low retirement ages.
CALIFORNIA
Stuff is going on in Los Angeles. The mayor cuts a deal with the unions on pensions. More on the deal; healthcare coverage is also involved.
FLORIDA
Taking a cue from Wisconsin, perhaps, Florida House passes bill to ban automatic deduction of union dues from state employee paychecks. That hurts a lot more than collective bargaining bans. Cut off the money, and how can the unions buy their politicians?
Some lawyers are "setting the record straight" on public pensions. It starts:
Are State and Local Government Pension Plans About to Run Out of Money? No, in fact, according to the Federal Reserve Flow of Funds, the combined value of public pensions was $2.73 Trillion as of 3rd quarter of 2010, the highest level in two years. This figure represents an increase of more than half a Trillion dollars since a low of $2.17 Trillion at the end of 1st quarter of 2009, and marks the fourth consecutive year-over-year quarterly increase.
MMmmmm, a little irrelevant. Nobody is saying they're immediately going to run out of money. Yet. They're saying that in the relatively short term (and in pensions, under 20 years is short term - it's shorter than the amortization period for making up losses many times) money will run out.
And there's some other really deceptive stuff in there as well. Why exactly would a DB plan be cheaper than a DC plan, hmmm?
But Why Should Public Employees Have the Most Expensive Type of Retirement Plan? They shouldn't, and they don't. In fact, when one considers the cost of achieving a specific retirement benefit goal under both a defined benefit plan -- which is made available to about 84 percent of all state and local government employees -- and the other common form of retirement plan, a defined contribution plan such as a 401(k), recent analysis has found that a DB plan costs about half as much as the DC plan. Specifically, it was determined that delivering the same retirement income to a group of workers is 46 percent cheaper using a DB plan than a DC plan.
As an actuary, I would like to know the drivers there. Is it the asset management fees? Is it the savings that come from people dying early? People not vesting?
Cough up links to that "recent analysis", guys, because I'm not buying this from a purely financial economics point of view.
Hmm. Who are their clients?
CITY OF BAL HARBOUR:
Bal Harbour Village Police Officers' Pension Plan and Trust
CITY OF BOCA RATON:
Boca Raton General Employees' Pension Fund
CITY OF CORAL SPRINGS:
City of Coral Springs Police Officers' Retirement Plan
CITY OF DELRAY BEACH:
City of Delray Beach Police & Firefighters Retirement System
CITY OF FORT LAUDERDALE:
City of Fort Lauderdale Police and Firefighters' Retirement System
CITY OF GAINESVILLE:
City of Gainesville Consolidated Police Officers and Firefighters Retirement Fund
CITY OF HIALEAH:
City of Hialeah Employees' Retirement System
CITY OF HIALEAH GARDENS:
Hialeah Gardens Police Officers Pension Trust Fund
CITY OF HOLLYWOOD:
Hollywood Firefighters' Pension Fund
Hollywood Police Pension Fund
CITY OF HOMESTEAD:
Homestead Retirement Income Plan for Firemen
Homestead Municipal Police Officers' Retirement Trust Fund
Elected Officials Retirement Plan
New Elected Officials and Senior Management Retirement System
VILLAGE OF KEY BISCAYNE:
Key Biscayne Police Officers' and Firefighters' Retirement Plan
CITY OF MARATHON:
City of Marathon Firefighters' Pension Plan and Trust Fund
CITY OF MIAMI:
Miami Firemen's Relief and Pension Fund
City of Miami Fire Fighters' and Police Officers' Retirement Trust
CITY OF MIAMI BEACH:
City Pension Fund for Firefighters and Police Officers in the City of Miami Beach (Consolidated)
Miami Beach Policemen's Relief and Pension Fund
Retirement System for General Employees of the City of Miami Beach (Consolidated)
VILLAGE OF MIAMI SHORES:
Miami Shores Pension Fund
Miami Shores Police Officers' Retirement System
CITY OF MIAMI SPRINGS:
City of Miami Springs General Employee's Retirement System
City of Miami Springs Police and Firefighters Retirement System
CITY OF NORTH MIAMI:
North Miami Employees' Retirement System Clair T. Singerman Pension Fund
North Miami Employees' Retirement System
North Miami Special Police Officers Fund
CITY OF PALM BAY:
Palm Bay Police & Firefighters Retirement Pension Plan
CITY OF PARKLAND:
City of Parkland Police Officers' Retirement Plan
CITY OF PEMBROKE PINES:
Pembroke Pines Pension Fund for Firefighters and Police Officers
CITY OF SATELLITE BEACH
General Employees' Retirement System
Police Officers' and Firefighters' Retirement System
CITY OF STUART:
City of Stuart General Employees' Pension Board
City of Stuart Firefighters' Pension Board
City of Stuart Police Officers' Pension Board
Oh, I'm sure that's a coincidence.
GEORGIA
Hey, that pot of money was just sitting there, asking for it.
ILLINOIS
Come on, man, we just need one more hit. Just one little more....
Is it any wonder individuals are trying the same ploy? Doesn't work as well for individuals, though. Hmmm.
The old, wise advice is to save early, often, etc. applies to both individuals and states. Sad that it's about as likely to be followed in both cases. The results.... ugly in both cases when not followed.
Anyway, you keep borrowing, who is going to pay the creditors eventually? The way things are going, Caterpillar ain't going to stand for it. Ex-legislators aren't hanging around to see what happens when the debt comes due.
Bill Zettler compares Wisconsin against Illinois pension plans for school administrators. Biggest driver in difference just looks like base salary, though you will see the more indirect items such as retirement age have a huge impact.
Yesterday I mentioned the big hole in the teachers pension plan. I want to point out they made a showing in a post back in September 2010, where I mentioned they looked like they could be entering a death spiral, where they were having to liquidate assets too fast.
KANSAS
Kansas Senate debated pension reforms. Choices: Pay more now or get less later. Here's another choice - both could occur.
LOUISIANA
A financial adviser takes a look at the state of Louisiana pensions. Yeah, employees are likely going to have to contribute more. It's not explicitly stated, but Louisiana employees might not be covered by Social Security (and it needs to be remembered in all these public pensions stories that government employees are sometimes not in SocSec- this has both pluses and minuses on both sides).
If you want to see a Powerpoint presentation on the SocSec/Medicare issue re: LA workers, here ya go.
MAINE
You see, the reason the governor's proposed pension reform can't touch his own pension because, man, he's not allowed to change his total compensation package! What a bummer.
MICHIGAN
In addition to the pension tax thing, the governor is looking at ethics rules for pension boards.
MINNESOTA
Lawsuit from retirees regarding cuts to cost-of-living-adjustments on pensions. Hmmm, think I saw something about that in this post somewhere....current retirees are definitely not safe from cuts, either. The easiest to hit first were new hires, but then current employees are getting hit and now current retirees. No one is safe -- taxpayers will be hit, too.
NEW JERSEY
Rendell kisses Chris Christie's ass for some reason. I'm with John Bury in that not making pension fund contributions is really not a good move for pension plan survival, even though Christie is supposedly using it as leverage to negotiate on pension reform. I kind of get that, but the problem is that the pols don't see the urgency of the contributions.... it's not real pain to them - where's the real leverage?
This is not the kind of leverage I mean.
NEW YORK
City versus State. This worked out well in education in the past, so perhaps Bloomberg may actually get something substantive done here (as opposed to taking away my transfats and salt... come on, eyes on the prize, Bloomie.)
PENNSYLVANIA
A look back at a 2001-pensions boost that is causing a great deal of trouble now.
I have no idea what is going on in Pittsburgh. I'm not sure they do, either - or rather, what went on Dec 31, 2010. I tried to get info on what the last-minute calculation error was (even off the record... I'm big on human error stuff, operational risk, etc. ... just wanted to know!) - never found out.
RHODE ISLAND
Public unions argue their pensions are modest, while the state treasurer warns of plan problems.
You know what? The individual lattes I bought from Starbucks weren't that expensive, if you think about it, as a daily treat. Neither were my individual copies of the Wall Street Journal. Or any number of little things I had to brutally cut a couple years ago to get finances back in order. I don't think anybody is saying to totally zero pensions of current employees and retirees, but there will be various cuts, no matter how modest the current benefits look.
The state gives up trying to yank the pensions of 2 specific crooked ex-employees.
WASHINGTON
Some states aren't waiting to hit the already-retired: Washington looking at altering cost-of-living adjustments to pension payments. Again, constitutionality/legality is brought up. But, of course, both laws and constitutions can get changed.
UK
Public employees warned to get a bit of reality before protesting... to think about how "fair" their pensions look to those paying for them.
Follow Dan!
All the Kool Kidz are doing it...
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