Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings • The Register

In a world where Tech Bros fall over each other to out bigot each other, it is refreshing to see the Python Foundation telling the National Science Foundation telling the NSF to put their $1,500,000.00 where the moon don't shine, because the grant demands that the organization cease all anti-discrimination activities.

I looked at recent data on executive compensation at the Foundation, and no one there got more than $200,000/year in 2023, yet more evidence that Dan Ariely,'s research on compensation, which shows that excessive pay reduces performance, is true.

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has walked away from a $1.5 million government grant and you can blame the Trump administration's war on woke for effectively weakening some open source security.

The programming non-profit's deputy executive director Loren Crary said in a blog post today that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had offered $1.5 million to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and the Python Package Index (PyPI), but the Foundation quickly became dispirited with the terms of the grant it would have to follow.

"These terms included affirming the statement that we 'do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws,'" Crary noted. "This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole."

To make matters worse, the terms included a provision that if the PSF was found to have violated that anti-DEI diktat, the NSF reserved the right to claw back any previously disbursed funds, Crary explained.

By way of perspective, that $1.5 million is about ⅓ of their annual operating budget.

The Python Foundation is a  501(c)(3) not-for profit, and donations are tax deductible, and they manage thousands of volunteers working on development of the eponymous cross-platform FOSS programming language.

I have no opinion as to its merits as a programming language, but it is very widely used. (I'm not a programmer)

Wanna Go Halfsies on a Guillotine?

Here's a depressing data point, pay rates for senior management in the United States are skyrocketing.

I guess running businesses into the ground, enforcing insane return to office mandates, and looting requires substantial remuneration, because ……… The Aristocrats!

US bosses’ pay is increasing at the fastest rate for at least 14 years, according to figures that critics say illustrate how ballooning reward packages such as Elon Musk’s risk exacerbating social inequality.

In 2024, median chief executive pay at S&P 500 companies has risen by 12 per cent, according to ISS Corporate, part of proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services. That compares with a 4.1 per cent year-on-year increase in US wage growth, according to official figures.

………

Executive pay “has gotten out of control”, [Former Exxon compensation committee chair William] George said. “This is going to cause a further split in our country between the haves and the have-nots. This is a grave concern to me because I think there will be a loss of trust [in companies].”

………

Peloton, Nikola, LendingTree and Paycom Software are among a handful of companies that have offered their chief executives mega stock grants only to see their share prices sink.

Of course they sunk.  Excessive pay actually reduces performance according to studies done by Dan Ariely.

George said he was “disappointed” by major investors, such as BlackRock and Vanguard, that “don’t step up” against excessive executive pay awards.

This is insane and unsustainable.

The only question is whether this ends with regulation, or a gravity assisted French chopping center.

Is Anyone Surprised by This?

A study indicates that above a rather modest salary level, very highly paid employees do not show any greater ability than their lesser paid compatriots.  In fact Dan Ariely's work showed that high levels of remuneration were associated with reduced performance years ago.

What this one shows is that very high levels of pay does not bring in people who are more capable, and in fact at extremely high levels of pay, you get a slight reduction of the quality of your employees.

Abstract

Are the best-paying jobs with the highest prestige done by individuals of great intelligence? Past studies find job success to increase with cognitive ability, but do not examine how, conversely, ability varies with job success. Stratification theories suggest that social background and cumulative advantage dominate cognitive ability as determinants of high occupational success. This leads us to hypothesize that among the relatively successful, average ability is concave in income and prestige. We draw on Swedish register data containing measures of cognitive ability and labour-market success for 59,000 men who took a compulsory military conscription test. Strikingly, we find that the relationship between ability and wage is strong overall, yet above €60,000 per year ability plateaus at a modest level of +1 standard deviation. The top 1 per cent even score slightly worse on cognitive ability than those in the income strata right below them. We observe a similar but less pronounced plateauing of ability at high occupational prestige.

We don't have highly paid executives, we have overpaid executives

This

Dean Baker makes a very good point: CEOs Maximize CEO Pay, Not Shareholder Returns. 

They act in their own self interest, not those of the company, which is why the insane pay arrangements for senior executives do not result in increased performance for any task involving thinking, which we have known for years, and was demonstrated by Dan Ariely over a decade ago:

It is a cult among policy types to say that CEOs maximize shareholder returns, as in this NYT piece. This is in spite of the fact that returns to shareholders have not been especially good in the last two decades. And, this is even though returns were boosted by a huge corporate tax cut in 2017 that increased after-tax profits by more than 10 percent, other things equal.

There is considerable evidence that CEOs do not earn their $20 million pay, in the sense of providing $20 million in additional returns to shareholders, compared to the next schmuck down the line. This matters in a big way because CEO pay influences pay structures throughout the economy. If CEOs got paid 20 to 30 times the pay of ordinary workers, like they did in the 1960s or 1970s, or around $2 million to $3 million a year, the next in line execs would likely get around $1.5 million and the third tier corporate execs would get in the high hundreds of thousands. That is a contrast from today when the CFO and other top tier execs might get close to $10 million and the third tier can easily make $2-$3 million.

Preach it, Brother.

Preach It

Over at the Stanford Social Innovation Review, they make a cogent argument for limiting excessive salaries in the non-profit sector:

An average family participating in the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program costs taxpayers $400 a month. We pay $126 a month to the typical beneficiary of food stamps—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

By contrast, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, costs us $44,200 a month. [This is the amount subsided by the tax deduction, not her salary, which is 2½ times that] This figure may catch some readers by surprise, because they probably don’t think of themselves as paying the salaries of people who work at nonprofit organizations. But we do pay her that amount, and it is a problem.

The salary of the Gates Foundation’s CEO costs taxpayers money because we gave Bill Gates a large tax break that subsidizes his contribution to his eponymous foundation or any other philanthropy. If Gates was in the 40 percent tax bracket (a safe bet before the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act pushed by President Donald Trump), then the government effectively picked up the tab for 40 cents of every dollar that Gates decided to contribute to his foundation.

There is a tendency to treat tax deductions, for charitable contributions or other purposes, as being qualitatively different from direct government spending. This may be a convenient way of thinking for the people who most benefit from these deductions, who tend to be richer on average. But it is nonsense.

………

We should have this fact in mind when we consider the purpose of the charitable-contribution tax deduction. In effect, we are saying that certain categories of activities are serving a general public purpose. If individuals choose to support these activities, through religious organizations, educational institutions, or philanthropic organizations such as the Gates Foundation, we will subsidize their contributions by allowing them to pay less in taxes.

This is a reasonable policy for the federal government. It provides subsidies for organizations that address a wide variety of social ends in diverse ways. These subsidies can help promote new and innovative practices that may ultimately be adopted more broadly.

However, the government does put conditions on the sorts of organizations that are eligible for tax-exempt status. For example, they must not be for-profit organizations. The government does not, at least explicitly, allow deductions for money paid to profit-making corporations. Nonprofits also must serve the general public purpose. I cannot have a charity to pay the person who mows my lawn. Nonprofits cannot advance a partisan political agenda.

This is important background for thinking about the money that taxpayers effectively pay to support the salary of the Gates Foundation’s CEO. Most people view the rise in income inequality as one of the major problems in the US economy. Desmond-Hellmann’s $1.33 million annual salary is way above the cutoff for the top 1 percent of US wage earners. In fact, it is far above the cutoff for the top 0.1 percent of wage earners.

While many factors have led to the rise in inequality, part of the story is the excessive pay of CEOs and other top executives. This is more an issue in the corporate sector, where the average pay of CEOs now approaches $20 million a year. Nonetheless, when pay for top executives in the nonprofit sector crosses the million-dollar mark, even at philanthropies such as the Rockefeller Foundation that worry about inequality, this is also part of the problem.

………

In this case, we should keep our eye on the ball. The federal government is providing enormous subsidies to the bloated pay of top executives at nonprofits. This is simply not a good use of federal dollars, and it is hardly in keeping with the idea that nonprofits should be serving a public purpose. We can try to develop government policies to reverse market outcomes that generate inequality, but we should first end government policies that promote inequality.

I would note that some of the most highly remunerated employees at non-profits are coaches for NCAA Division I teams, which frequently are in the 8 figure range.

These high levels of compensation make a joke out of charities. 

First, they make a mockery of the whole concept of charity, and second, as behavioral economist Dan Ariely showed in his studies, very high levels of remuneration actually decrease performance.

Not Enough Bullets

It looks like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac engaged in back flips to avoid government regulations holding senior executive pay to "only" $600,000,00.
Seriously, we need to stop the damn looting: (Also, prison for these rat-f%$#s, including the board, who is in on the conspiracy)

For years, the chief executives of two giant government-controlled companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have operated under a strict constraint: They can’t be paid more than $600,000 a year.

The housing companies may have found a way around that congressionally mandated pay cap. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac created a new job — president — transferring some of the work traditionally done by the CEOs to the new positions, according to government investigators. The presidents will be paid more than $3 million each.

………

At Fannie Mae, five executives earned more than $2 million each last year, while four executives at Freddie Mac earned more than $3 million, according to data compiled by Equilar, a research firm. The total amount spent on salaries for the top executives increased 31 percent at Fannie Mae and 4 percent at Freddie Mac last year, according to the data.

Fannie Mae declined to comment for this report. Freddie Mac challenged the conclusions of an Office of Inspector General report questioning the arrangement. “Simply put, the facts do not support the report’s conclusions,” company spokesman Christopher Spina said.

………

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stand as part of the last unfinished business from the crisis. The companies have been under government conservatorship since 2008 and received more than $100 billion in taxpayer bailouts.

………

Running companies of Fannie and Freddie’s size and complexity would typically be a career highlight for an ambitious executive. Fannie Mae has $3 trillion in assets, and Freddie Mac’s assets total $2 trillion. But the relatively low salary and the lack of rich stock options, or even the hope for a bonus, make it a tough sell, executive recruiters say. The companies’ CEOs also have little control over the ultimate fates of the housing giants, which is being debated by Congress and regulators, they say.

I have to note here:  Dan Ariely did a study on the effect of bonuses on performance, and discovered that very high levels of remuneration actually DECREASED performance.

Overpaying the executives will actually get you worse performance.

………

The issue became pressing as both companies faced major turnover last year. Fannie Mae’s longtime chief executive, Tim Mayopoulos, announced he would be stepping down before the end of the year.

While deciding how to replace Mayopoulos, now president of a digital lending company, Fannie’s board came up with a plan: The CEO’s pay would remain $600,000, but it would create a new position, president, and that person would earn more than $3 million a year.

………

Both positions were filled by company insiders. Hugh Frater, who had served on Fannie Mae’s board since 2016 and is also the nonexecutive chairman of Vereit, a real estate investment company, was picked to be CEO. David Benson, their chief financial officer, was promoted to president. Less than two months after Benson was appointed, Fannie Mae proposed increasing his salary 11 percent to $3.6 million, the Office of Inspector General noted.

Fannie Mae is now spending $4.2 million for work that used to be done for $600,000 when it had only a CEO, the inspector general’s report concluded.

Gee, they hired insiders.

It's not like they had to look very far for new presidents

………

Still, the inspector general’s office has challenged the arrangement. Freddie Mac now spends $3.85 million to pay two people for work that used to be done by one person for $600,000, according to the report. Both companies are involved in “financial engineering” meant to allow them to “circumvent” the salary cap put in place by Congress, the report said.

This is not "financial engineering". It is a criminal conspiracy to break the law.

Prosecute.

Linkage

• Parts of Yellowstone National Park closed after massive supervolcano beneath it melts roads (Raw Story) I really hope that this is a false alarm.
• London Celebrates The Monty Python Reunion By Putting A 50-Foot Dead Parrot In Potters Field Park (Co.CREATE) Win!
• Arbitration Clauses Let American Apparel Hide Misconduct (New York Times) Not only did arbitration clauses hide the serial sexual harassment of the CEO American Apparel from the public, but it hid it from the board of directors.
• Three New JPMorgan IT Deaths Include Alleged Murder-Suicide (Wall Street on Parade) I am not suggesting that these guys are getting whacked The Firm style, but maybe something is weighing on them.
• Airbus wants to patent the most uncomfortable plane seats ever (The Washington Post) Be afraid, be very, very afraid.
• New Bank Leak Shows How Rich Exploit Tax Haven Loopholes (ICIJ.org) I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
• France - Amazon snubs French free delivery ban with one-cent charge (France 24) Stupid.  If there is anything that the French excel at, it is officious bureaucrats.  Amazon is in a world of hurt.
• Fatah Envoy Accuses Hamas Of 'Crimes Against Humanity' (TPM) Chalk one up for political opportunism in the Middle East.
• Subpoena Of GOP Aide In Insider Trading Probe 'Freaks Out' Hill Staff (TPM) As well it should. Leaking inside information to well connected friends is something that should have scary consequences.
• Uber Kindly Agrees to Stop Price Gouging During Emergencies (Gawker) Because there are limits to a company run by an Ayn Rand felching crook?  Probably not
• Lamb Bacon Wrapped Asparagus Recipe (JoyOfKosher.com)
• The Highest-Paid CEOs Are The Worst Performers, New Study Says (Forbes) Not surprising. Dan Dan Ariely's research showed this years ago.

How to Roll Cable: (Should work with garden hose too)



H/T Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the vid.

What is Wrong with the TED Talks in One Person

My call in is at 41:05

On Monday, I went to the Doctor, and on the way there, I was listening to the Midday talk show on WYPR, and they were interviewing Dan Pallotta, who gave a TED talk (no link, ever) about how we need to spend lots of money on high powered executives and self promotion, and not be so concerned about overhead costs.  (Link to this show)

I called into the show (you can hear me at 41:05), and made two points, both from experience:^* That aggressive fundraising and growth as a strategy will take place at the expense of the core function of that organization, and that studies have shown that very high levels of compensation actually decrease performance.

Pallotta spouted banalities about the use of "appropriate metrics" when discussing how a high growth focus won't distract , and for the studies showing that excessive pay decreases performance, he pulls out the straw man about whether we should stop paying real estate agents after their 3^rd sale.

The reality is that his failed for-profit event promotion business died because it became excessive expensive, and the self aggrandizement of its CEO, Dan Pallotta.

In it's own way, this is TED Talks in a microcosm, it is all about comforting the comfortable.

After all this, I Wiki the motherf%$#er and found this "clearly-written_by-his-publicist" article:

Pallotta TeamWorks
Pallotta built his for-profit company Pallotta TeamWorks. His company employed 400 full-time people in 16 U.S. offices and was raising $169 million annually by 2002. In total, the company raised $582 million from 1994 to 2002. The company charged a fixed production fee for its services. It did not do commission-based fundraising or get a “take” off of the top. One hundred percent of all donations went to lock boxes under the charities’ exclusive control. The charities then reimbursed the company for its expenses on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Pallotta TeamWorks fees, in a hindsight calculation, amounted to 4.01% of funds raised.

As is shown below, this is a bogus number. It refers only to direct fees, and not the expenses of putting on the increasingly lavish events.

Palotta was criticized for the large amounts of money Pallotta TeamWorks was making each year and the $394,500 salary he was receiving, described as "stratospheric" for the aid world.[ His annual salary ranged from $150,000 in 1994 to approximately $425,000 in 2002. Palotta commented that "We allow people to make huge profits doing any number of things that will hurt the poor, but we want to crucify anyone who wants to make money helping them".

In 2002, the company moved into an innovative headquarters that it had outfitted, The Apostrophe. For years Pallotta TeamWorks was located in poor offices spaces in Hollywood. A new and completely empty 47,000 square-foot 'tilt-up' warehouse was located in Atwater Village, Los Angeles. ………

Shut-down of Pallotta Teamworks

……… At the time the Breast Cancer 3-Day program was the company's largest fundraising event series. For five years the Avon Products Foundation had been the beneficiary of the events, which netted $194 million in unrestricted funds for the Foundation in just five years. In 2002 Avon informed Pallotta TeamWorks that it would no longer be associated with the company's events. Pallotta TeamWorks began negotiating with another charity to become the beneficiary of the events. During that period, Avon announced a nationwide series of multi-day breast cancer fundraising walks, each with a four-figure pledge minimum, in many of the same cities in which the 3-Days had been conducted and, in many cases, on very similar dates. As a result, the new charity with which Pallotta TeamWorks had been negotiating, fearing that the events would cannibalize one another, decided against partnering with Pallotta TeamWorks on the 3-Days. A few days after the news, on August 23, 2002, the company laid off its entire staff nationwide and closed the doors on its new headquarters.

So, they got dumped by their charities (more below), and they tried to set up competing events to keep their gravy train rolling.

But we can look at the Internet, where nothing goes away, and see what was being said of Pallotta Teamworks at the time:

Published on Tuesday, August 27, 2002 in the Washington Post

Expenses Eat Profits Of District AIDSRide

by Carol Morello

Expenses ate up at least 86 percent of the $3.6 million raised in June for the annual D.C. AIDSRide organized by Pallotta TeamWorks, a rate that is expected to increase when the tally is complete, the benefiting charities said yesterday.

If the riders had not raised more money than required, the event might have lost money. Per-rider expenses averaged $400 more than the $2,400 each rider needed to raise to participate. But the event turned a $500,000 profit only because riders raised an average of more than $3,200, according to preliminary estimates made by the two charities that co-sponsored the ride.

"Disappointed doesn't even begin to describe how we feel," said Cornelius Baker, head of Whitman-Walker Clinic, one of two charities benefiting from the ride.

When the audit is completed in the fall, the return may be less than 14 cents on the dollar.

………


Critics of Pallotta events said the return on the D.C. ride was indicative of problems that have beset the company this summer.

"The returns are abysmal," said Wayne Turner, an AIDS activist with the D.C. chapter of Act Up. "People are beginning to wake up to the fact these AIDS rides are not about raising money at all. They're about building Dan Pallotta's empire, which is now crumbling."

This year, Pallotta TeamWorks was to have run 23 charitable events across the United States and in Africa and Europe. Pallotta's fee for each AIDS ride runs from $225,000 -- the amount for the District ride -- to $450,000. Locally, it also has organized the Avon Breast Cancer walk, held in May, and a night walk this month from Fairfax County to the District to raise awareness of suicide prevention.

Pallotta had been one of the country's most successful promoters of charitable events. But criticism grew as the company expanded and began aggressively promoting itself. Its events are characterized by emotional opening and closing ceremonies, slick marketing and creature comforts for participants, including cucumber eye masks and massages. Expenses run into the millions, though net proceeds are often high, too. But recently, many riders and walkers have complained that the events' purity has been clouded by excessive promotion. At walks and rides attended by survivors and relatives of people with breast cancer and AIDS, vans were set up marketing the company's other events and selling books by founder Dan Pallotta.

………
Pallotta, though, has lost numerous clients this year.

This spring, Avon Products announced that it would no longer use the company to produce its three-day breast cancer walks and would launch its own walkathons. After seven years of collaboration, Food & Friends decided to hold its own bike event next year. The huge Heartland AIDSRide across the Midwest also is being dropped.

So he is a f%$#ing serial narcissist who put on lavish charity events for the purpose of his own self-aggrandizement, and so his business imploded.

His response is to go on TED and suggest that the way to improve our charities is to throw more money at those overpaid narcissistic sociopaths who are our looting class.

Just beautiful.

^* My background:

• I audited my university (UMass Amherst) as a part of a student government committee.
• I founded a not-for-profit, and successfully took it thorugh the 501(c)3 process.
• My experience was that a laser-like focus on aggressive growth and increased prestige is achieved at the expense of quality services.
• That, as numerous behavioral economics studies have shown (Dan Ariely, for one), very high levels of compensation are associated with DECREASED performance.

Well, That Explains all the Bullsh$# When I Was Single

Someone asks behavioral economist Dan Ariely if she should put out to a guy that she is dating. She "Unsure" is seriously into "George", and wonders if the rule about making him wait is true.

Well, Dr Arieli says that according to behavior economics research, the rule is true:

The classic experiment here comes from psychologists Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith, who had participants perform a boring task and then paid them either $20 or $1 to convince someone else that the task had been great fun. Everyone then rated the task, with the result that the $1 participants rated the task more positively than did the $20 crew. While the $20 group could explain away the dissonance between their action (“I told someone the task was riveting”) and their belief (“It actually bored me to tears”) via money (“I was paid to promote the task”), the $1 individuals could not because they could not justify misleading others for such a small amount of money– so they changed their initial belief (“I must really like the task, to have promoted it”) and they ended up rating the task more positively.

To give you an example that is closer to our social life, look at fraternities: loyalty to frats increases with the amount of hazing, since pledges tell themselves, “I did a lot of embarrassing stuff for my frat – it must really matter to me.”

So, the advice to, "In other words, make him work, and he will rationalize it by deciding he loves you," is supported by studies.

It does explain my favoring women who are can sometimes be described as "high maintenance," though I feel compelled to note that each moment with Sharon,^* is unalloyed bliss.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.^†
†I know what you are thinking, he's just writing that because he knows that she could read this on the net. My response is that Sharon^* is a deeply passionate woman, and she has knives, and some of them are dull.....Mama did not raise no fools.

Big Bonuses Make You Stupid

That's the short read on Dan Ariely's reseasrch, he is a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University:

We did this study in India, where the cost of living is relatively low so that we could pay people amounts that were substantial to them but still within our research budget. The lowest bonus was 50 cents — equivalent to what participants could receive for a day’s work in rural India. The middle-level bonus was $5, or about two weeks’ pay, and the highest bonus was $50, five months’ pay.

What would you expect the results to be? When we posed this question to a group of business students, they said they expected performance to improve with the amount of the reward. But this was not what we found. The people offered medium bonuses performed no better, or worse, than those offered low bonuses. But what was most interesting was that the group offered the biggest bonus did worse than the other two groups across all the tasks.

(emphasis mine)

So, we have people over compensated and for work that mostly really does not to be done, (financials have exploded relative to the rest of the economy over the past few decades) and given bonuses for under-performing, and now we find out that the bonuses make them do a crappier job.

Delightful.