Foliovision were recently contacted to provide $500 of technical work by a firm called Visiomente. A simple Typepad to WordPress content move. Normally we would never write about an inquiry but Visiomente made such an effort to screw us and wasted enough of our time that a look at their business tactics is widely instructive about what’s wrong with American business these days.
Our hopes are this post might help other small businesses protect themselves against Visiomente and their ilk in the future.
Visiomente appears not to do anything themselves except run around and subcontract experts to provide work to high end clients. It appears Visiomente’s sole business model is to contract at the lowest possible prices and then charges on the work at the highest possible prices under their own name.
There's only one person who hasn't paid Foliovision for our work.
And his name is Ivan Pope. He runs a site called Magazero that we moved from Typepad to WordPress. The move went very well, but Ivan Pope went AWOL after the move.
Ivan Pope is the reason we don't split payments anymore on technical moves.
For many years I've admired my sister Julie's charity activities and JKT charity pages on her website. Gradually over time, we've ended up doing a fair amount ourselves. The last couple of years I've promised myself to put up a list of our activities too. What you believe in is so important.
I was recently at a Canadian round table in Slovakia. The Canadian Ambassador to Prague (Canada for inexplicable reasons does not have an Ambassador in Slovakia though most African republics do) asked us very politely what motivated us to come to Slovakia. One well-known business figure quickly answered, "Money is the name of the game. That's what brought me here and that's what gets us up very morning. Isn't it?" His pudgy face beamed at all of us for certain affirmation.
I nearly choked on my drink. I couldn't believe that anyone could live with such shallow values.
Money is certainly not what gets me up every day. Building a better world is. Sometimes it starts by making sure our team is well fed, well paid and well lodged. But the true journey goes much farther.
Cancer survivor Julie Kinnear leading a huge team in a ride against cancer
I have been somewhat concerned that some of our clients or potential clients would shun our services if they knew what progressive organisations we support. But at the end of the day, a progressive stance is part of who we are. We haven't had too many gun-loving, invasion-happy oppressor clients.
And that's just fine with me.
It's been great working with our clients who are usually small to medium sized organisations (not always: we've had Microsoft Seattle and The Hollywood Reporter among other large clients) trying to improve their own communities.
On the occasion of American Thanksgiving (Canadian Thanksgiving is in October), I finally had peace from our clients to put up a first draft of an about page with some of the organisations we support. The normal pace of my email around 250 emails/day which I actually have to read and answer about a third: on American thanksgiving it's dropped to under 50: if only Thanksgiving came more often.
I'm especially proud to support Captain Paul Watson of The Sea Shepherd every month and for the work we've done to help Mario Radačovský found an international level modern dance company here, Balet Bratislava.
Both men are doing heroic work at great personal sacrifice. This is really change we can believe in. People who are willing to put themselves on the line to do something for the greater good.
Keep on doing it Captain Watson, ballet founder Radačovský, Professor Juan Cole. Your personal contribution to making a better world is what makes hope possible.
sea shepard paul watson takes a bullet saving a whale
Thank you to all the volunteers at EFF.org, Wikileaks, Series 8:08, Znet for your great work against tall odds.
Thank you to the open source projects and coders with whom we've been able to give something back to the giants like Tim Berners-Lee and Richard Stallman who made this explosion of shared knowledge possible.
Thank you to our clients who trust us with their projects and their dreams (quite rightly it turns out) and give us the opportunity to contribute to their lives and the ability to contribute to the organisations we support.
Thank you to the Anima which supports us and allows us still to toil for a better life for humankind and all beings on this earth. However dark the clouds overhead, there is still light on the horizon.
Gruber was complaining about the brilliant Samsung Galaxy S II ad making the rounds. Here is the long version (1m25s) which you might otherwise miss. There's lots of additional clever repartee not in the airplay version: "I guess this is what adultery feels like," says one of the Apple fans in the queue with the Samsung Galaxy in his hands.
long form version of the brilliant Samsung ad
I'm one of the people who moved from iPhone to Android and is really happy about it. Here's why. I owned an iPhone 3GS. After the initial thrill of ownership wore off, I became very tired of:
being forced to update to the latest version of iTunes every week
having my mobile phone tied to my credit card and personal account at Apple, sending all the info in my mobile phone to Apple anytime Apple chooses
fighting with a virtual keyboard which fills most of the screen when you are using it
really slow network switching (I live on the border between Slovakia and Austria and need to switch networks often), usually requiring turning the iPhone on and off
having to hack the iPhone to be able to share the internet connection from the iPhone even to a Mac: and then to be worried that any given update could kill my tethering set up
looking at really lousy photographs, worse than my two year old Nokias
Something we are working on is some additional capacity in peak periods (as auto manufacturers have additional suppliers they can bring online if a sudden surge in demand appears). Gradually we are getting there. In the meantime, I take great care not to take on more work than we can handle. There's at least a $100,000/month of business which I'm not seeking as we just couldn't maintain quality standards yet. We are working on increasing capacity first and then slowly adding those additional clients.
My girlfriend is shocked and horrified that we are leaving this kind of money on the table. Her shock diminished when I explained that every day Foliovision leaves millions on the table in Slovakia alone:
A new order for some advanced Basecamp features came in. I checked the weblog of the client to see where they are coming from and ran into a new term: neo-Taylorism. Taylorism apparently had very negative connotations. My only acquaintance with Taylor is with the sails manufacturer and the association is positive. I decided to go digging and in the process ran into the concepts of:
scientific management
human relations movement
Toyota production system
Running a company is a pain in the neck tremendously challenging.
If you are in the knowledge business, there are two major challenges:
managing people
managing process
You are spared the pain of managing inventory. In a sense, time becomes your inventory but it does at least take a third dimension out of the equation, in comparison to auto parts production where you really, really need to manage raw materials and parts.
What's cool about business theory is that it's all been invented before.
Scientific Management: neo-Taylorism
This Taylor is Frederick and he died in 1915, before Henry Ford's factories were built. Frederick Taylor came up with something called Scientific Management. The basic idea was to improve workflow (hey I need some of that) and labour output (work faster!).
The basic idea is that best practice methods should be documented and taught: all workers should produce quality work. A good start. The problem remains that with equal pay, there is no disincentive for workers not to dog it or goldbrick. Taylor called this slow working "soldiering". Many workers call it "getting through the day". I've got a friend like this. Once someone approaches work like this, that person is nearly unemployable at Foliovision or anywhere else where enthusiasm, productivity and quality of work are valued.
Hard to theme. A Mambo/Joomla site looks like Mambo/Joomla, like it or not.
Crappy built-in SEO. Leading SEO plugin belongs to a very peculiar developer and is encrypted (have fun repairing the SEO plugin, we reverse engineered and decrypted it for our site to make our changes even after paying for it).
Nasty, nasty core code. Very difficult to fix broken items.
Fractured community (never healed after Joomla/Mambo split back in 2006).
Most good plugins are pay.
Rather mediocre developers. Anyone who likes to code in Joomla/Mambo in 2011 ought to see a psychiatrist.
Developer pricing is all over the map as there are many old-school Mambo/Joomla developers still ought there churning out convoluted future-resistant code quite affordably.
Easy to theme in a unique way. A WordPress site does not have to look like a WordPress site.
Great plugin architecture.
Plugins for everything.
Lots of great professional developers.
Fast development cycle. Improvements every year.
Active leadership from Automattic and founding team. Particular thanks to Mark Jaquith for keeping the community running with less nepotism and more fairness than most collective human endeavour.
Disadvantages
Fairly weak core code (in comparison to Drupal, but not Joomla!) but core getting better every year.
Lots of really crap faker developers in the pool who couldn't build a working website to save their mother's life.
Lots of popular but seriously broken plugins which will cripple your website performance forever and make it nearly impossible for you to cleanly upgrade (NextGen Gallery, I'm looking at you but not just you).
Really crappy commercial themes which are heavily marketed but compromise your ability to either upgrade or switch themes and compromise performance for the life of your site.
Weak static page management without adding plugins. Easily fixed with said plugins.
Too fast an upgrade cycle. You have to keep upgrading your site, whether you like it or not, for security reasons. There are no security releases only new versions. Feel the pain for a commercial site with running a full complement of plugins. Corollary: choose your plugins and plugin developers very, very carefully for cleanliness of code and frequency of update.
Conclusion
For a very large commercial project, I can see a justification for choosing Drupal. On a big project, most of your expense will be custom development anyway - everything has to be optimised and integrated - so you don't much care one way or another about a myriad of plugins which you will probably not use. I still wouldn't make that trade-off: slightly better core code for a vast pool of community contributed code. But it's a defensible position.
Joomla/Mambo should die a violent death. We did our first CMS project in Mambo and last year redeveloped a couple of existing sites in Joomla. Our best developers - very platform agnostic - threatened to quit if I accepted anymore Joomla work. Such crappy, convoluted spaghetti code they'd never seen. And these developers have had ample chance to see the worst side of WordPress.
The only justification for a site in Joomla/Mambo is that it's legacy (i.e. you already did a lot of custom development on it six years ago and don't have the budget to migrate) or that you are part of an international network standardised on Joomla/Mambo and the mothership discourages anyone from leaving the central platform (our client's situation). For everyone else, just migrate out and count your blessing that you got your site out alive. Enjoy the fresh air and clean code of WordPress (or Drupal).
WordPress is the platform of choice in my opinion for the small, medium or large business. Whatever holes you can find in WordPress (editorial management process, page management, ecommerce, membership site) are easily solved with high quality plugins.
The cool part about WordPress is that the core is kept clean so that you aren't forced to load code you don't need if you want a simple weblog. Thus WordPress can be a weblog, a corporate information site, a membership site, a store or an international news network.
The danger with WordPress include the overhyped commercial themes which don't solve your problems but pretend to (I'm looking at you DIYthemes.com and Thesis, WooThemes and ElegantThemes). A related danger are the weak developers and hangers on who have infested the huge WordPress community and enthusiastically give bad advice, whether about SEO or gallery plugins. These clowns will happily break your website for pay or into a defective by design commercial theme. Forewarned is forearmed.
Just like any other serious professional endeavour you need steady hands on deck when you want to take your site to the next level if you want to maintain performance, appearance and compatibility. Once you have substantial traffic or need ecommerce, WordPress is no longer a DIY venture for the non-programmer.
We personally recommend people start a new site on WordPress.com unless they are developing for an established business. Once you have an audience or a functioning business, self-hosted WordPress is the way to go. Even the sky is not a limit. There are few sites we could not develop better and faster in WordPress.
Just trying to prepare the database of one of our top clients for import into Highrise. We do some checking out of the Tags documentation. Lo and behold at the top of our help query what comes up:
Highrise Tag Export
which leads to:
Incorrect Highrise Tag Export Info
We get very alarmed. This client's database needs some major reorganisation. The client would flip out if we spent three months reorganising that database and then she were not able to leave. We plan to keep the client in Highrise for years but perhaps she will run into a workflow issue which absolutely requires her to step up to a more sophisticated CRM system.
Guys, it would be a very good idea to take the wrong information out of your official help system.
I remember Jason loudly complaining about GetSatisfaction.com a few years ago. I remember mainly agreeing with him at the time. But the 37signals documentation at GetSatisfaction.com is more accurate than their own.
Kind of takes the wind out of those sails.
Lesson to be learned: keep your own documentation up-to-date.
That rule applies to Foliovision too. I wonder how much of our plugin documentation is still accurate.
I wondered how potentially an anonymous feedback tool would go over around here.
Great but nobody would use it.
I thought about how many hours would be involved introducing it and monitoring and how much feedback we'd get.
Great but there would be very little use.
I then checked their list of customers. Mozilla is on the list, some company called Vivaki. Another one called George Fern.
Mozilla is an open source company which we admire enormously and probably not terribly different in terms of company culture. But much bigger.
All of these companies have multiple teams and multiple managers. I.e. they've broken out of the human society structure. Human society is based on family/packs of six to eleven individuals. Under normal conditions, more than ten and we start to fracture off into different groups.
So a company needs to restructure as they get over ten.
Even at Foliovision that applies. We are at around fifteen and one of the groups had to break off under their own manager. I still lead a group of about ten plus one manager.
How does that affect Rypple?
We are too small to be using such a tool. At Foliovision everyone still has extended direct contact with their managers. If you have a question or concern, it's not difficult to bring it up.
We do have a couple of shy employees who don't speak up until s/he is a bit cross or steamed up. Perhaps Rypple would help them. But the administrative load to carry would be too much. Like carrying a washing machine through the mountains.
On the other hand, would you want to live without a washing machine at home?
Not likely.
If you do run a larger company (thirty plus*), you might want to take Rypple for a trial.
* Rypple as its own team of 17+. Nice looking app but that's a lot of people supporting a single, fairly simple tool. Equivalent of the entire 37signals staff who are supporting four apps and an education business.
On the other hand, pricing for bcToolkit seems a bit out of line. For their reports, bcToolkit wants the price again of your Basecamp subscription. If you're paying $50, pay $50 again. If you are paying $99 pay $100 (more expensive than Basecamp itself). I don't see the value there. bcToolkit does not provide half the functionality of Basecamp.
Are there any more affordable alternatives for reporting on Basecamp time keeping? As a matter of fact, yes.
If you use Freshbooks, you get all the reporting of bcToolkit plus invoicing and expenses.
Fresbooks reports Basecamp hours
sample Freshbooks user summary by tasks
If for some reason, Freshbooks doesn't work for you and your team does its time tracking inside Basecamp, bcToolKit is worth considering. Having access to these kinds of reports helps a lot with billing and planning.
At Foliovision, we are growing slowly but surely. With every quarter we have more trained and talented staff, with every quarter we have more clients, with every quarter our principal clients get gradually wealthier, with every quarter we have more experience, with every quarter we've written more and better software. Sometimes one does wish it could all go a lot faster...but what's happening is steady and good.
The alternative to slower organic growth of course is the quick fix of funding, VC funding with massive expansion until acquisition by a big player (big: YouTube by Google, small: Delicious into Yahoo) or public offering (Google itself).
Our luminary colleague in SEO, Rand Fishkin recently started a personal weblog with a more intimate take on events in his life, than his persistent and ever cheery company posts over at SEOmoz.org. Great idea. It's wonderful to see Rand's deeper reflections and concerns, ideas which go beyond the latest change in Google algorithm's and the bright future of SEO.
Rand Fishkin backed by lawyers at ProSEO London November 2010
Apparently as recently as summer 2009, Rand wasted 3 months of his life and SEOmoz's time doing fruitless rounds of musical chairs with VC's. The valuation they shopped was too high. No luck.
In the end, they just had to stop the meetings and just build a profitable company and finish/render commercial a selection of their grandiose projects for conquering the SEO universe (does SEO exist beyond this world of men or is it an unfathomable and nonsensical conceit of a few decades around the turn of the second millenium). Probably the best thing to ever happen to SEOmoz.
Not getting the money was a blessing in disguise. Rand has learned to run a profitable larger company instead. That’s a much better business and human skill than firecracker VC deals which in the end implode a company.
My pledge to myself is that I would always run my company for the staff and for the clients (in that order). I figure that if the staff are very happy and able to work well and stay, the clients will be very happy too. Of course it’s somewhat more complex than that simple rule, but it’s a good starting point.
Trying to run a company for the VC’s instead sounds like a diabolical prospect. In the first year of Foliovision, one of my staff actually gave me Wayne McVicker’s book Starting Something: An Entrepreneur’s Tale of Corporate Culture a cautionary tale if there ever was one. After three years of health destroying work and cares (in the medical equipment business, ironically) and $3 billion dollar IPO, Neoforma founder Wayne McVicker's ends up with a used Volvo and some debt to his stepfather. Highly recommend it.
How on earth can one ever make a better world with VC’s on one’s back? And if we’re not making a better world, what is it then that we are doing with our lives?
We are very big Basecamp users (we hover between 70 and 100 active projects at any given time). We've been waiting a long time for a 37signals suite. I've been curious to try Campfire seriously (which we can only do in the context of a large account).
Finally they delivered and the offer is pretty good. For Highrise for example, the account bundled in the $149 would normally cost $149 by itself. Of course, what we'd need or use would fit into the Plus at $49/month (although we'd be close with the 15 user limit). In the end, we haven't said yes yet.
37signals Suite Review
Value of the offer.
The Pro suite is equivalent of:
$99 Basecamp (100 projects)
$149 Highrise (50,000 contacts, unlimited employees: we'd need $49 separately)
$149 Backpack (10,000 pages, larger than any existing Backpack plan: we'd need $49 separately)
$49 Campfire (60 users instead of 75: we'd need $24, 25 users)
So for a single fee of $149, the paper value is $445/month. The real value if we used the services to the max with our existing staff and client list is $222/month.
The value proposition is great, with plenty of room to expand. But my main question is upgrading going to improve our business processes and our lives. I'm not sure yet.
Here's my main concerns:
increasing our dependence on 37signals: it's always dangerous to put too much of your business process in the hands of any third party, as Microsoft customers have learnt to their peril over the years. Lock-in. Right now we are waiting on 37signals to improve the mobile versions to stop complaints from BlackBerry users.
Backpack does not allow you to export pages to html (only Writeboards will go cleanly). That's a nuisance as the source code is so messy you can't just view source and move it over. I was thinking about using Backpack for the drafts of our documentation but we'll just keep doing it as WordPress drafts in Foliopress WYSIWYG. So we'd be unlikely to use Backpack much, although our SEO department might go back to using it for collaborating with external writers.
Each writer could have his or her own page. We'd get all our documents then in standard format, ready for html. This did work really well for us at one point.
Campfire will be great for quick chats, but I'm worried that a lot of coherent conversation will just end up in these quick chats and hence not be searchable from Basecamp. So Campfire is a plus and a minus. Currently we get by very well with Skype for this kind of communication. With this step, we could eliminate Skype from our workflow along with any IM service.
Highrise. Really we'd like to use Highrise. We need a better sales process (one with less me in the middle of it, and it looks like Highrise might be the solution). We are still doing a lot of work with Relenta for outgoing group email and may manage to replicate our sales process in Relenta, but Dmitri and the guys have slowed down in terms of improving Relenta and before totally committing to Relenta, we'd like to see some new features and a faster upgrade schedule.
There's a good chance we'll eventually end up upgrading just for Highrise. If we do, then 37signals scores big as we'd be able to move our clients in real estate over to Highrise which has lots of great features for real estate (deals and cases).
Focusing on Highrise: Integration with external tools and even with Basecamp itself
Our main accounting and invoicing tool is Freshbooks. We love Freshbooks and did contribute a lot of tweaks to its development a couple of years ago. Freshbooks totally satisfies our sophisticated four currency and fifteen member team's needs now so we don't need to bother to ask for too many improvements anymore.
Highrise does integrate with Freshbooks. But frankly, integration with Freshbooks stinks. It's a simple import tool really, with no information or links shared back and forth. On the other hand, JavelinCRM/CapsuleCRM (too bad about the forced rebranding guys) does full integration with Freshbooks, even fetching Freshbooks financial data automatically. As Freshbooks is now the center of our client contact data, I'd really appreciate better integration here before jumping on board. In fact, data sync is one of the biggest issues we have with the 37signals suite.
Even their own Basecamp doesn't integrate with Highrise. The best 37signals now offer is importing Basecamp contacts into Highrise. The problem with this integration is that normally a contact would start in Highrise as a lead and only later move to Basecamp as part of a closed deal. Get ready for data reentry, 37signals user. Moreover, Highrise won't sync with Apple Address Book or Google Contacts. I know sync is one of the worst productivity killers for app developers (burns up to 90% of programming resources), but some kind of working sync is really pretty important in this day and age at least for core contact information.
The generally unfriendly attitude of 37signals to sync (even among their own products) makes me very reluctant to upgrade to their suite or integrate Foliovision more deeply. Take another example: Backpack. For everyone I'd like to add to Backpack I have to do it by hand. Not the end of the world for the twelve core Foliovision employees, but I would think as a suite subscriber, there would be a shortcut allowing me to pick people from my Basecamp contacts or Highrise contacts.
Highrise: the competitive landscape
Highrise does very well against SalesForce (expensive), SugarCRM (free but complicated), ACT (difficult to use) and TopProducer (expensive and complicated). It's more interesting to hold 37signals feet to the fire against similar best of breed web applications.
So in this case, whether I go for CapsuleCRM or Highrise/suite, I end up with no sync between my CRM and Basecamp. At least with CapsuleCRM, I do get sync with Freshbooks making that part of life easier.
The next issue we run into are todo's. Our whole team has all of their todo's in Basecamp so they see all their todo's in one place. They can even order their todos with our new tool Ascent List. With Highrise todo's this working system would be temporarily broken and they'd have to look in two places. We can fix that though.
Now we do get to a rub here. 37signals is great on volume pricing. With Basecamp, I'm limited by 100 projects in my current account but as many staff and as many clients as I'd like. CapsuleCRM would charge me $12 per staff member. If I wanted to bring the core Foliovision staff on board (most of them would hardly use it, but locking them out of our CRM is hardly the hallmark of a progressive organisation), I'd be looking at about $150/month. I.e. three times more expensive than the Highrise solution. With the Highrise solution, we'd also be able to keep growing with no incremental cost.
I can solve the cost issue by just adding sales and admin staff to CapsuleCRM for about $60/month. It would be great if CapsuleCRM would do some kind of bundles for small business like Freshbooks and 37signals, even if it means two levels of users (one kind can't use the sales tools).
Highrise: Mailing out
37signals think of themselves a high-minded lot. The last thing they'd like to be bothered with are spam complaints and ISP relations. Hence there is no mailing functionality in Highrise. This is where Relenta shines. You have your contacts which you can easily place into groups. You can put them on email sequences when they arrive, or even later. You can send out mass emails to any group with the click of a button.
Highrise could make this all a reality by plugging into an external email provider. Unfortunately when they created their API, 37 signals left tags out. Meaning that it was very difficult to send to the right people with an external email provider (SendLoop, Newsberry, MailChimp, ConstantContact).
Only MailChimp has had the patience to come back now that the API has been improved and rework their Highrise sync. It actually seems pretty good now. Alas, I don't care for MailChimp. Just a bit too funky and a bit too fiddly. Really like SendLoop when I tried them but no real Highrise sync. Advantage, Relenta (integrated). CapsuleCRM, neutral (MailChimp integration but a bit weaker than Highrise).
Returning to value: TCO
The 37signals bundle is a great deal for any small business. Maintaining these tools, let along building them, from open source software would be many times the monthly cost in time of using their suite. The suite even includes time tracking in Basecamp (again I must say we use the Freshbooks time tracking as it's more robust for billing purposes and as usual with 37signals, the sync/integration is pretty weak) so apart from invoicing, you have almost all of your business needs met apart from an internet connection and a telephone line. You won't even need to bother with local networking (always a hassle) unless you are editing video as the online network from just Basecamp is robust enough to fill all your needs.
With this suite you can scale up to 100 projects, 50,000 contacts and unlimited employees for just $149/month. That's easily $1500/month of infrastructure for $150 when you count admin and IT hours.
Just fix the syncing and interaction with external tools and between the apps to be more robust and I'm on board. Yesterday. In the meantime, we'll hobble along with just Basecamp and look elsewhere for our CRM solution to Relenta and CapsuleCRM.
For years we had our sites all on Cartika Hosting and we loved it. For about five years I think. We recommended Cartika Hosting to all our clients and put up a lot of sites on Cartika.
The disk space limits and even bandwidth were always pretty tight in comparison to what you could get with Dreamhost, Bluehost or Hostgator. But we didn't mind.
What we wanted was quality and security and for that we were prepared to pay a significant premium over discount hosting. We called it "business quality hosting", after a rough ride with our own site Foliovision on Dreamhost for a few months with our client sites on Hostroute.
I'm always amused to see the right wingers shout about how the market rules and how the invisible hand will solve all problems. Actually in place of government regulation what you will see are cartels and mafia structures. And there will be no one to intervene on your behalf. You'll take your medicine and say thank you.
A perfect example are the mobile telephone providers whether T-Com, Orange or in the case to follow, Verizon. The only reason they don't just take whatever money they want from you all the time is fear of the regulator. For three years, Verizon hammered any customer who accidentally clicked on a data button on his/her phone $1.99 for initiating data use.
sony ericsson single touch data button
I don't know if you've owned a recent Sony-Ericsson telephones but for years it's been almost impossible to avoid starting a data connection at least 10 times/month. Just by clicking the wrong key once you were toasted.
It turns out that Verizon has stopped doing this. Not only that, Verizon is now handing the $50 million in dubious booty back to consumers. They are repaying consumers only thanks to consumer complaints to the FCC, one of those wasteful government organs:
"We're gratified to see Verizon agree to finally repay its customers," FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Michele Ellison said in a statement. "But questions remain as to why it took Verizon two years to reimburse its customers and why greater disclosure and other corrective actions did not come much, much sooner."
Next time a tea party starts somewhere near you, tell them this story. Without civil oversight, private enterprise is not an invisible helping hand, but the ripper's glove on your throat.
