Oh do fuck off you old coot.

At the wreckage near Bishoftu in a small pastoral farm field and in the Java Sea off Indonesia lie the remains of the early victims of arrogant, algorithm-driven corner cutting, by reckless corporate executives and their captive government regulators.

You know, that something is 50+ years old in basic design doesn't make it bad, especially when it hasn't failed a bunch of times in those 50 years that could be pinned on some inherent vice.

To the contrary.

Nader had a use at one time.  Then again my family owned a Corvair in my youth and we didn't die.  In fact it was my mother's daily driver, so you can bet I rode in it as a kid more times than I could count, more than a few of them without any seat belt on too.  And she wasn't all that good of a driver either -- certainly not up to racing standards.  Can I tell you about the time she hit a bridge?  No, really, she did.....

Don't get me wrong -- as my other articles point out there's plenty of finger-pointing to do with the 737MAX, with most of it aimed at the MCAS system and its poorly documented characteristics.

I'll even go so far (and have) as to call five-alarm bullcrap on allowing a 0.6 degree control authority to turn into a 2.5 degree one without the entire fault and risk analysis being re-run up and down the line, including the impact on CG and cargo carrying capacity.  After all it's not the authority the pilot may require at cruise altitude and speed (he probably has enough to rip the tail off the plane if he could use the whole thing rapidly there) -- it's down low and slow when that's going to matter.

I can also raise a big stink about the fact I'm quite sure (although I don't have a flight or system manual for the plane) that there are multiple other sources of imputed attitude (angle-of-attack) data available, and as a result it shouldn't be all that hard for the flight management system to know that a sensor is full of crap in short order -- including on the ground at power-up when the angle of attack is (obviously) not some wildly-divergent figure.  Not doing that right up front -- and charging extra to compare data in the air is IMHO flat-out culpably wrong.  Digging back into why the system didn't cross-check as a matter of routine (that is, why someone or a bunch of someones thought it was not necessary or didn't consider it, and whether that was a pure revenue play with excuses paving the road) is something we deserve answers to, because it's something I would have thought of -- and I don't do flight control computers.

And I can make a stink about the fact the the previous generation 737 aircraft (from what I've been told by a couple of people who drive 'em) apparently disconnected auto-trim on a converse manual control input and this one does not (which makes sense; if you go the opposite way the computer has clearly gotten it wrong) so if the pilots (and carriers) were told this plane flies exactly like the old one and relied on that, well, no it doesn't.

I can take an even bigger beef with statistical models used to "predict" failure rates.  I love those lines of BS that are commonly run in the computer world; 1x10^-14 or -15 bit-error rates, for example, or "2 million hours MTBF" that sound like "oh you mean that never happens" -- and since you believe that you never need to make known-good backups too.  Let me know who you are if you buy that bullcrap so I can prepare to bill you at $1,000+/hour to try recover your general ledger and all the data that went into it (never mind the rest of your business data) when you lose it, because you eventually will.  Oh, and may I remind you up front my odds of complete success in that circumstance -- that is, you lose little or nothing and at the end you're mostly ok business-wise -- are about one in five?

Or the reality of computers generally, which is that they run on electrons being stored, moved around and compared, and guess what -- there are these things called cosmic rays that can flip bits without warning in same.  Happen often?  No.  Does it happen?  Uh, yeah, it does.  Can this be guarded against?  In some cases (e.g. ECC memory) but not all (e.g. same hit on a logic gate in a peripheral, etc.)  Do aircraft systems shield against this?  I'm sure they do; military systems do, but is that shielding perfect and are defenses like ECC perfect?  I hope nobody's counting on that to keep them from making smoking holes in the ground.....

None of this, however, changes that a human pilot had quite some time to figure out what was going on or simply decide all the computers are full of crap, I'm turning them off and flying the plane.  At what point was that the right call?  Obviously before the ground was hit, but also obviously neither crew did it.  Is this human-factors engineering, people too damned reliant on technology, shitty training or.... something else?  Hellifiknow but don't you think we better figure it out before we make more smoking holes?  For all we know the second auger job might have ended the same way but not started the same way and there's some evidence of that (e.g. reports of an abnormally high take-off speed; unsubstantiated at this point since the data is not yet available from the FDR.)

And then there's what drove this entire thing, which was carriers demanding "same type" so they didn't have to spend much if any money on retraining and such -- and not just for pilots either, but also for ground crews and related things.  There's a hell of a lot more than just a plane involved in flying a plane, in short, as anyone who has ever been to an airport knows.

Finally whatever you think of the professionalism of the crews involved (that is, are the carriers outside the US hiring competent people, in the main) there's one glaring fact -- Lion Air, the first 737MAX to go down, had a similar fault to what appears to have crashed it the day prior and for inexplicable reasons the aircraft was not immediately put on the ground, the problem reported, including up the line to Boeing and the aircraft tagged out (grounded) until the cause was found.

Might that have led to a resolution path before anyone got killed?

Maybe, maybe not.

But it didn't happen, and that one's not on Boeing since that flight did land safely.

Or is it on Boeing?

This much we do know -- modern aircraft engines, at least, send a lot of data in real time to manufacturers and so do modern aircraft avionics and flight management systems.  Malaysia's lost hull in which we have had reported said system was intentionally disabled, anyone?  So..... was the data sent, to whom was it sent, who if anyone got it on the previous day's flight with Lion Air when they had the computer go crazy but they lived and if someone did get it why didn't they instantly go apeshit when they got it and ground the damned aircraft?

I want an answer to that question too because again -- but for that, if the data was sent and someone got it 300 people would be alive.

Finally don't be so sure US crews are that "vastly" superior.  We now know that a United Express plane missed the runway entirely in Maine.  The original report was that it "slid off" the runway in icy conditions; that turns out to have been wrong.  On the first attempt they went around on a missed approach but on the second they landed between the runway and taxiway on what was probably (if there hadn't been snow!) grass, ripping the gear off the aircraft.  Oops.

So let's do get to the bottom of this and let's not just change the software and call it a day.  Specifically, let's make damn sure that if the MCAS system retains it's 2.5 degree trim change authority that all of the calculations and fault analysis related to that are run with that figure and the 0.6 degree figures are voided, meaning that until that's complete the plane doesn't fly again.

What falls out of that does; it might be nothing, it might be something.  It might even be a bad something, force MCAS to basically go away and with that all the retraining and certification issues come back with the cert as an entirely different type.  Or maybe something less is required -- but let's have the formal verification re-run and know its right.

What I've said before and will say again is that the sort of rot that leads to these incidents doesn't happen in a day or a week.  It takes years, even decades.  Likewise it can't be fixed in a day or a week either.

Thiokol, if you remember, ignored multiple engineers who had told them that the seals on the shuttle booster rocket were unsafe at low temperatures.  But their warnings were ignored, and despite a director for Thiokol refusing to sign the launch recommendation -- he believed the concerns were valid -- NASA launched anyway.  Challenger was destroyed along with everyone aboard.

I suspect there's a decent pile of crap sandwiches to be served here, as I've said before, and I can't come up with any good reason for that control authority deviation to not be run back through the full set of analysis.  That not being done, along with the reset behavior not being part of the analysis, and it appears it wasn't, is inexcusable.

But then again so is not grounding a plane when everyone on board damn near dies and only because there was a competent pilot in the jump seat did they figure it out and successfully complete the flight -- then the same apparent fault kills everyone on board the next day.

Figure it out and nail the responsible parties to the cross -- Nader-style scaremongering garbage serves nobody.

Every one of the officers and directors.

Or just destroy the company.  I don't much care which.

I'm talking about Boeing here.

Christchurch saw 50 people killed by a maniac.  The 737MAX has killed six times as many people and destroyed two hulls.

STFU about terrorism and how horrible it is until there are 300+ criminal charges of manslaughter laid for the souls aboard those two aircraft unless this entire article is crap, which it probably isn't.

Specifically, the article states:

• The failure analysis, including the "what bad thing(s) happen if this goes wrong" were predicated on a design that had the authority to move the trim by 0.6 degrees.  By that maximum movement the system could not crash the plane or kill anyone on board (it might produce minor injuries or discomfort to passengers however.)
  
  
• The limits were later updated to 2.5 degrees but the documents were not updated and thus the analysis was not re-run. That's four times the original limit, and would have prompted a much more serious rating in the event of a malfunction.
  
  
• Worse, it was not documented that the system would reset whenever the pilot entered a trim command, and thus there was no effective limit at all on the amount of trim change the system could input.  That would have likely led to a "will lose the aircraft" (e.g. "CATASTROPHIC", or "must be prevented") rating for a failure.

To have a system that winds up during testing requiring four times the designed and expected range of authority is outrageous on its face.  To be off by 5%, 10% -- that's pretty normal.  You can only model so much, and models are never exact.

But when you're off by four hundred percent your original design was crap.

Further, to have the system reset whenever the pilot gave a contrary command meant that it had unlimited authority.  The total range from neutral to the limit is 5 degrees, so 2.5 degrees is half the total design range from neutral with one action.  That's not a "minor" adjustment!

As I said in my previous article prior to reading this I had serious questions about whether Boeing pushed the envelope too far with this design in the first place, shaving margins.

Now, if this article is correct it's clear that Boeing knew during flight testing that the expected behavior of the aircraft with the new engines did not match the actual, in-flight performance; what they actually got in terms of aerodynamic stability under certain conditions was much worse than they expected.

But rather than change the documents to reflect the true amount of correction required and document that the actual authority of the system was unlimited due to reset behavior or put hard limit switches on the system to prevent that and then re-run the analysis, which might have resulted in at minimum a different type certificate (read: more cost for customers as pilots must be re-trained) or worse, a denied certification (potentially catastrophic costs requiring re-engineering the engine mounts and aerodynamic effects of same, redesign and re-fabrication of the wings and control surfaces, or even determination that the problems were not able to be feasibly corrected!) Boeing didn't update the documents and thus the re-analysis was not done.

The Seattle Times calls this flawed analysis.  That, of course, assumes Boeing did not know that the authority of the system was changed to have four times that originally specified and did not know that if the pilot commanded opposite trim the system treated that as a reset and restarted, giving it the set authority anew, effectively meaning it had authority only limited by the physical limits of the mechanism.

That is an unreasonable assumption since someone changed the limits of authority between the time the system was designed and when testing was completed.  That someone most-certainly did know; the change did not happen on its own.

In addition Boeing knew that pilot commands in the opposite direction reset the system because Boeing engineers coded it that way.  Someone wrote that spec and someone else signed off on it when the programming was complete; in addition during testing it was tested against that spec.

But the FAA wasn't notified of any of this, the documents were, if the article is correct, not updated and the failure analysis was not re-examined in light of these facts.

Look folks I've written code like this.  Yeah, it was a long time ago but so what?  It wasn't for a plane but it was operating heavy machinery where excursions beyond authorized and reasonable limits either had the potential to do severe property damage and in some cases could kill someone -- or a lot of someone's.

You don't change limits from the original design without going back through the failure analysis.

You don't put a system together like this without defining what the maximum limits of its authority are, and what happens if they are entirely consumed -- along with what can happen if they're exceeded.

If the "what can happen if they're exceeded" is very bad (people get badly hurt, die, or serious property damage happens) then you put physical, hard backup on said system that independently prevents that and which is not able to be overridden by the software in question, whether it's a limit switch that cuts the power to the contactor's coil or something similar, and also considers any time that limit switch triggers an alarm event which indicates a critical malfunction took place that must be corrected before the thing in question is returned to service, since that "last ditch" safety device is there for the specific purpose of preventing a disaster and it just triggered. You cannot run that last-ditch safety through the original control system in any way because if it goes off you know, with certainty, the original system is defective -- it has either gone insane according to its operating rules or is broken.

Further, and perhaps most-critically, to not look VERY closely at ALL of the original design assumptions and their safety margins when you design for an 0.6 degree maximum automated trim correction, which is about 12% of the range from neutral and during testing you're forced to allow a 50% range from neutral to meet requirements, four times the designed and expected limit, you fucked up when you designed that thing in a way that might not be able to be safely operated no matter what you do in the present "as-built" configuration.

You have no damned business letting that thing, whatever it is, anywhere near people it can maim or kill until and unless you can prove that being off by 400% on a critical safety item's range of authority does not reduce the margin of safety for the entire thing below reasonable limits.  In addition if you're off by that much then everything in said device needs to be re-examined down to the last piece of wire, rivet, bolt and torque spec; if you screwed the pooch that badly in one place why would I believe that's the only place your rocket scientists blew it?

To not do all of that is outrageous.

I'm not an aeronautical engineer but I understand process control, computers and shaving margins to meet "corporate needs", whether those needs be time or money.  If what The Seattle Times is reporting is accurate not only did that happen the FAA, the agency that's supposed to stop that crap from happening and spank people if they try it instead stuck its head up Boeing's ass and issued a type certificate, all in the name of "promoting" American aviation.

Don't talk to me about terrorists and shootings when there are two planes full of people who are dead as a consequence of this bullshit.

Whereas the First Amendment guarantees the right to freedom of speech.

Whereas the Internet has taken over from print and other traditional media in the distribution of speech, both on an individual, one-to-one basis and on a one-to-many basis.

Whereas Internet distribution encompasses what was traditionally considered "printed words", live and recorded speech, along with live and recorded video, and likely will encompass further means of communication not yet envisioned.

Whereas the First Amendment's guarantees, unless extended and secured by the dominant media distribution methods of the day is rendered meaningless, an outrage that neither the Founders or contemporary Americans should tolerate.

Therefore it is enacted:

Definitions

• Utility Internet Services (UIS) are those which are now and become in the future essential to participation in and publication of material on the Internet.  Said services include but are not limited to Domain Name Registration, Domain Name Resolution, Packet-Switched Routing, Dedicated Fixed Wired and Wireless Packet Service (irrespective of whether the wires involved are copper, glass, or other materials not yet invented), and CPU, Disk or Network Resource that are attached to or reachable by the Internet, whether provisioned with an operating system and application software or "bare" and whether provided on a dedicated, leased or "cloud" and shared basis.
  
  
• Application Internet Services (AIS) are those services built upon or run within UIS that are (1) branded, (2) present a consistent presence to a consumer that are distinct from other AIS and do not provide the services of a UIS.  Examples of an AIS include but are not limited to Facebook, Snap, Twitter, The NY Post's online web presence and others.
  
  
• Financial Internet Services (FIS) are those services that are built upon or run with UIS that are (1) branded and (2) primarily provide the functionality of transferring funds to or from one party to another, whether as part of an AIS or separately.  Examples of a FIS include PayPal, Square and Venmo.
  
  
• Viewpoint means any and all political, personal or commercial perspectives, expressed beliefs or statements, whether factual or opinion and irrespective of the means of expression whether verbal, via imagery or otherwise, that is lawful to express under the laws of The United States.  A viewpoint does not encompass depictions or acts that constitute per-se violations of United States law, including but not limited to child pornography or exploitation and the transmission of "spam" in violation of applicable law (e.g. the CAN-SPAM act.)

Prohibited Acts; Penalties and Exceptions

• Neither a UIS or FIS may enjoin, refuse to provide services to or refuse to transact, interoperate with or otherwise discriminate for or against any person or entity who desires to or does transact with same on the basis of Viewpoint.
  
  
• A UIS shall not tamper with, inspect, modify or filter any lawful transmission of content through, by or to a customer, nor shall any such entity intercept, monitor or sell data pertaining to same to third parties for any purpose whatsoever except as specifically directed by a court of competent jurisdiction and subject to a warrant requiring same.  By way of example filtering, diverting, sorting or otherwise tampering with domain name lookup results is a violation of this section as is the examination of stored or in-transit data for any commercial purpose including targeted advertising.
  
  
• An AIS may enjoin, refuse to provide services or refuse to transact on a Viewpoint basis, provided that said refusal does not violate any other federal non-discrimination statute in the United States, including but not limited to discrimination on the basis of race, color or creed and the rules upon which said conduct will be judged are both published and consistently applied.
  
  
• A FIS that violates this section shall have any linked federal money transmitting or banking charter suspended for six months upon the first violation, and permanently upon a second or subsequent violation.  Any aggrieved party may bring private civil suit for enforcement of this section and, upon prevailing, is entitled the the greater of $50,000 or treble the actual damages incurred and shall also recover all reasonable attorneys fees and costs.
  
  
• A UIS that violations this section shall be fined not less than $100,000 or more than $1 million for each person so injured or impacted for the first violation with the penalties doubling for each subsequent violation without limit.  Any aggrieved party may bring private civil suit for enforcement under this section and, upon prevailing is entitled to the greater of $50,000 or treble the actual damages incurred and shall also recover all reasonable attorneys fees and costs.
  
  
• Nothing in this section shall prohibit content and viewpoint neutral constraints on customers, such as billing for the data, CPU or space consumed, limiting the rate of transactions (e.g. posting) or imposing, on a non-discriminatory basis, fees for service.
  
  
• Nothing in this section shall prohibit the employees of a UIS, FIS or AIS from performing legitimate troubleshooting or investigation for the purpose of correcting "bugs" or other operational problems, or in the furtherance of investigating suspected fraudulent or illegal activity while using or facilitated through their services, provided that the interception and monitoring undertaken is performed only for that purpose and all copies of stored and intercepted data used therein are destroyed when the incident to which same pertains has been resolved.

That should pretty-much do it....

No, PayPal cannot refuse to allow people to send money to someone it considers a purveyor of "hate speech", as such is not illegal under the laws of the United States.

No, GoDaddy cannot refuse a domain registration provided the operator is not violating an actual law of the United States, nor can they terminate an existing registration except for non-payment of their fees or a proved violation of law.

No, the cable company cannot refuse you an Internet connection if you happen to have a picture of yourself in a white hood in your High School or College yearbook.

No, a hosting company cannot refuse to sell service to Glenn Beck on the same terms as it sells service to a LGBT organization.  It can, however, prohibit both from spamming people -- but cannot prohibit Glenn from spamming while allowing the LGBT people to do so.

If you get "deplatformed" or harmed by such a firm you can sue, and if you win not only will they get fined on an escalating basis if a financially-linked firm their federal banking connections will be severed on any second or repeated offense and the amount due to you is large enough to obtain both diversity jurisdiction in Federal Court and to make it hurt the entity who tries to do it.

Facebook or Youtube (for example) can ban people for whatever reason it wants. So can Twitter or, for that matter, The Market Ticker.  However, neither those firms nor any other collection of firms can get together to stop Gab, as a potential competitor, from establishing and maintaining service including taking money through and by it, and if they do all who are so-involved are exposed to ruinous fines and, in the case of a financially-related firm, the extinction of their business.

This does not address the monopolist concentration of power by, for example, Google and Youtube, nor Facebook and Google in the digital advertising realm.  It does, however, address firms and other parties attempting to destroy competing services such as Gab by targeting their ability to transact financially and connect physically to the Internet along with provisioning the services they need to operate on a non-discriminatory basis.  This act will instantly neuter the grievance industry attacks on those who might otherwise provide a legitimate competitive threat to those firms that are "AIS" types of providers yet go far down the road of censorship, and by doing so re-open the marketplace of ideas that so many are trying their damndest to slam shut.

Time to introduce and pass this folks...... right now.

Since nobody at CPAC wants to talk about it.... I will.

The bill is really quite simple:

• No person shall be entitled to any public funds or federally-funded government services unless they are a United States Citizen, Lawful Permanent Resident, or explicitly admitted under a formal refugee resettlement agreement.  No person admitted under such a formal refugee resettlement agreement may receive any federally-funded service or public funds beyond the term of five years, which may not be extended.  (In other words you either qualify for lawful permanent residence during that five years, including integrating and learning English, or get the hell out.)
  
  
• No person or organ of government may obligate any private party to provide any form of federally-sponsored benefit or mandate to any person not a Lawful Permanent Resident, Citizen or explicitly-admitted refugee during the above five-year period where said benefit, mandate or enterprise operates with any material connection to or with supplies procured in interstate commerce.
  
  
• No person who is not a citizen or lawful permanent resident may obtain any personal or financial benefit from federally-sponsored or funded benefits or mandates through a claim of familial or custodial relationship with a citizen or lawful permanent resident.
  
  
• Any person violating this statute shall be criminally liable under the crime of fraud for the full amount of such benefit, the full cost of any such mandate they access imposed upon the party who provides it and shall be ordered, upon conviction, to pay all such costs, expenses, court and attorney fees incurred by the party so impacted.  In addition any person violating this statute shall suffer a permanent inability to enter or remain within the United States with any future attempt to so enter being a separate and distinct criminal offense carrying a penalty of not less than one and not more than five years, with the costs of said incarceration billed to said illegal entrant.
  
  
• All persons desiring to claim asylum in the United States must do so in the first contiguous nation they reach after leaving the nation or nations that give rise to their claim at a US Consulate or Embassy in said nation and they must remain outside the United States while their claim is adjudicated.  Claims of asylum cannot be made nor processed by any person who is a citizen of a US-contiguous nation with which the United States has a formal trading and visitation relationship (that would be Canada and Mexico.)  Any act of illegal entry, past or present, to the United States permanently voids all privilege of asylum.
  
  
• All employers shall transmit with each 941 tax filing the E-Verify control number for each person so-employed.  All new hires must have E-Verify run prior to hiring and all currently employed persons must have same run within six months of the date of this legislation.  Failure to include a valid E-Verify control number on a 941 transmission, forgery of said number or willful omission of any employee from said form is declared a federal felony offense carrying a mandatory 5 year prison term and $100,000 fine for each person so-omitted with all persons having constructive or actual knowledge of said omission or fraud jointly and severably liable for same.

That stops the influx.

No "free" education, health care, housing, food stamps or anything else -- either directly or indirectly.  You cannot poop out a child on US soil and have their presence create an obligation to you -- not for your birth expenses, not for your housing expenses, nor for your food, utility or other expenses.  While a State could fund whatever it wants it cannot use any federal funds for such a program, including Medicaid, public schools (which obtain federal funding), food stamps or similar.

If you come here under a resettlement arrangement you have five years to show that (1) you intend to assimilate and (2) you are willing and able to both work and meet all other criteria for lawful permanent residence.  If not you're cut off -- period.  No more Little Mogadishu nonsense that has produced a crazy number of jihadi wannabes.

If you employ an illegal invader and get caught everyone with actual or constructive knowledge of it goes to prison.  It does not matter who you are -- whether you're a CEO, Controller, Payroll Clerk, farm owner or someone hiring a nanny.  Period.

Do the above as a simple bill and the entire illegal invader problem disappears overnight.

The lie factory in the media continues with regard to the economy and markets -- and it's you who take it up the chute.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have recently criticized stock buybacks, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in a New York Times op-ed and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., in a tweet storm about his plans to release legislation on the subject. As the Tampa Bay Times notes, this is something “you might expect from Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but not necessarily the Florida Republican.”

These objections to stock buybacks are, in a word, misguided. Critics’ complaints rest on the premise that they maximize shareholder earnings to the detriment of workers and at the expense of investments in the company. But this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how stock buybacks work and what drives business leaders’ decisions about spending profits and deploying capital.

False.

My complaint with them is that they are frauds.

Faux Snooz continues:

When a company turns a profit, one basic way to address the balance is to buy back shares; it’s a common mechanism for companies to distribute earnings to shareholders. The alternatives are to increase investment or pay out more in dividends, the latter of which is functionally identical to buying back shares.

No it's not.  Leaving aside tax differences, which are significant, the financial and market impact of buybacks is not functionally equivalent to a dividend.

When a company pays out dividends the total number of shares does not change.  Therefore the EPS does not change either for a given level of earnings.

If you earn $1 billion dollars and have one billion shares then the EPS is $1.00.  If you pay out half of that billion dollars in dividends then the EPS next quarter, assuming you still make a billion dollars, remains $1.00.

Now let's assume you take that half-billion and buy back shares.  The denominator gets smaller.  This means that for the same billion dollars in earnings next quarter (the size of the company hasn't changed) the EPS goes up.

This is a major functional difference.  It sounds like a free lunch to many people -- EPS goes up and since the "P/E" ratio is a common way to value stocks the instant effect on P/E is for it to fall, and thus price per share will tend to rise to make P/E the same.

This sounds like a buyback is superior to shareholders, and thus ought to be not only permitted but every firm should do it instead of issuing dividends.

If only it was that easy.

If only Unicorns that crapped out Skittles existed.

If only.....

When you reduce the denominator it is true that EPS goes up for a given level of earnings.  But so do the losses per share when there are losses, and by an exactly equal amount.  In other words market violence, which is called "volatility", associated with said firm's results increases exactly at the same ratio.

There is no free lunch in this regard.

Second, however, and the reason that buybacks were generally illegal before the government changed the rules is that this fact is actively hidden by everyone involved -- on Wall Street, in the media, in earnings reports and the statements made by everyone involved.

Why would all these people intentionally mislead the public?

Simple: They use buybacks as a mechanism to rob you as a shareholder.

Let's take a hypothetical company that issues 1,000 shares of stock.  We'll make it nice and small.  The insiders -- that is, the founders, mostly, and other key people at the outset hold 250 of those shares; they sell the rest of them to the public.  (This, by the way, is another scam that is commonly run -- companies sell a minority of shares to the public by one means or another and thus prevent the public shareholders from ever voting out the officers and directors!  That's fraud because such a firm is not publicly-owned and ought to be flatly illegal in the so-called public markets -- if you wish to do this you ought to be limited to selling to accredited investors who understand what's going on and are willing to buy what amounts to a private placement with no voting rights -- because that's what these companies are!)

Ok, so we have our 1,000 share company with 250 of them held by inside executives -- probably half of that 250 is held by the founder who is frequently the CEO.  All good so far; the other 750 shares are enough that you, along with the other public shareholders, can vote out and eject the CEO and board.

Now the company runs and makes a profit.  So what the board does is vote to buyback 100 of the shares in the public market.  What just happened?

The public's interest of 75% of the company just got cut; the insiders held 25% but now they hold 28%!

It doesn't end there.  The 100 shares gets bonused out as "restricted stock units" to the officers and directors!  So the total number of shares doesn't decrease; now there are 350 shares in the hands of insiders and only 650 in the hands of the public.

Do this for two more years and the public no longer has any control over the board or executives since they are now a minority and cannot vote anyone out!

You just had control of the company stolen from you.

The same strategy is sometimes used by closely-held firms where you have outside minority shareholders.  The reason you have to be an "accredited" investor to buy such a position is that it is very easy for the majority holders, who are usually the founders and running the place day-to-day, to steal from you and absent some extremely strong controls you have written into the bylaws of the company if and when it happens there's damn near nothing you can do about it.  Unless you're very savvy and insist on such as part of your deal you are open to a rank ramjob that will diminish your investment by an arbitrary amount as soon as the insiders decide to screw you.

There is nothing in the law, for example, to prevent the majority holder of such a firm who is the CEO from voting to bonus out more shares to himself as part of his compensation.  This dilutes your ownership interest and as a minority shareholder you can't vote a stop to it.  The only hope you have is to sue and you will probably lose so long as the firm can show that it's making money and the executive(s) who got the bonus are substantially why it's making money.  In other words you're almost certain to take it up the pooper with exactly zero recourse, and if you do sue not only will you almost-certainly lose the company defends against your lawsuit with what is ultimately your money since it comes out of company coffers and not the CEOs personal checking account.

Stock buybacks where the executives and other insiders are getting share grants are the exact same scam played out in the public markets.  The claim that it "makes value go up" is a lie.  Until you sell your shares all you have is numbers on a screen; the lower the float in a given firm (that is, the fewer shares outstanding) the less-likely you can sell them without moving the price downward, and thus your so-called "gain" is likely to be illusory.  In addition you permanently give up your voting control piece by piece until you have effectively none; while you may still own the same number of shares the public ownership of the whole is reduced and at the point it reaches less than 50% you have no voting control whatsoever.

Buybacks, in short, are nothing more than a parlor trick.  They look real good so long as the economy is very strong and there are no recessions.  But as soon as the inevitable downturn comes you discover that not only are losses magnified exactly as are "earnings" but you have had your ability to throw management out on their ear either diminished or completely destroyed by an under-the-table trick at the same time.