Honesty and Reflection on Company Mistakes

One question I get asked on occasion is how does speaking out about mistakes affect things like a career.

As I have stated before, honest analyses of what went right and what went wrong are hard to come by in any corporate environment. Most peoples' interest is protected by burying mistakes, this is how execs get hired again and again. The problem is this (obviously) does not serve the organization.

Honesty is not rewarded, even if:

• It is to lobby for training (or pointing to the Borders book store across the parking lot when someone complains the 'dir' command does not work on UNIX - maybe that's baby-like; I prefer competence)
  
• If there is an easier way to get something done
• If there is something that affects the company bottom line

So has this affected my work or ability to find it? Undoubtedly, but not in a quantifiable way.

Would you hire someone that will tell you when mistakes are being made?

How about if you do not react and the person gets shrill at times?

Radio Interview w Rich Levin: Last call for sunscreen!

Here it is - I opened my big mouth again, and gave an interview to Rich Levin. Pardon the voice quality - it was over SunRocket. I also got some press coverage locally in Connection Newspapers.

As it turned out, he also interviewed my former boss from SunRocket. Interesting how seven months can change things.

My last points are important: I am as blunt as I am in bringing up mistakes because one needs open discussion to learn from them. Too much energy in corporations is expended hiding mistakes, and so lessons get lost. Think about that before you berate the next guy for telling you the truth.

In other news, Bush said this morning that "you cannot impose freedom." Duh. Or "fundamentational" I guess.

Teleblend CEO Speaks

There was a thread on DSL Reports earlier in the week that included the participation of Bill Fogg, who is stated as the CEO of USA Telephone. Nice that they're actually becoming active and shedding some light on the internal structure of the company. I do, however, find some of his comments incredibly odd, namely:

"Probably the question I’ve seen most frequently relates to the equipment being locked and passwords. Let me say this: the reason that former SunRocket customers still have service is because TeleBlend is paying the bills to carriers so that the lights stay on. In other words, service still exists because the network has been kept running. We do not have access to equipment passwords and we can’t impact your service at all; all we have done to this point is pay the network operators to keep service operable. We don’t have access to your passwords or information that would enable unlocking."

There have been complaints that the unlock passwords published elsewhere are not working for everyone. The Innomedia gizmos are managed by a dedicated system that has, politely put, "security issues." It hangs out there on the Internet without much protection, and it would not be the first time this stuff got breached. Don't blame me - that was set up on the telco side of the house, and I was told to stay away, especially as soon as I pointed out the breach.

As far as the statement "we don't have access to the equipment" I have to call BS. It's neither hard nor a stretch to figure that they can retain someone technical on their end. The receiver has access to the servers, and the password list (in my time) was also kept printed out in hardcopy (yes, safe...). It's not a stretch to assume that someone from either Sherwood Partners or Teleblend could retrieve a copy of the network diagrams, IP address list, and the systems operations guide (which nobody at SR seemed to remember existing anyways).

The other counter-point here is that if you dial 0 on your gizmo, you get teleblend customer service. This does require a change on the call control servers, so again, someone has access to the equipment.

The question is, why misrepresent?

Here is a link to the questions thread on Teleblend on DSLReports.

State of the 5th Amendment

Scary stuff happening to the Rule of Law around here:

First point is a Presidential Order issued on July 17, 2007, that effectively suspends/repeals the 5th Amendment ("nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;") for any person who "poses a significant risk of" undermining the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq. Also see story on Slashdot, and an article minimizing the language on the Guardian UK's web site.

Wait, so Democrats can have their property be frozen (i.e. seized)? Can my property be seized, for posting this article? Check that wording, and get back to me. It sounds very ripe for abuse.

While we're on the subject of due process, bill HR 2640, just passed back to the House from the Senate is also an assault on this. The bill was introduced in response to the VA Tech shootings, and seeks to "strengthen the NICS system." The NICS (National Instant (Background) Check System) is the database state police departments use when processing a firearms purchase, and contains records of all convictions, pending charges, and other court judgments against a person.

In this case it deals with firearms, so many readers won't care. Some pro-gun organizations have stated that the language therein is subject to mis-interpretation, allowing an attorney general to effectively prohibit an individual from possessing or acquiring a firearm without due process. The NRA's lobbying group at this time states that this is not the case, but that the bill will likely have some other controls attached to it by the time it passes the second reading in the house. Apparently the NRA is backing some clarifying language, of course opposed by gun-control groups.

A possible amendment could be that seeking counseling or psychiatric treatment could allow you to be placed on the "blocked list". Most mental health professionals are pretty opposed to firearms ownership, so probably mentioning the word gun would cause this. Treatment for PTSD would be a prime example, which would be ironic: you serve your country in a war abroad, see things nobody should have to see, come back, and you're no longer allowed to have firearms. See a blog entry on the Washington Post, the Huffington Post.

Scary stuff.

SunRocket's AOL Management Defended by ... AOLers

I guess I had to see this coming: the former CTO of AOL links to this blog and states that SunRocket wasn't a management failure. Mr. McKinley, of course "it was more fundamental than that" but beware of how you phrase your arguments. Between the lines I read "wasn't a failure of AOL managers". As the acrimonious guy in need of healing (thanks!), I'll tell you that the arrival of the AOL management made a salvageable situation completely untenable. Millions were wasted on acquired solutions that had already been solved in-house, without having to pay consultants to shoehorn scalability into something that only scales vertically anyway. The hubris of not taking stock of the situation and looking at your working assets before throwing wrenches into the works is mind-blowing.

And while I agree that there are issues with the business model of VoIP providers in general (and it's good you caught that on the AOL side), start-ups are about risk. SunRocket's failure was to bring in telco and big company management, that did not buy into the founders vision. All they wanted is to do what telcos do: build it, and bill for it. And you're right, you can't compete in a free market doing that.

Nice to stick up for your own, but remember the folks in the SunRocket debacle also cost your options a great deal of value too. Why else would your head of broadband be quoted saying "Broadband is irrelevant"?

In other news, it seems that nobody cares to read about Turkey. Blog traffic dropped to near zero, so I guess people prefer to look at their own navels. I'll let you get back to that.

AKP Wins in Turkey, and What that means

What? Not something about SunRocket? Stop navel-gazing, read this, and think:

Turkey is a secular democratic state, a NATO ally, but whose primarily muslim population seems to cause a great deal of fear and misunderstanding among Americans. It has troops in Afghanistan, sent AWACS planes to the USA after 9/11, and allowed America to station medium-range ballistic missiles on its territory in the 60's triggering the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a reward, they are greeted with American vitriol and lumped in with Arabs.

The vote result (live in English here) shows the pro-islamic AK party in the lead, and possibly in a position to rule without having to form a coalition. Remember, unlike the US two-party system, a British-style parliamentary system can have many parties, and the executive branch is drawn from the leaders of the legislative majority. Should no majority exist, two parties may negotiate a coalition to control the majority. This leads to degrees of compromise not possible in the US political system, where discussions tend to be binary and divisive.

What does a pro-Islam party majority mean for the USA?

• The vote by the Turks for a party that is considered by some a threat to Turkey's separation of church and state is a response to the fear of the Turks of US Unilateralism.
• This is similar to, but obviously not as severe as, the Hamas election wins in Palestine.
• Some Turks already expect a US reaction to mirror the one in Palestine: "Democracy is great as long as you agree with us."
  
• It can be seen, along with comments last week on the Turkey-Iran gas deal, as a rejection of US influence in the region.
• It can be seen as skepticism to the commitment of the US and EU involvement on the War on Terror.
  
• US and British support for the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq in spite of increasing PKK terror attacks in Turkey.
• Austria's disregard for INTERPOL protocol in the capture of a wanted PKK terrorist, instead allowing him to travel on to Iraq.
• Finding of US-made equipment and weapons in the hands of PKK terrorists captured or killed in action.
• Rejection of NATO treaty "Article 5" support against the PKK by NATO members following the suicide bombings in Istanbul and Ankara.
  

In a sentence, the USA can expect what it sees as lack of cooperation from Turkey to continue, based on Turkey's objection to what it sees as a double-standard from EU nations and the USA.

US unilateralists will of course counter with "they did not help us in Iraq," but unilateralism seems to always get hung up not taking into account your allies' political realities, instead requiring blind and unquestioning support from those to be called "friends." This plays into the hands of our enemies quite well, as it's "us or them."

Yet the same unilateralists scoff at Turkey's right to defend itself against a clear and immediate threat across the border in Iraq? How better to undermine your credibility.

Will the Turkish military, charged by the constitution to protect separation of church and state, intervene this time? Time will tell, and this will depend very much on the actions the elected leaders, versus public opinion. After all, the pro-EU reforms the AKP undertook during their last term have brought Turkey a rare period of economic growth and prosperity.

Naysayers will say Turkey is not truly a free state, and I would have to agree there. Insulting "turkishness" is a crime there, so free speech is restricted. However, what happens to people who deny the Holocaust in the USA or Germany?

Naysayers will say Turkey is corrupt and police abuses are rampant. Little evidence exists to support or deny that argument. One can point to allegations of Monsanto Corporation's, big energy, and military contractors' connections to the Vice President's office in the USA, with similar connections in Canada and Germany. DNA evidence causing exposures of miscarriages of justice in "non-corrupt" western states is similar. Again, I'll say this argument exposes the desire to be one-sided in the imposition of "standards."

Naysayers will say that women's rights are in doubt in Turkey. Partially true: While ignorance and tradition abound outside the urban areas, the number of women delegates elected in this election by AKP(!) supporters doubled. One can also argue that women in Turkey were the first of any nation to get a vote to begin with, in 1934 (corrected).

Naysayers will say that Turkey has a history of ethnic cleansing, but fail to account for their own countries' involvement. The Ottoman Turkish state probably killed a million Armenians or so, but accusing modern Turkey is akin to accusing the United States of handing smallpox-infected blankets to American Indians ("It wasn't us! It was the British!"). The Greek invading army into the southwest of Turkey in 1922 carried out similar atrocities on Turks living there. Turkish Cypriots are accused of massacres of Greek Cypriots, and those accusations run both ways. Bottom line: Everyone's ethnicity has has done this in the last 400 years. Study your own history. I say: get over your double standard.

ISRO (International Strategic Relations Organization) surveys (1 (2004), 2 (2005)) indicate:

• Most Turks (~70%) see the USA as a "strategic ally"
• Many Turks (~28%) see the USA as the greatest threat to the Turkish nation
• 37% of Turks have no problem with their children marrying an American (considering how regionally "selective" Turks are, this is remarkable)

One of the interesting parts was that mainland Greeks overwhelmingly see Turkey as their #1 threat. They also overwhelmingly believe that Turkey's Mediterranean coast is "un-liberated" Greek territory. Yikes.

So, what should Turkey do? (Unilateralists: "Submit" is not the answer) My recommendations:

1. Enforce equality legislation on the books now to erode base support amongst ethnic Kurds in the eastern provinces.
2. Continue in its anti-corruption initiatives.
3. Continue implementing positive economic changes to continue to reduce poverty, improve access to education, and minimal public services in its vast rural regions.

What should the USA do to get more Turkish support? (again, unilateralists: "Nothing, or threaten them with nukes." is not helpful).

1. Address Turkey's status as a contributing partner in NATO.
2. Address perceptions of double standards and unilateralism as viewed by the Turkish voting public.

It's really not much, but the vitriol used in the rhetoric used by both sides needs to be toned down. Someone needs to have the guts to be first, and do the right thing.

Or should Turkey really leave NATO and form a defensive pact with Iran, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan? That would be a nightmare.

Oooom... Are we really going to fall for this?

So my inbox has been deluged with people seeking my impressions of Oooma. Heck, they even have Blogspot blog touting how great this is. Newsflash: Most people heard the song "White Rabbit" and probably think that's what you're on. You had 9 hits when I looked this morning. Two was me - one yesterday, and one today to make sure I wasn't hallucinating.

However, you're giving the press some tokes too:

• The WSJ, as usual is in love...
• CNN also banters on

And the rest of the Internet is abuzz since yesterday.

Now, a quick recap of this week's events:

• A VoIP provider that loses more money the more people sign up implodes, with everyone stressing out and wanting to call the FCC to regulate the market for them.
• A Fly-by-night-style web site is set up, collects your CC info for your SunRocket account, and in return you get a customer number.

And now everyone's ga-ga over some new service, with no information on its web site except how great its management team is, and charges money up front but no maintenance fee for its systems?

You need to quit the white rabbit...

Seriously though, this is just another spin on the "lifeline" idea - if the customer chooses to buy both the device and connect a legacy POTS line, 911 will work. For some reason, these folks get the credit, but again, we know how well homework gets done around here.

Whoa, SunRocket Zombie... and a Blender

(Corrected - thanks Chris!)

So late last night someone posted the email from "Sunrocket" that they had received, pointing at two "preferred" services.

One is Packet 8, whom we know, and some even love. I think their "Is the Sun setting on your phone service" ad is really cute.

The other is this company called "Teleblend". Name aside, they're offering service starting at $12.95 a month. If you enter your SunRocket number, it was reported that they showed all your account info. Put in someone elses SunRocket number and you can see all of their info. Scary. Apparently though, they read DSL Reports too, and so fixed that quickly.

But this gets weirder. Some checking around shows the following information:

• The domain was created on July 17, 2007 (link to whois database)
• Looking in the GoDaddy domain database shows different info (and the teleblend.com domain)
  
• Looking up the registrant on WHOIS proper (i.e. Network Solutions) points to the Overgroup, which claims to make telecom billing and provisioning systems, in Florida.
  
• GoDaddy's account shows an address in Kennebunk, Maine
  
• The secure certificate on their site is issued by GoDaddy, and also issued on July 17, 2007.

Tooling around, at least Teleblend/MyTeleblend has a press release.

What's scary beyond this?

• There is no "about us" section on their web site. Their FAQ states "We're your broadband phone company." I guess we're supposed to take them at their word.
  
• They don't list their place of business on the web site.
• Their domain name routes back to Florida or Maine, depending on the registrar.
• Their PR contact on the release has a number in central California.
• They claim to be "privately held, profitable voip provider" on their press release.

Some on Dslreports surmise Myteleblend(er) is owned by USA Telephone, owned by United Systems Access (no web site, showing Google search on filings instead). A link on Yahoo! Finance as well. The Gizmo Password site picked up on this too, although I cannot follow their connecting thread posted there back to Singapore.

Now, United Systems Access Inc. states that it is "focused on acquisition of young or ailing telecommunications companies that exhibit growth potential." The DSL Reports rumor mill feels that they're likely buying SunRocket's physical presence assets (i.e. servers and so on).

Is it just me, or does the attempt to obfuscate seem deliberate? It seems too much to just write off as accedental, and I would suspect even a private corporation like USA (hah! I get it!) would act a bit more transparently than the company it replaces. Riding in on that white horse might even be good PR, although that makes it tough to distance yourself from mistakes.

Stay tuned...

Press Dingbats and SunRocket

I have to say I am still amazed how poor the state of journalism in the country is. I thought Geraldo pioneered drive-by journalism, but it's clear the folks and Washington Post are quick studies. Here is how to do it right.

Errors seen in the Press:

• AP, Washington Post, Forbes: SunRocket was founded in 1994? It's 2004.
• SunRocket offered monthly service for $24.95, and annual service for $199.00. The two-year specials were not on all the time. And they're not "contracts" - if customers cancelled policy was to refund the pro-rated amount. Try that from your contract cell provider.
  

Downright Falsehoods:

• Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro: I'm not a developer, and I'm not recently fired. Read before you pollute the world's search indices. Wait - 11 months ago may be "recent" to you. Oh, and I love the ViaTalk affiliate spammer at the bottom.
  

And for some reason, I thought the Terms of Service made it clear that SunRocket was not intended for business use. Why are businesses then complaining? One news org is so brazen they actually post an article online - I guess they can't read either.

No wonder the press says guns kill.

SunRocket and Consumer Recourse

I confess: Yesterday I could not stop hitting my browser's refresh button and watching the carnage unfold on dsl reports.

It does seem some subscribers did the math and realized SunRocket, nor likely Vonage, are tenable the way they are/did business. It's true, given how they're structured, the more people they sign up, the more money they lose.

I am not defending SunRocket, but:

The other interesting observation was of the customers that were very, very upset at the sudden loss of service. Talks of calling the FCC or other government authorities were bandied about. What these people don't realize is that the government does not owe them anything. For one, VoIP as structured, skirted the tax structure of traditional telecom - this is where the deals came from. No tax, no government regulation = no recourse. With the imposition of some regulatory fees came some recourse, but much of this was because the telcos granted area monopolies were seeing their best customers skimmed off by VoIP, and thus successfully argued that this eroded their ability to provide at-loss telephone service to out of the way places.

Remember - a normal telco, say Verizon, is granted a monopoly in an area in return for not turning down customers. This means if you live somewhere where they need to string wire to you, they cannot charge you more than the guy in the downtown apartment. In return, nobody can go anywhere else. Those calling for government intervention circumvented the system, in almost all cases, knowingly. "So you left for the high seas to get away from your navy and customs people, and when the pirates come, wonder where your navy is?"

Now, you can knock SunRocket on consumer laws, but most of these only take effect in the case of outright fraud, are difficult to prove, and moreover require there be assets in that company to allow the damages to be paid. Which means that if you do take them to court, even if you win, no matter the size of the judgment, there probably won't be enough to take to even pay your lawyer.

In the end, people, knowing what they're in for, can either accept the risk of going with VoIP (or this new-fangled thing called the Internet - your virus checkers are up to date, right?), or return to the traditional, sheltered telco environment. It's a free country - you're free to complain too.

Just be sure you've got your number porting paperwork in.

Sunrocket done at COB today

I also got copied on the internal memo stating that they had not found a buyer. More than anything though, it seems pretty clear that people don't quite understand how the porting system works. The last dev remaining sent an IM my way saying that he was turning out the lights. If I had been in town I'd be pulling gear out of the lab right now, they had some really nice kit in there.

Porting a number is "pull" process most of the time. This means that there need not be anyone alive on the other end to release the number. The only system that will still see the number at its original location is the system that you have ported from. In SR's case, they'll be "bricking" or killing their ATA's today sometime, so this won't be a problem. Secondly, SunRocket never bothered going through the registration to get its own numbers for a number of reasons (good for everyone, as it turns out), so proof of number ownership lies with the upstream number providers anyways: Global Crossing, Qwest, Broadwing.

How to Port:

1. IMPORTANT: Print out a SunRocket statement from the web site!
   
2. Open an account with your chosen provider, and tell them you'd like to port the number.
3. Send them a copy of the printed statement (not that it says much).
4. Once inbound calls start working on your new equipment, call SunRocket to cancel your account. Skip that step - they're no longer answering.

--------------- (edited for clarity)
NOT RELATED TO PORTING:

Other cool links:

ATA (Gizmo) Passwords, posted here:
User: admin
Password: 7UprUtew

Another Gizmo site

If the decision (at Sherwood Partners) is not to blow away the actual Gizmo firmware (killing them permanently), one should technically be able to re-use them for whatever service one ports to.

Kicking the Dead Horse: Top 10 Mistakes of Sunrocket

Other than the top-10 list I posted some time ago I suppose now that my stock options are worthless I have no incentive to hold back.

I still dig top-10 lists, so here we go:

10. Failure Framework: Hiring telco execs in CXO positions out of the gate. Who else to piss away money the fastest on "future proofing" while the sysarch has to explain why these "web servers" are necessary?

9. Gotcha: Claiming a "no-gotcha" company while maintaining strict radio silence when things were going wrong.

8. From bad to worse: Hiring the same people responsible of a major loss in shareholder value at AOL to run Sunrocket. Of course, they covered their butts and so this is impossible to prove. I'll mention this: nobody in their 40's "retires" from a VP position. That's jargon for not being able to find a new job before it becomes plain as day you suck at your current one.

7. We tanked like this last time: Telco execs hiring ex-telco NOC staff to run what's essentially a dot-com network hauling primarily UDP traffic. To their credit most came around to running internet systems, but this was much harder than it needed to be. The bitching of the "seasoned Telecom execs" about Linux not being UNIX and then one of their stars tanking a UNIX machine (Solaris... that's UNIX, right?) by typing "hostname help" at the root prompt did little to point out their own irony.

6. Improvement aversion: vertically scaling session border controllers originally purchased as a stop-gap measure while politicking to have a solution with 1/20th the per-subscriber cost in back office equipment (and scales horizontally) taken off the map. Not to mention it provided a gateway to the Jabber protocol's Voip (can you say peering with GoogleTalk?) service. Can't do that - it could make us popular.

5. The Ostrich: One exec signs a deal for a SQL Server-based billing system (read: runs Windows, not UNIX) with no due diligence. Want to know why Sunrocket could not actually make money? They could not bill. The result: Call detail records were present three times in the billing database with the call merging done in-database. A perl script would have been 20 times faster. A funny one was that it was the same exec that called a meeting to explain the "web server line item" asking why this was needed, what this thing called Linux was - and then promptly complained that SQL Server cost money, and nixing the enterprise choice so fail-over could work.

4. The Ostrich 2.0: Deploying (I don't know if it ever went live) the next billing system on servers with no floating point processors (Sun T1000 systems). Now fine, billing systems should count tenths of pennies or so (i.e. not need floating point), but Oracle 10g sure does, and programmers sometimes forget that you're quickly down to two digits of precision when daisy-chaining floating point calculations. Are the T1000's even Oracle certified?

3. The Sheep: Outsourcing development and call center without actually agreeing to a development process in house. And then wondering why things fail, take twice as long, or end up canceled. Repeat after me: The good thing about outsourcing development to India is you get exactly what you specify. The bad thing about outsourcing to India is you get back exactly what you specify. If you're a bank, fine, you probably had 20 years to sort your process and procedure out - doing it as a dot-com is an express ticket to dot-gone. Oh, and the project managers that were not allowed to manage projects... Wait! Innovation was outsourced to ... AOL execs. Yaaay!

2. Security? That's the sysarch's problem: SR could have called itself the official VoIP provider of Al-Quaeda for a while - the session border controllers were so bottlenecked that authentication was effectively off at times, and ATA (the box that gives you dial tone) configs were unencrypted. Of little consolation is that your account password is the same as the account number ... hmmm. Too bad the sysarchs weren't usually allowed on the session border controllers.

1. Penny wise, pound foolish: The whole thing was rolled out seam-of-the-pants style. To the first 7 month team's credit, it all mostly worked (except believing some vendors, like the SBC people, that their capacity assessments were actually accurate). Conveniently, Mr. "what's-this-webserver-thing" canceled the inital lab to diagnose or load-test anything because it would be too expensive, and he did not want to run another 60A of power to the machine room. That was until the building engineer got all huffy showing the circuit distribution box hitting 166F on his thermal cam, so at least the circuits came.

Now fine - I have no trouble admitting my part in this. I never produced a nuclear-sub-grade operations manual for the whole system, with step-by-step procedures for when some green light went red. But then, nuclear subs cost 60 billion each and take three years or more to build. But was fun pointing the network staff at a folder on their network during an outage (I wasn't there anymore, but I also like my phone working...) that outlined troubleshooting and recovery procedures, and lists of every process needed to to support production on every production system and hearing "I never even heard this existed..."

<full_disclosure>
Oh, and I got fired for getting upset that someone with control over the access list at the data center decided to "omit me" the day I was to work on-site with a vendor, and then pointing this out. Plausibly deniable - only other CXO's admitted to hearing the perp admit this was not an accident. But perfect timing, since my mom had just died, and I was somewhat vulnerable as a result. Who says telcos can't innovate?
</full_disclosure>

Arguably, the number one folly at Sunrocket: for a communications company, we all should have been better at communicating. The irony.

I feel better now.

SunRocket turns Scud Missile

Well, the word is in: SunRocket is out for the count.

As the guy who did the wiring diagrams for the place (now you know who I worked for), it's sad to see. Congratulations to the ex-AOL management (you know who you are!) that took over for a new record in running a company into the ground, and congrats to the board of directors for yet another successfully mismanaged venture.

Internally, SunRocket's politics went further and further in preventing effective execution of the technology vision. But can be expected when you mix telecom and dot-com? The dot-com "meltdown" was a drop in the bucket compared to the losses incurred by telecoms companies during the downturn years, and clearly management from the has-beens has not learned from their mistakes. I won't make myself sound like a disgruntled former employee, but anyone who has worked there should not be surprised at the outcome.

All the best to the folks let go today and last month, and I'll get some toilet paper printed in the shape of stock options certificates!

Nannyfornia

Well, so more on the subject of nanny states - try California on for size:

Every building, it seems, has a sign stating that "there are materials therein that can be harmful to reproductive health." It's nice that California cares about my sperm cells, but is it really that necessary to state the obvious? Or does this make Virginia buildings, without the warning, safer from the get-go?

As far as reproductive health goes, there are a lot more things that I can think of that are quite likely hazardous to it:

1. Crossing the street
2. Breathing LA air
3. Keeping a cell phone in your front trouser pocket (hey, it's a 3W microwave! No matter what studies are paid to say, there is no way holding one next to your jewels or your head can't be harmful)
4. Driving like a Virginian on the I-5
   
5. Riding a LA taxicab

Arguably, the 1, 4, and 5 will also prevent you from finding out about your reproductive health, since you'll be dead. The middle too, sadly, allow the sheeple to go on their merry ways until the expected no longer happens.

So, I imagine that the great state of California deems to protect me from myself. Let me guess, for my own protection, ammo sales are probably banned in June and December so homies can't shoot their ill-gotten firearms into the air on the 4th or on New Years.

The problem? Sheeple don't read signs. Homies have cars and can drive to Arizona. They can also buy extra in November ... hmmm.

Alas, sushi chefs who only speak Spanish are okay in CA. That and pining for hybrid Hummers...