Canadian Bureacracy Can't Answer Simple Question: What's This Study With NASA?

Saint Aardvark writes "It seemed like a pretty simple question about a pretty cool topic: an Ottawa newspaper wanted to ask Canada's National Research Council about a joint study with NASA on tracking falling snow in Canada. Conventional radar can see where it's falling, but not the amount — so NASA, in collaboration with the NRC, Environment Canada and a few universities, arranged flights through falling snow to analyse readings with different instruments. But when they contacted the NRC to get the Canadian angle, "it took a small army of staffers— 11 of them by our count — to decide how to answer, and dozens of emails back and forth to circulate the Citizen's request, discuss its motivation, develop their response, and "massage" its text." No interview was given: "I am not convinced we need an interview. A few lines are fine. Please let me see them first," says one civil servant in the NRC emails obtained by the newspaper under the Access to Information act. By the time the NRC finally sorted out a boring, technical response, the newspaper had already called up a NASA scientist and got all the info they asked for; it took about 15 minutes."

Comments

Re:What about talking directly to the scientists?

[eyenot]

Yeah, and, when you come under a DDOS attack, one quick decision you can make in the short term is ignore everything from a growing blacklist of attacking addresses. An even easier decision would be to ignore an entire block of addresses or, even more simply, ignore any service requests that have nothing to do with your company/organization/network focus and throttle back what services you're "supposed" to provide so you don't become "overwhelmed".

Is that the future you're looking forward to? One where you get singled out for being so egotistical, bored, and productivity-chalenged that you actively seek to force your government to shut down privileges enjoyed by all your fellow citizens in a widespread attempt to defend the government's resources against mis-use? In other words you get your jollies from government mis-spending and over-burden? You enjoy having people work for you only so you can push them to the brink of uselessness? You don't care about your fellow citizens with cooler, leveler heads and higher priorities who might not enjoy a press embargo?

You don't even really care about the purpose or thought put into the protocols that make you so pissed-off. You haven't put any thought into it, if you're even capable of real, critical "thought". You're willing to ignore other peoples' reasons for doing what they do as soon as you find out that they aren't that interested in your over-bearing demand or your reason for demanding it, even if that's simply your spoiled upbringing and insular mentality in action. You just want to stomp your feet, demand "more", demand it "now", and couldn't care less about your neighbors (in any sense of the word).

You probably aren't even aware that you have neighbors.