RIP: Tech Advocate and Obama Advisor Jake Brewer

SpaceGhost writes: The BBC reports that Jake Brewer, a 34-year-old senior policy advisor in the White House Chief Technology Office, has died while participating in a charity bike race on Saturday. Some of his work included global policy and external affairs at change.org, the White Houses TechHire initiative, and the administration's efforts to expand broadband connectivity. Brewer's death has triggered emotional tributes from many in the worlds of politics and technology. Brewer was well known for his work on Change.org, and in his role at the White House as an advocate for education, access to technology, and intelligent use of data to make government more effective.

Comments

Re:Cause of death

[phantomfive]

Bush was pathologically incompetent, but that doesn't mean Obama's any good.

Unrealistic Expectations (Re:Cause of death)

[Tablizer]

Maybe your expectations of what prez can accomplish is unrealistic. The middle east has confounded them all, for example. Either a prez should quit meddling over there, or be honest that failure is likely. They don't appear ready for (stable) democracy, which leaves either iron-fisted dictators, or roaming zealotic hordes.

And economic downturns seem to happen roughly every 10 years no matter what's done. Bubbles and the "business cycle" have existed for at least 400 years. It's a bug in capitalism that nobody knows entirely how to fix.

The only known partial solution is to save up during the good times so there's spending money during the down times (Keynes). However, politicians are expected to fix the here and now and are judged on the here and now, not the next decade. (The prez who exits during the "up" phase gets undo credit.)

We could perhaps have a constitutional amendment to force saving up, but that requires objectively defining "good times" and "bad times", which is a sticky request.

The same pattern of problems keep appearing and we keep blaming them all on the prez. Perhaps it's because they always promise to fix these things, but the fact they keep failing suggests we should not expect the prez alone to fix them regardless of what they claim. Spank the voters for once.

Re:Unrealistic Expectations (Re:Cause of death)

[phantomfive]

Maybe your expectations of what prez can accomplish is unrealistic. The middle east has confounded them all, for example.

You can start with "avoid pre-emptive wars in the middle east." In fact, "avoid pre-emptive wars anywhere." It's not hard to do, yet every president this century has failed. There is certainly such a thing as "unrealistic expectations", but there is also such a thing as incompetent, and we haven't seen competence in a while.