No, there's a much easier answer, that's more inherent in the job: you're dealing with (among other things) the allocation of a significant amount of cash. When you have a significant amount of cash to distribute, most people will try to get as big a share of that pile of cash as they can muster, and one way they'll do that is to butter up the people who are making the decision about how to distribute the cash.
And the next step, of course, is that too many people try to butter up the actual decisionmaker, so a new set of people comes up who's job it is to decide who can butter up the decisionmaker, and they now get buttered up by the people who want extra cash.
This is not limited to government - corporate purchasing departments and the like are also get caught up in this.
Well I can tell you I didn't, and here is why. I tried that with my senators and congressmen/woman three times and you know what? Three times I got back a generic "vote for me!" form letter, and they went against the public interest. And pleeease don't give us that tired "vote the bums out!" bullshit, because we done been there and done that and they only get replaced with a shill with a different letter in front of their name.
Have you tried talking to them when they're in town? Even if they don't listen to you, it's kinda fun to watch em squirm a bit.
For instance, I once walked up to Sen George Voinovich (R-OH) and asked him to justify his vote for a large tax cut in light of his longstanding view that the government's budget must be kept balanced. After hemming and hawing for a while, he mentioned that he'd recently gotten a nice chunk of Homeland Security funding to protect the western suburbs of Cleveland (where we happened to be standing) from terrorist threats. I still remember the look on his face when I asked him how that kind of funding to protect against non-existent terrorist threats helped balance the federal budget.
Oh, and the politicians you actually want in office (yes, they do exist) will tend to respond well to constituents. At worst, they'll apologize, point you to their website, and dash off to their next appointment. That's one of the reasons I actually like the Iowa caucuses and NH primaries starting off the presidential race - both of those environments tend to force candidates to actually answer would-be constituents face-to-face.
I described this problem in another post a while back, but here's the short version: The basic calculation here is that you should vote for A if the expected returns for A and B are close (in your state for US presidential elections, in your riding for UK parliament) and you significantly prefer A to B. Otherwise, you should vote for C.
And of course it's worth remembering Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which proves that there's no way to capture everyone's preferences correctly, even if you include ideas like preferential voting and proportional representation.
Never in the course of human history, outside of the industrial revolution, has a human being been expected to produce "something" for 8 straight hours a day, 5 days a week (and for some more than that).... Non stop, widget production, should be left to the factory worker who needs to follow a standard script. Expecting an IT professional, a researcher, or an engineer to simply keep producing something measurable with each minute of the day shows a complete lack of understanding of your resources.
See, the real kicker is that before unions developed real clout the most common factory work day was about 12 hours a day 6 days a week. Even the 8-hour shifts are a difficult if not grueling pace for factory workers, and overtime is frequently involved as well because it's currently cheaper to pay 2 workers to work 60 hours than 3 workers to work 40 hours. I'm getting the impression you're saying "8-12 hours non-stop is fine for those Deltas and Epsilons, but I'm a Beta and I can't handle it." Well, it turns out it's not fine for the Deltas and Epsilons, but because their other options are even worse they do their best to do the job.
I was actually thinking that it's the sort of research that could go incredibly wrong after they realized that they used the brain of somebody named Abby Normal.
Speaking solely from my own experience, nothing improved social standing, and thus the treatment I got from teachers and peers, like demonstrating a willingness to respond to bullying by throwing a few punches. For instance, in 3rd grade my teacher actually was requiring me to read self-help books on how to deal with social pressures. It didn't help, of course, just was one more indignity. Whereas in 4th grade I started using violence to combat violence, and while I was given detention several times my teachers stopped thinking there was something wrong with me, my peers began respecting me, and the bullying stopped in relatively short order.
And this was in a situation where I was usually outnumbered and out-sized. And since the same people were generally involved, it's safe to say that there was at least a bit of a causal relationship there. Did I get beaten up a few times? Yes. But by being willing to fight, it saved me a lot of grief.
Also known as turning off the TV and experiencing the truly wonderful show known as "real life". It can be boring at times, but the upsides are worth waiting for.
Where the heck do you think those labor laws came from? What do you think is keeping them there? Unions are responsible for OSHA, the NLRB, minimum wage, overtime rules, and a host of other protections that you and most other Americans take for granted these days. And without unions applying steady pressure, you can be sure that a good portion of Congress would in fact quite happily vote to repeal those very same laws.
Unions are incredibly useful to the people who are in them. And for people who aren't in them, the threat of unionizing tends to keep management from walking all over their employees. Unions (or the threat thereof) give workers important protections against employer crimes such as unpaid overtime, wage theft, and dangerous working conditions, all of which are occurring regularly in non-union shops but are unheard of in union shops.
Regarding your experience of paying a guy $200 to watch you set up a booth - was he an IBEW electrician? If so, think about who you would have turned to the moment something went wrong with your power strips (e.g. all the booth electrical stuff overloaded a circuit). And also think about how expensive $200 was in comparison to the rest of the cost of that booth.
See, the basic business cycle of a social networking website goes like this: 1. Site attracts core group of users with good privacy protection, features, and general usefulness that is superior to their competitors. 2. Everyone who wasn't attracted in step 1 signs up to new site, because they want to be on the same network as their friends. 3. Site locks the users in by having the user's social life revolve around the social networking site, rather than real life. 4. Company that created the site "monetizes" the customers by selling their eyeballs for ads and their information to marketing companies. They also start charging for some of the niftier bells and whistles, and eventually for the stuff that used to be free. If possible, the founders make a huge bundle from stupid investors. 5. Because of the practices in step 4, the good privacy protection, features, and general usefulness of the website drops. 6. Users get fed up, find some other social networking site that provides good privacy protection, features, and usefulness.
This cycle has happened at least twice (LiveJournal, MySpace). Facebook has been at step 4 for a while, and is getting closer to step 5 or 6. And steps 3-4 are why I refuse to sign up for these sites.
Speaking from experience working with kids, while I'm not entirely sure about babies, you can be darn sure that 10-year-old kids will call you out if they think you're playing favorites. If you set a rule, it had better be the same rule for everybody, or they will walk all over you trying to get special treatment. The good news is that if you are playing fairly by everybody, these same kids will actually hold each other to the same rules. And that basic sense doesn't go away in adolescence - I've watched 15-year-old boys enforce my rules for me because they were convinced that the rules were reasonable and fair.
So whether it's innate, or learned at a very young age, both parent and GP are right on the money.
Are they actually looking for porn, or saying they're looking for child porn and actually looking for documents that could end up embarrassing the government?
It's mighty foolish to spend a trillion $ and have all that effort counteracted by a visit to UPS and $187.54.
It is, unless you're on the receiving end of that $1 trillion. While I'm sure some folks working at military contracting companies are decent and hardworking folks, it's extremely profitable to get nice big contracts to produce something that (a) doesn't work and/or (b) isn't actually useful.
Unless, of course, you have an actual blind justice who is incapable of looking at Officer Obie's 27 8x10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back explaining what each one was.
Slashdot Mirror
Some exotic underwater hotel where he can sleep with the fishes?
Just when I thought I'd stumbled across the strangest fetishes ...
No, there's a much easier answer, that's more inherent in the job: you're dealing with (among other things) the allocation of a significant amount of cash. When you have a significant amount of cash to distribute, most people will try to get as big a share of that pile of cash as they can muster, and one way they'll do that is to butter up the people who are making the decision about how to distribute the cash.
And the next step, of course, is that too many people try to butter up the actual decisionmaker, so a new set of people comes up who's job it is to decide who can butter up the decisionmaker, and they now get buttered up by the people who want extra cash.
This is not limited to government - corporate purchasing departments and the like are also get caught up in this.
Well I can tell you I didn't, and here is why. I tried that with my senators and congressmen/woman three times and you know what? Three times I got back a generic "vote for me!" form letter, and they went against the public interest. And pleeease don't give us that tired "vote the bums out!" bullshit, because we done been there and done that and they only get replaced with a shill with a different letter in front of their name.
Have you tried talking to them when they're in town? Even if they don't listen to you, it's kinda fun to watch em squirm a bit.
For instance, I once walked up to Sen George Voinovich (R-OH) and asked him to justify his vote for a large tax cut in light of his longstanding view that the government's budget must be kept balanced. After hemming and hawing for a while, he mentioned that he'd recently gotten a nice chunk of Homeland Security funding to protect the western suburbs of Cleveland (where we happened to be standing) from terrorist threats. I still remember the look on his face when I asked him how that kind of funding to protect against non-existent terrorist threats helped balance the federal budget.
Oh, and the politicians you actually want in office (yes, they do exist) will tend to respond well to constituents. At worst, they'll apologize, point you to their website, and dash off to their next appointment. That's one of the reasons I actually like the Iowa caucuses and NH primaries starting off the presidential race - both of those environments tend to force candidates to actually answer would-be constituents face-to-face.
I described this problem in another post a while back, but here's the short version: The basic calculation here is that you should vote for A if the expected returns for A and B are close (in your state for US presidential elections, in your riding for UK parliament) and you significantly prefer A to B. Otherwise, you should vote for C.
And of course it's worth remembering Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which proves that there's no way to capture everyone's preferences correctly, even if you include ideas like preferential voting and proportional representation.
It accused Genachowski of pushing 'heavy-handed 19th century regulations' that are 'inconceivable'
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I'm sorry, my regex parser got confused about everything after the $
I believe you need to have your sarcasm detector replaced.
Is the pilot named Cid?
Never in the course of human history, outside of the industrial revolution, has a human being been expected to produce "something" for 8 straight hours a day, 5 days a week (and for some more than that). ... Non stop, widget production, should be left to the factory worker who needs to follow a standard script. Expecting an IT professional, a researcher, or an engineer to simply keep producing something measurable with each minute of the day shows a complete lack of understanding of your resources.
See, the real kicker is that before unions developed real clout the most common factory work day was about 12 hours a day 6 days a week. Even the 8-hour shifts are a difficult if not grueling pace for factory workers, and overtime is frequently involved as well because it's currently cheaper to pay 2 workers to work 60 hours than 3 workers to work 40 hours. I'm getting the impression you're saying "8-12 hours non-stop is fine for those Deltas and Epsilons, but I'm a Beta and I can't handle it." Well, it turns out it's not fine for the Deltas and Epsilons, but because their other options are even worse they do their best to do the job.
I was actually thinking that it's the sort of research that could go incredibly wrong after they realized that they used the brain of somebody named Abby Normal.
Speaking solely from my own experience, nothing improved social standing, and thus the treatment I got from teachers and peers, like demonstrating a willingness to respond to bullying by throwing a few punches. For instance, in 3rd grade my teacher actually was requiring me to read self-help books on how to deal with social pressures. It didn't help, of course, just was one more indignity. Whereas in 4th grade I started using violence to combat violence, and while I was given detention several times my teachers stopped thinking there was something wrong with me, my peers began respecting me, and the bullying stopped in relatively short order.
And this was in a situation where I was usually outnumbered and out-sized. And since the same people were generally involved, it's safe to say that there was at least a bit of a causal relationship there. Did I get beaten up a few times? Yes. But by being willing to fight, it saved me a lot of grief.
Nobody. It's before the existence of Steamboat Willie, and all the retroactive copyright extensions start right about there for some reason.
What else am I supposed to do at the office?
Also known as turning off the TV and experiencing the truly wonderful show known as "real life". It can be boring at times, but the upsides are worth waiting for.
The US has labor laws to protect workers.
Where the heck do you think those labor laws came from? What do you think is keeping them there? Unions are responsible for OSHA, the NLRB, minimum wage, overtime rules, and a host of other protections that you and most other Americans take for granted these days. And without unions applying steady pressure, you can be sure that a good portion of Congress would in fact quite happily vote to repeal those very same laws.
Unions are incredibly useful to the people who are in them. And for people who aren't in them, the threat of unionizing tends to keep management from walking all over their employees. Unions (or the threat thereof) give workers important protections against employer crimes such as unpaid overtime, wage theft, and dangerous working conditions, all of which are occurring regularly in non-union shops but are unheard of in union shops.
Regarding your experience of paying a guy $200 to watch you set up a booth - was he an IBEW electrician? If so, think about who you would have turned to the moment something went wrong with your power strips (e.g. all the booth electrical stuff overloaded a circuit). And also think about how expensive $200 was in comparison to the rest of the cost of that booth.
And they must have it pretty good compared to us poor folks in Cleveland, since they average about 150 suicides of working-age adults per year.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
See, the basic business cycle of a social networking website goes like this:
1. Site attracts core group of users with good privacy protection, features, and general usefulness that is superior to their competitors.
2. Everyone who wasn't attracted in step 1 signs up to new site, because they want to be on the same network as their friends.
3. Site locks the users in by having the user's social life revolve around the social networking site, rather than real life.
4. Company that created the site "monetizes" the customers by selling their eyeballs for ads and their information to marketing companies. They also start charging for some of the niftier bells and whistles, and eventually for the stuff that used to be free. If possible, the founders make a huge bundle from stupid investors.
5. Because of the practices in step 4, the good privacy protection, features, and general usefulness of the website drops.
6. Users get fed up, find some other social networking site that provides good privacy protection, features, and usefulness.
This cycle has happened at least twice (LiveJournal, MySpace). Facebook has been at step 4 for a while, and is getting closer to step 5 or 6. And steps 3-4 are why I refuse to sign up for these sites.
Speaking from experience working with kids, while I'm not entirely sure about babies, you can be darn sure that 10-year-old kids will call you out if they think you're playing favorites. If you set a rule, it had better be the same rule for everybody, or they will walk all over you trying to get special treatment. The good news is that if you are playing fairly by everybody, these same kids will actually hold each other to the same rules. And that basic sense doesn't go away in adolescence - I've watched 15-year-old boys enforce my rules for me because they were convinced that the rules were reasonable and fair.
So whether it's innate, or learned at a very young age, both parent and GP are right on the money.
Are they actually looking for porn, or saying they're looking for child porn and actually looking for documents that could end up embarrassing the government?
Or alternately, one step closer to this scenario.
Why don't they call it a Turanga Leela Wrist-Kejigger?
It's mighty foolish to spend a trillion $ and have all that effort counteracted by a visit to UPS and $187.54.
It is, unless you're on the receiving end of that $1 trillion. While I'm sure some folks working at military contracting companies are decent and hardworking folks, it's extremely profitable to get nice big contracts to produce something that (a) doesn't work and/or (b) isn't actually useful.
Unless, of course, you have an actual blind justice who is incapable of looking at Officer Obie's 27 8x10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back explaining what each one was.
See, here's the difference: In America, the government guys are a bunch of crooks. In Russia, the crooks are a bunch of government guys.