It is a reality of life that we all think we can do more than we actually can.
It's a reality of life that those not doing the actual work think that those doing the actual work can do more in the same amount of time than they actually can.
That separation of roles is important: in a large number of organizations (the military is probably no exception) the people making the scheduling and budgeting decisions and the people doing the work are not the same people. Which lends itself to exactly what happened here: when the project goes over time and over budget, those responsible for unreasonable scheduling simply say "It's the fault of the people doing the work that they didn't meet our perfectly reasonable schedule", and the people responsible for doing the work (including the overtime, loss of sleep, loss of family relationships, and so on) are canned.
Actually, one of the better parts of Law and Order is that when cops rough up a suspect (or other people for that matter) there are frequently negative consequences such as cases getting thrown out and professional sanctions. But a lot of people don't understand or pay the slightest bit of attention to the legal discussions (less of a common plot element in the spinoffs, probably for this very reason).
I absolutely agree with you about the application of law impartially. Unfortunately, that's far from reality.
For instance, if you read lot of the flak that Justice David Souter has gotten, especially from the conservative side, it is precisely his tendency to call things based on law and precedent rather than ideology that got them riled up. A lot of folks who have particular political opinions (most notably surrounding abortion, but there are plenty of other issues) want ideological justices because they see them as the easiest way to get their political views in place for a couple of decades without having to risk that a mere election can get rid of those ideas.
Now, thanks to what happened to the nomination of Justice Bork in particular, now nominees are encouraged to have the ideological views preferred by those who appoint them but hide them until after the Senate confirms them to the court.
On top of that, there are often ambiguities in law, and situations that kinda apply to a law but not exactly, and laws that are kinda Constitutional but come close to the line, and so on. It's very unlike computers, where it's ultimately some reliable 1's and 0's.
You made the mistaken assumption that I would move to Canada because I didn't like big government, whereas my motivation for moving would be that I didn't like a government encroaching on my civil liberties.
Cleveland is very badly hit by foreclosures, but a major difference between Cleveland and, say, Phoenix (which has been hurt very badly in the recent crisis) is that there was no boom-bust cycle in Cleveland because there was no boom. In other words, it's been seeing a foreclosure crisis for at least a decade or two, and in some ways shows signs of slowing losses.
Cleveland proper does have some abandoned areas, but the OP didn't make it clear that he was referring to areas that were actually more-or-less abandoned industrial areas rather than heavily populated inner-city neighborhoods.
Sorry, I misinterpreted you. I've just heard the sentiment expressed around the northeast Ohio area along the lines of "ship all the black people out, all our problems will be solved", and your proposal seemed awfully close to that.
If you're talking abandoned factories by the lake, you'll be glad to know that I'm all with you there. The problem is that "East Cleveland" typically means the area roughly delineated by E 40, E 100, Superior, and Kinsman, which is a densely populated residential area.
So again, I apologise for misinterpreting your post, but that was my reasoning.
We could do without most of the East side of Cleveland too.
Umm, you do realize that according to the census maps East Cleveland is heavily populated, right? Or were you slating that for demolition because it's the poorest and most African-American area of the city? For those not familiar with the geography and demographics of Cleveland, what Weaselmancer said was more or less like saying "New York could be improved by eliminating Harlem." It's an incredibly racist proposal, whether you realized it or not.
Places like Flint and Youngstown have significant areas that are emptying out and abandoning their property. That's why they want to physically shrink. It's not simply picking places full of residents you don't like and/or are scared of.
That was really well written. Might I suggest a more poetic way of saying the same thing:
Work is love made visible And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distills a poison in the wine And if you sing though as angels,and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.
Many jobs aren't about service in the same was as help desk or auto mechanic.
- Management, for starters, which tends to be not about service but about trying to squeeze as much out of your people as possible. - Sales, which can be about service but is often about BSing the customer into paying a lot more than they should for something. - "Consulting", which is mostly about giving content-free Powerpoint presentations to make some manager look good. (What I'm referring to here are shops that hire lots of Harvard grads to give presentations on things they know next to nothing about. They exist, they're very profitable, and totally mind-numbing to work for.) - Advertising, which tends to be about making a product, company, or political cause look better than it really is.
See, when the parent talks about "service", what he means is that when a help desk worker does their job, some user's problem is solved. When a lot of these folks do their job, all that's happened is that somebody is convinced to do something that really doesn't help themselves or anyone else.
Let's say I'm a fine upstanding citizen who's a friend-of-a-friend of someone with the same name as a known terrorist (which could happen pretty easily). The NSA notices that my friend is forwarding jokes to me from the guy who's name matches the terrorist list. Ergo, he must be acting as an intermediary for terrorist communications. Both me and my friend are in real trouble, and all because of some silly email joke.
Basically what the parent poster is pointing out is that absolutely any metric that management can come up with can be fooled.
For instance, now that you know that "time to close the ticket" is the metric, you can always close the ticket and then go work on the problem rather than the other way around. Or if it's an average time to close, you can get a pal who works in another department to open up a bunch of phony tickets for you to resolve quickly.
Robert Austin, in his book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, says there are two phases when you introduce new performance metrics. At first, you actually get what you wanted, because nobody has figured out how to cheat. In the second phase, you actually get something worse, as everyone figures out the trick to maximizing the thing that you're measuring, even at the cost of ruining the company.
Worse, Econ 101 managers think that they can somehow avoid this situation just by tweaking the metrics. Dr. Austin's conclusion is that you just can't. It never works. No matter how much you try to adjust the metrics to reflect what you think you want, it always backfires.
With 2K for turbines and wires, we can build a generating flyer. With a line to the ground, it's a turbine in flight! With a bolt holding tight to the string of the kite!
Let's go fly a kite Up to the highest height Let's go fly a kite And send it soaring Up through the atmosphere Up where the air is clear Oh, let's go fly a kite!
Where the heck did you get the idea that the ideas Sen Hatch was espousing were socialist? They aren't: Socialism advocates the collective ownership of property, which in the world of so-called intellectual property would be something along the lines of Creative Commons.
No, the word you might have been looking for was "fascist", "corporatist", or "plutocratic".
Slashdot Mirror
It is a reality of life that we all think we can do more than we actually can.
It's a reality of life that those not doing the actual work think that those doing the actual work can do more in the same amount of time than they actually can.
That separation of roles is important: in a large number of organizations (the military is probably no exception) the people making the scheduling and budgeting decisions and the people doing the work are not the same people. Which lends itself to exactly what happened here: when the project goes over time and over budget, those responsible for unreasonable scheduling simply say "It's the fault of the people doing the work that they didn't meet our perfectly reasonable schedule", and the people responsible for doing the work (including the overtime, loss of sleep, loss of family relationships, and so on) are canned.
Actually, one of the better parts of Law and Order is that when cops rough up a suspect (or other people for that matter) there are frequently negative consequences such as cases getting thrown out and professional sanctions. But a lot of people don't understand or pay the slightest bit of attention to the legal discussions (less of a common plot element in the spinoffs, probably for this very reason).
I absolutely agree with you about the application of law impartially. Unfortunately, that's far from reality.
For instance, if you read lot of the flak that Justice David Souter has gotten, especially from the conservative side, it is precisely his tendency to call things based on law and precedent rather than ideology that got them riled up. A lot of folks who have particular political opinions (most notably surrounding abortion, but there are plenty of other issues) want ideological justices because they see them as the easiest way to get their political views in place for a couple of decades without having to risk that a mere election can get rid of those ideas.
Now, thanks to what happened to the nomination of Justice Bork in particular, now nominees are encouraged to have the ideological views preferred by those who appoint them but hide them until after the Senate confirms them to the court.
On top of that, there are often ambiguities in law, and situations that kinda apply to a law but not exactly, and laws that are kinda Constitutional but come close to the line, and so on. It's very unlike computers, where it's ultimately some reliable 1's and 0's.
I always called it a "Get The Facts Out" campaign, or "GTFO" for short.
You made the mistaken assumption that I would move to Canada because I didn't like big government, whereas my motivation for moving would be that I didn't like a government encroaching on my civil liberties.
Cleveland is very badly hit by foreclosures, but a major difference between Cleveland and, say, Phoenix (which has been hurt very badly in the recent crisis) is that there was no boom-bust cycle in Cleveland because there was no boom. In other words, it's been seeing a foreclosure crisis for at least a decade or two, and in some ways shows signs of slowing losses.
Cleveland proper does have some abandoned areas, but the OP didn't make it clear that he was referring to areas that were actually more-or-less abandoned industrial areas rather than heavily populated inner-city neighborhoods.
Sorry, I misinterpreted you. I've just heard the sentiment expressed around the northeast Ohio area along the lines of "ship all the black people out, all our problems will be solved", and your proposal seemed awfully close to that.
If you're talking abandoned factories by the lake, you'll be glad to know that I'm all with you there. The problem is that "East Cleveland" typically means the area roughly delineated by E 40, E 100, Superior, and Kinsman, which is a densely populated residential area.
So again, I apologise for misinterpreting your post, but that was my reasoning.
Cana ... oh, ummm, crap, now I'm in trouble.
We could do without most of the East side of Cleveland too.
Umm, you do realize that according to the census maps East Cleveland is heavily populated, right? Or were you slating that for demolition because it's the poorest and most African-American area of the city? For those not familiar with the geography and demographics of Cleveland, what Weaselmancer said was more or less like saying "New York could be improved by eliminating Harlem." It's an incredibly racist proposal, whether you realized it or not.
Places like Flint and Youngstown have significant areas that are emptying out and abandoning their property. That's why they want to physically shrink. It's not simply picking places full of residents you don't like and/or are scared of.
Rarely is the question asked, "Is our presidents learning?"
As does EA Sports Rugby, at least here across the pond.
That was really well written. Might I suggest a more poetic way of saying the same thing:
Work is love made visible
And if you cannot work with love but only
with distaste, it is better that you should
leave your work and sit at the gate of the
temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference
you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half
man's hunger
And if you grudge the crushing of the
grapes, your grudge distills a poison in the wine
And if you sing though as angels,and
love not the singing, you muffle man's ears
to the voices of the day and the voices of
the night.
-Kahlil Gibran
(The rest of this particular bit can be found here: http://www.sfheart.com/work.html)
Many jobs aren't about service in the same was as help desk or auto mechanic.
- Management, for starters, which tends to be not about service but about trying to squeeze as much out of your people as possible.
- Sales, which can be about service but is often about BSing the customer into paying a lot more than they should for something.
- "Consulting", which is mostly about giving content-free Powerpoint presentations to make some manager look good. (What I'm referring to here are shops that hire lots of Harvard grads to give presentations on things they know next to nothing about. They exist, they're very profitable, and totally mind-numbing to work for.)
- Advertising, which tends to be about making a product, company, or political cause look better than it really is.
See, when the parent talks about "service", what he means is that when a help desk worker does their job, some user's problem is solved. When a lot of these folks do their job, all that's happened is that somebody is convinced to do something that really doesn't help themselves or anyone else.
Which either way is a problem.
Let's say I'm a fine upstanding citizen who's a friend-of-a-friend of someone with the same name as a known terrorist (which could happen pretty easily). The NSA notices that my friend is forwarding jokes to me from the guy who's name matches the terrorist list. Ergo, he must be acting as an intermediary for terrorist communications. Both me and my friend are in real trouble, and all because of some silly email joke.
One subpoena away is much better than the zero subpoenas away it currently is (which is the whole point of the article).
If you fear freedom so much, why don't you move to Iran?
Because in Iran they'd be facing street protests.
Basically what the parent poster is pointing out is that absolutely any metric that management can come up with can be fooled.
For instance, now that you know that "time to close the ticket" is the metric, you can always close the ticket and then go work on the problem rather than the other way around. Or if it's an average time to close, you can get a pal who works in another department to open up a bunch of phony tickets for you to resolve quickly.
To quote extensively from Joel Spolsky:
Robert Austin, in his book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, says there are two phases when you introduce new performance metrics. At first, you actually get what you wanted, because nobody has figured out how to cheat. In the second phase, you actually get something worse, as everyone figures out the trick to maximizing the thing that you're measuring, even at the cost of ruining the company.
Worse, Econ 101 managers think that they can somehow avoid this situation just by tweaking the metrics. Dr. Austin's conclusion is that you just can't. It never works. No matter how much you try to adjust the metrics to reflect what you think you want, it always backfires.
Actually, if I had to guess they're probably dragging it out so Darl et al can continue to draw salaries.
Actually, the real problem is that Rock CPU faced off with Guts CPU, Bomb CPU, Fire CPU, and Ice CPU, but hasn't been able to handle Cut CPU.
With 2K for turbines and wires,
we can build a generating flyer.
With a line to the ground,
it's a turbine in flight!
With a bolt holding tight
to the string of the kite!
Let's go fly a kite
Up to the highest height
Let's go fly a kite
And send it soaring
Up through the atmosphere
Up where the air is clear
Oh, let's go fly a kite!
I think your sarcasm detector malfunctioned.
The problem with that approach is that unscrupulous commercial sites will want to get pageviews by pretending to be a research site.
these socialist ideals
Where the heck did you get the idea that the ideas Sen Hatch was espousing were socialist? They aren't: Socialism advocates the collective ownership of property, which in the world of so-called intellectual property would be something along the lines of Creative Commons.
No, the word you might have been looking for was "fascist", "corporatist", or "plutocratic".
I'm afraid that analogy doesn't work for me: Puppies are cute. Orrin Hatch isn't.
It's just not for serious gaming.
Could we please start treating "serious gaming" like the oxymoron it should be?