Especially true at the help desk level. The truth is that there is very little 'real engineering' in smaller corporate information systems departments (special needs cases aside). Sure the network folks have to think things through architecturally and there can be integration problems that require a solid information architecture understanding that would be on par professionally with other 'professional class' knowledge workers out there, but by and large it's just configuration management even at levels above the help desk, with a bit of project management. Real engineering I think of as designing and building actual computers (not assembly either), designing and building complex applications and algorithms (not glue scripts). Really, much of corporate I.T. operations is simply mechanic 2.0.
And before people get in a huff... I've been a phone 'hardware technician' for a major computer company, a field tech supporting medical billing systems, 2nd level help desk in a corporate environment, network/system admin, and then moved into applications and management later. I've been there and I can speak first had that the only thing that really distinguished me as a good help desk guy was I knew where the configs were, I could do basic problem solving, and I had good customer service skills.... all the same things I want in the guy fixing my car. Advanced thought and professional dedication is what qualified me to be something other than a help desk guy. BTW.. I respect the hell out of guys that can fix my car as I sure as hell can't.
Once the wise bureaucrats of the TSA get a full chance to gather their collective minds together and make thorough examination of incident I fully expect the following policy changes.
1) All airline passengers must travel nude and will be required to be nude to traverse any security checkpoints. After all the guy had the goods in his underwear, so to speak. 2) All airline passengers must submit to random body cavity searches at the security checkpoints. This way the TSA is saying they are keeping one step ahead of the bad guys.
Of course you'll still be allowed to carry on any number of things that a clever person could use as a weapon, but what the hell... perception is more important than reality!...and some suggest the terrorists have won...
The Austrian School of Economics in determining the value of products actually discounts the idea that the value of the end product is somehow connected to the labor expended in producing the product. There are many examples of this in tangible products... for example in the art market, a painter, prior to earning fame may not be able to sell a painting at all or only for a few dollars; after the painter earns fame (and is probably dead) that same painting worth a few dollars many now be worth tens of thousands of dollars. The labor that went into the product didn't change... it's still the same product. But the value of that product to society increased through unmeasurable and intangible factors.
The same amount of code and development time may have gone into a $20 dollar shareware game and a $500 dollar business app. Assuming both sell equal copies, which has more value? Which was the more 'productive'? By looking at lines of code and development time alone their value should be equal, but that's not the case. True the idea behind each of those apps contributed to the overall value differently, but even then the ideas may have taken the same 'labor' to develop while producing uneven value.
I've managed development teams myself. Over time I've learned how long certain types of feature take to develop and how well they should work in that given period of time... sort of a baseline. If a develop provides the product in less than that time with the same quality that developer is clearly more productive than a developer that fails to meet that baseline. This could be formalized to a degree, but would still maintain subjective standards of quality and estimates of effort. I agree with the premise of the posting however... you cannot judge productivity on scientifically measured quantities like lines of code or number of bugs; coding is too creative an endeavor for that and it starts to look like judging value in the way the Austrians rejected long ago.
Hear, hear! I think you're right on the money with this. One thing that I've observed and, anecdotally speaking, it seems as though this is accelerating over time, is that the typical drivel that gets shouted from the podiums of political conventions has completely supplanted any more serious debate that we use to have in this country. It use to be that silly grandstanding was the tool to whip your rank and file party members into a frenzy so that they would devote time and treasure to the cause of bringing around the less political observer to your side. Culturally, we've become a nation without a real middle. Sure there are the independents, but I have a hunch (complete and utter speculation) that these real independents are largely the same groups of people that wouldn't bother to register to vote without things like DMV sponsored registration and still wouldn't vote except for the convenience of absentee ballots... not so interested in the process, completely reactionary not so willing to put any real thought into it. With that scenario, that means the interested parties have really factionalized themselves such that political discourse is more about cementing an identity than really exploring the issues. It's a sort of tribalism where the jibes at Palin or Pelosi, etc. count more for for saying "I'm one of you liberals/I'm one of you conservatives" than really any deeply understood (as opposed to 'held') personal conviction.
Sorry for being a bit ramblely on this... but I'm very concerned we've reached a point with this sort of factional divide where it won't be repaired and the country will continue to decline.
I appreciate what 'too big too fail' means when applied to AIG and the consequences of an AIG failure for the banking industry. What I disagree with is that 1) those large banks that you're talking about have any more valid claim to being 'too big too fail' and 2) that we've actually avoided an economic meltdown.
I do agree that had things been let to play out as they should have that it would have been painful. But I don't believe we've avoided that pain so much as strung it out, delayed the worst of it, and ('the real sin') is diluted it for those most responsible for the problems while directly punishing those that had no part in it. My personal belief is that the economic crisis has only just begun. We took all the bad bets people made and turned them into government debt and government held 'toxic assets'. We've printed money and all signs are that new money will have virtually no cost for the foreseeable future. There's no way for the government to pull this back without hamstringing the economy further, yet if they continue to do it they risk inflation/hyper-inflation (money supply increase with production decreases can force this even in recessionary times) or they risk an end to foreign lending at which point the gravy train really is over.
While it is certainly easy to suggest something like this for those evil people at AIG, it presupposes that those good prosecutors and men at law that would protect us from such evil themselves are actually good. In truth the situation is much more grey than that. Firstly consider that many prosecutors in the country are elected and the prosecutorial policy is originates in the politics of the various office holders. Are politicians so indifferent to their own self interest that such a policy as being proposed by the article could be executed in good faith? Of course not. Politicians, and those that serve at them, are as notorious as any 'fat cat' in using their position and power to their own benefit at the expense of the others. All this policy does is feed a sort of populist anger that garners political support for those that suggest it and at the expense of real justice for the small minority that it targets... regardless of their past transgressions. One should remember that enshrining rights, such as prohibitions against search and seizure without convincing a court, exist largely to protect minorities from majority exploitation.
The real sin in the AIG case, to be fair, was not any action of AIG at all. It was that we bought into the bogus notion that a firm can be 'too big too fail' and must be bailout out by Government. AIG made bad judgments and bad investments and its owners (shareholders, including big investment banks) allowed it to be managed poorly. The company should have been allowed to fail, something all those involved earned. What we did instead was reward the foolish risk taking made by the shareholders and the managers and, worse still, told future generations of shareholders and managers that taking these risks is OK... the government will bail you out if you lose so there really is no risk at all... you're too big too fail. Let em fail! Stop taking my savings, diluting my money, borrowing on my behalf to save businesses that by all rights have earned their failure (including all those that chose to have a business relationship). There are other insurance companies, there are other investment banks, and there are others capable of filling the gap responsibly. Sure none of them have such good friends as Geithner, Paulson, Obama, & Bush... but they can rise to the occassion.
'In denying other aspects of the FOIA request, the Army stated 'disclosure of this information is likely to cause substantial harm to the Department of the Army's competitive position in the gaming industry.'
I'll be the first to admit that I'm a fan of America's Army and like the games. But that the Federal Government, much less the Army, should be concerned with its ability to compete against private industry? Isn't that contrary to our beliefs regarding the purposes of Government and of our economic system (at least in the U.S.)? And to top it off, it's denying a FOIA request on the basis, not of national security, an on-going criminal investigation or violation of someone's privacy, but on the basis of what could be called a trade secret? And it's so bogus to boot, they can invest as much as they want into the program to out-compete their private industry competitors without fear as they don't have to recoup their expenses... the Army won't go out of business if they spend foolishly. Private companies on the other hand do go out of business when they fail to have excess revenues to costs... unless you're a car company or a well connected bank of course. I know it's not the first time this has happened (Amtrak, USPS), but still... aren't the existing game companies good enough?
(Stepping off of soap box and taking big breath to facilitate big sigh)
The original author of the blog in the story has revised his analysis thus:
"In the course of re-reading the opinion to post it, I recognized that I was misreading a key part of the opinion. As I read it now, Judge Mosman does not conclude that e-mails are not protected by the Fourth Amendment. Rather, he assumes for the sake of argument that the e-mails are protected (see bottom of page 12), but then concludes that the third party context negates an argument for Fourth Amendment notice to the subscribers. I missed this because the reasoning closely resembles the argument for saying that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply at all, and I didn’t read the earlier section closely enough. That’s obviously a much narrower position, and I apologize for misunderstanding it the first time in the quick skim I gave it. Sorry about that: The fault is entirely mine."
Actually, I had a friend die about three weeks ago. Got on Facebook to see how to handle the account over this past weekend and they had already implemented this service; in fact I didn't know it was a new way of handling it until a few days later Drudge and other sites (and eventually Slashdot) started reporting the story. It took less than a day from the time I made the request to the time the page was 'memorialized'. I'm not this person's family (they wouldn't be on Facebook), but it was clear from postings from other well established accounts what had happened (a lot of 'we'll miss you' postings, from when he passed away) so it was pretty easy to tell it was legit.
I think it's an appropriate service and I have no doubt that if somehow a fraudulent report caused a live person's account to be 'memorialized' that they still have all the data to make it whole pretty fast. Having said that, the last point is complete speculation on my part and not substantiated in any way... so don't take my word for it!
One self-criticism to my note... my stats are dated (2003) so the rankings may have changed, though I suspect that they are still generally true today. At the end of the day, we may trade off with those states wherein state government invests heavily in consumption entitlements rather than engage in frugality; I suspect the players I'm thinking of can be guessed at.
Yep, we Californians can vote for spending mandates and guarantees that must be accounted for in the state budget (Prop 98 ring a bell), but it's more than that. We really excel at ballot measures that add new debt. See, in California our constitution prevents simple majority tax increases in the legislature or by ballot measure (2/3rds must support to pass)... but there is no such restriction on issuing bonds for new spending. But even with the difficulty of passing new taxes, we're ranked third for highest income tax (Montana beats us, but has no sales tax and so does Vermont... and that kicks in at over $308K) by another measure related to business we're in second place and only by property taxes to come it at 8. I can only imagine what the rates would be if 2/3rds requirement wasn't there. I can tell this is one reason why one side of the isle want the Constitutional Convention for CA... get rid of that 2/3rds passage requirement! Unfortunately I don't think either side wants to cut spending... they just want to spend differently.
100% agreed. In fact, in the scenario I mentioned I wasn't on the operations side but on the business side of IT. However, our CIOs narrow focus on ticketing volumes, and the lack of insight to IT value this inspired in our executive team completely sidelined any IT value efforts. I found that midsized companies $100-500M tend to be very vulnerable to this mindset, depending on vertical, of course.
I completely believe in productivity assessment in IT operations and support done correctly. But the game, as you point out, is about the business case and investment of IT. A good CIO should be interested in the operational metrics, but really those are more internal to IT and should be the focus of the business. Other scorecarding techniques are available to summarize IT success vs. failure more completely and across disciplines. Portfolio management techniques are one way to address this.
If they're just monitoring how quickly tickets get closed and faster is always better, then your observation of the utility of the metric is spot on. Otherwise, productivity is a valid measure and how fast someone turns around work is important.
Corporate IT performance, and support/operations performance can include a timeliness measure, but the interpretation and use of the metric matter. So, for instance, the correct use of such a measure would be to see if a technician is turning work around quickly enough relative to others doing the same sort of work at a given level of quality. YOU CANNOT USE THIS MEASURE WITHOUT CORRESPONDING QUALITY MEASURE(S)... it becomes meaningless in the absence of those controls much to the OP's point.
Still, productivity measures are real and when you know, and control for, the factors that go along with that then you can make use of such a measure to effectively bring value to your organization.
Many lesser IT managers will, though, just look at 'how fast' or 'how many'. The last company I was with just looked at help desk tickets opened and closed, for instance, to judge help desk success. The numbers closed went up and the numbers opened dropped... therefore success right? Nope. This overly simplistic view, with no real quality measure, actually meant that it was so hard to get the help desk to do anything that users just stopped opening them and found 'out-of-band' ways of getting help. Those that were closed weren't necessarily complete, but again, users didn't get any value out of challenging so just gave up. So what our operations management was seeing as success was actually a more accurate measure of their failure!
A simple random sampling of tickets with automated 'how did we do?' surveys could have collected this information and provided some meaning to the productivity measures... as well as if people were closing things too fast or too slow while maintaining quality.
Firstly, my ISP rebuttal is a bit higher in the thread. Rather than retype it here, comment prior to yours for reference.
For Microsoft. Of course they try, and largely succeed in precisely what you accuse them of. But once their prices exceed their value, they too will cease selling as many products and make themselves vulnerable to competitors that provide greater value for price. There are computer makers that sell computers only loaded with Linux; yes very small right now, but do you think people would endlessly look at those alternatives and say, 'looks great, but I have to buy a Microsoft loaded PC' if Microsoft wasn't adding value in a way that the marketplace desired?
As for your Microeconomics 101 text book, whether just a glib remark or not,... I wouldn't take it on faith. There are many economists micro and macro that are a bit too academic for their own good. Many of them are now in Government. I prefer the Austrian school of economics as they tend to be more right in practice about the workings of the economy (http://www.mises.org and http://mises.org/story/621 more specifically for a discussion on monopoly).
Absolutely incorrect. My argument, in fact, relies on the opposite notion that even a monopoly can exceed the value of of its products in pricing and lose business as a result.
In the mid '90s as a sysadmin for a chain retail company, I regularly had the need to transfer many megabyte files around; occasionally very late at night, with tight time constraints, and without necessarily having access to our offices. I could have (and yes we checked) had a DS1 or fractional DS1 setup at my home. I could get it only from one source, the local telco, a monopoly, and there were no other 'broadband' options available (just pre-ISDN). But it would have cost $1000+ per month; not counting installation. Sparing me 6 or so hours through the night babysitting a transfer hoping the line wasn't noisy wasn't worth the price of the service offering from the monopoly to me or my employer. We didn't buy it and made due with dial up; when cheaper ISDN came along my employer provided me a circuit. The price matched the value of the service and we paid it. All with a monopoly.
Now by offering ISDN, wasn't the monopoly simply devaluing its T1s? They're a monopoly... they didn't have to do that, right?
You are right there is little that you can do. But then what conveys your desire to not be billed for services you don't want or use as a superseding right over the ISP's choice to package and sell their services they believe will make them the greatest profit? Further still by what right is your desire to prevent Disney from earning income from their products?
I agree with you that it's very displeasing, and I would get no more value from it than you since I'm not a Disney customer online, but your 'need' or desire doesn't convey a right to have others sacrifice their best interests to fulfill yours. Disney's right to attempt to profit from their products is paramount. If the ISP agrees that Disney's products are a valuable addition to its own products and would be desirable to its customers, the ISP has the right to pay the extra costs and add those costs and associated profit margins to their prices if they desire; if not the can turn Disney away. If ISP's service offering is of value to you at the price they offer it and you can afford it, you'll buy it; if not you won't.
If the ISPs feel it isn't a good investment or feel that it's unfair: they shouldn't pay for it. If they do think it provides enough value: they should if Disney asks them to.
Yes they will pass those costs on, but they can only put their prices up so high before they lose value to their customers and they walk. And yes even cable providers and ISPs have a threshold to their value beyond which the price ain't worth it.
If enough of their customers want Disney, they'll continue, if not they'll buck the deal.
Think about it: if Disney and other majors cost the ISPs too much, the ISPs may well tier their services for consumers; if consumers feel the extra price to access Disney is worth it more power to Disney and the ISP. The extra value will be worth it... I suspect on the Internet people would find other content (maybe even non-Disney content, shudder) rather than pay a premium. If ISPs don't offer enough service for price, people won't buy the service.
Going to the FCC or trying to steal the content isn't going to solve anything and ultimately punishes those that create the value.
But that's nonsense, because if the pricing weren't affordable relative to value customers would 'leave it' and the monopoly would shrink in size. If the prices were high relative to the costs, competitors would start to enter the market and investment would be there for the easy money.
Look at the history of Standard Oil and its pricing. Prices under the Standard Oil monopoly were very cheap relative to the immediate aftermath of it's break up. The breakup of ATT... did that help consumers? I haven't sudied it in quite the same way, but I recall there being more frustration with the baby bells than Ma Bell.
If Microsoft, which most people here will say is a monopoly, charged $700 for Windows Vista Home Basic... take it or leave it, they can do that and be profitable according to your line of reason... wouldn't that be about the best thing for Linux desktop ever? Before long they wouldn't have a monopoly.
Look at the telephone company that had infrastructure to your house. They now face competition from cable providers not because of government fiat, but because technology for communications is reducing the technical (and cost) barriers for making it happen. Power line and wireless technologies will even push that trend.
Just like the community re-investment act and the creation of government backed mortgages to ensure the 'less well off' can get loans housing loans from banks that otherwise wouldn't lend to them. Just like the Federal Reserve Bank keeping interest rates artifically low through much of the 90's and the first half of this decade.
All this was done to 'level the playing field' and make people's lives better. I have no doubt that was by and large the intension in these programs. And it worked for a while... 15 years or so. People that couldn't normally afford houses got houses, banking execs got rich because the government told them that the public would take the risk, and property owners saw their house values soar.
That worked out really well in the end... good thing government was protecting us.
When you say that there was no subsidy on the cable costs, the initial build out (the initial investment) sounds like it was subsidized. The issue if that was the case and they are getting a lesser payback than if that money where otherwise invested is that their act would have, perhaps in only some small way, depressed the effciency of the economy... that's not to say finacial disaster or maybe even anything noticable, but the growth on capital is a reflection of the efficiency of the use of that captial. I take less issue with community investments of this kind, very locally decided public commitments can be responsive enough and have enough information to work well... its when you start to expand this out beyond small groups of people that the errors in judgment by government officials will get more pronounced.
Based on your description, the infrastructure sounds quite nice there and it also sounds like they very wisely used it to their advantage.
What's wrong is that the process of arbitraily influencing costs and prices via government fiat can actually mask not just real economic benefits and costs, but also the environmental impacts as well: indeed, if the economics, outside of the artifical fees imposed by government were actually compared, you might find that it is less -environmentally- sound to recycle than to landfill.
The report implicity was trying to demonstrate this point and doing so via economic means. In all the free market cost elements of an activity, resource/raw materials utilization is a major component. If the free market costs of dumping are less than the free market costs of recycling, then dumping may well use fewer resources, consume less enegry and be overall more sound than recycling in the case of plastic. Government fees can hide the effects of resource consumption in costing (and by extension pricing)... and thus hide any real outcome of the environmental effecacy of recycling on that basis.
The interesting thing to note is that the individuals paid to conduct such studies have, themselves, a vested interest in the outcome. I'm not accusing the study authors that I read of fraud, but they see the world wanting one side to win in that debate.
Name one price set in the economy, outside the price that government charges for it's "services", that isn't ultimately 'take it or leave it'? Even negotiated prices will reach a bottom and top during the course of negotiation. The fact is that if a price for a service is too expensive relative to the value returned, the customer simply won't buy it: even in the case of so-called 'monopolies'.
Unfortunately, there are those that want something for nothing and often times they use the law to intervene on their behalf to take those resources that they haven't earned (otherwise it would be called theft).
How much of the operating expense is subsidized by revenue not generated through subscriber fees?
Any cost element that's not accounted for in the price calculation that subscribers pay directly makes the apparent benefit of such an arrangement apparent only... not real.
I read a study on plasitic recycling that did something similar; they wanted to show how much more economically sound it was to recycle, so they compared costs (including some estimated) of the recycling processes (transport, processing, etc.) with just plain dumping. And part of their rationale was that dumping fees were really high. But they didn't account for artifical elements in the fees (government environmental impact taxes and fees, etc. designed to make dumping more expensive) and the fact that significant portions of those fees went to subsidize recycling activities (a double whammy in terms of the study dollar per dollar there). This made to whole thing silly, but it looked good if you didn't ask the questions.
This low pricing sounds like it could be suffering from the same sorts of distortions.
You know... I've hired a bunch of people, and I've had a bunch of jobs over the years.
I not only look online to see what a potential employee is like, when a new boss comes my way, I research the hell out of them, too.
My personal political views, when found to be in conflict with someone, don't stop me from hiring someone. Indeed, say someone were in porn... I would still hire them if 1) I thought they could do the job and 2) they were deep enough in the org that no one would care (from the press point of view). As a hiring manager outside of work is outside of work, period. But, I can learn about how dedicated a person is that way... think how many top notch developers are in open source of their own desire for excellence, they have an tend to have an online presence and a reputation I can understand that I could never find in a simple interview or calling references. I'm out to hire the best that I can... not the most agreeable that I can: the best will contribute to the bottom line, the agreeable may or may not.
As for managers, damn shooting I want to know who I'm going to work for. And frankly, if someone bases a hiring decision for me based on out of work online activities... I don't want to work for them anyway...
People should stop being so pathetic about some of this stuff and understand their own value... including what they believe express it etc. An employer goes looking for you online... so what... if you have value and they are smart... they won't care... if you don't you should be fired anyway... if they fire a valuable employee... they get the worst of it anyway.
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Especially true at the help desk level. The truth is that there is very little 'real engineering' in smaller corporate information systems departments (special needs cases aside). Sure the network folks have to think things through architecturally and there can be integration problems that require a solid information architecture understanding that would be on par professionally with other 'professional class' knowledge workers out there, but by and large it's just configuration management even at levels above the help desk, with a bit of project management. Real engineering I think of as designing and building actual computers (not assembly either), designing and building complex applications and algorithms (not glue scripts). Really, much of corporate I.T. operations is simply mechanic 2.0.
And before people get in a huff... I've been a phone 'hardware technician' for a major computer company, a field tech supporting medical billing systems, 2nd level help desk in a corporate environment, network/system admin, and then moved into applications and management later. I've been there and I can speak first had that the only thing that really distinguished me as a good help desk guy was I knew where the configs were, I could do basic problem solving, and I had good customer service skills.... all the same things I want in the guy fixing my car. Advanced thought and professional dedication is what qualified me to be something other than a help desk guy. BTW.. I respect the hell out of guys that can fix my car as I sure as hell can't.
Once the wise bureaucrats of the TSA get a full chance to gather their collective minds together and make thorough examination of incident I fully expect the following policy changes.
1) All airline passengers must travel nude and will be required to be nude to traverse any security checkpoints. After all the guy had the goods in his underwear, so to speak.
2) All airline passengers must submit to random body cavity searches at the security checkpoints. This way the TSA is saying they are keeping one step ahead of the bad guys.
Of course you'll still be allowed to carry on any number of things that a clever person could use as a weapon, but what the hell... perception is more important than reality! ...and some suggest the terrorists have won...
The Austrian School of Economics in determining the value of products actually discounts the idea that the value of the end product is somehow connected to the labor expended in producing the product. There are many examples of this in tangible products... for example in the art market, a painter, prior to earning fame may not be able to sell a painting at all or only for a few dollars; after the painter earns fame (and is probably dead) that same painting worth a few dollars many now be worth tens of thousands of dollars. The labor that went into the product didn't change... it's still the same product. But the value of that product to society increased through unmeasurable and intangible factors.
The same amount of code and development time may have gone into a $20 dollar shareware game and a $500 dollar business app. Assuming both sell equal copies, which has more value? Which was the more 'productive'? By looking at lines of code and development time alone their value should be equal, but that's not the case. True the idea behind each of those apps contributed to the overall value differently, but even then the ideas may have taken the same 'labor' to develop while producing uneven value.
I've managed development teams myself. Over time I've learned how long certain types of feature take to develop and how well they should work in that given period of time... sort of a baseline. If a develop provides the product in less than that time with the same quality that developer is clearly more productive than a developer that fails to meet that baseline. This could be formalized to a degree, but would still maintain subjective standards of quality and estimates of effort. I agree with the premise of the posting however... you cannot judge productivity on scientifically measured quantities like lines of code or number of bugs; coding is too creative an endeavor for that and it starts to look like judging value in the way the Austrians rejected long ago.
Hear, hear! I think you're right on the money with this. One thing that I've observed and, anecdotally speaking, it seems as though this is accelerating over time, is that the typical drivel that gets shouted from the podiums of political conventions has completely supplanted any more serious debate that we use to have in this country. It use to be that silly grandstanding was the tool to whip your rank and file party members into a frenzy so that they would devote time and treasure to the cause of bringing around the less political observer to your side. Culturally, we've become a nation without a real middle. Sure there are the independents, but I have a hunch (complete and utter speculation) that these real independents are largely the same groups of people that wouldn't bother to register to vote without things like DMV sponsored registration and still wouldn't vote except for the convenience of absentee ballots... not so interested in the process, completely reactionary not so willing to put any real thought into it. With that scenario, that means the interested parties have really factionalized themselves such that political discourse is more about cementing an identity than really exploring the issues. It's a sort of tribalism where the jibes at Palin or Pelosi, etc. count more for for saying "I'm one of you liberals/I'm one of you conservatives" than really any deeply understood (as opposed to 'held') personal conviction.
Sorry for being a bit ramblely on this... but I'm very concerned we've reached a point with this sort of factional divide where it won't be repaired and the country will continue to decline.
Oh well... all good things come to an end!
I appreciate what 'too big too fail' means when applied to AIG and the consequences of an AIG failure for the banking industry. What I disagree with is that 1) those large banks that you're talking about have any more valid claim to being 'too big too fail' and 2) that we've actually avoided an economic meltdown.
I do agree that had things been let to play out as they should have that it would have been painful. But I don't believe we've avoided that pain so much as strung it out, delayed the worst of it, and ('the real sin') is diluted it for those most responsible for the problems while directly punishing those that had no part in it. My personal belief is that the economic crisis has only just begun. We took all the bad bets people made and turned them into government debt and government held 'toxic assets'. We've printed money and all signs are that new money will have virtually no cost for the foreseeable future. There's no way for the government to pull this back without hamstringing the economy further, yet if they continue to do it they risk inflation/hyper-inflation (money supply increase with production decreases can force this even in recessionary times) or they risk an end to foreign lending at which point the gravy train really is over.
While it is certainly easy to suggest something like this for those evil people at AIG, it presupposes that those good prosecutors and men at law that would protect us from such evil themselves are actually good. In truth the situation is much more grey than that. Firstly consider that many prosecutors in the country are elected and the prosecutorial policy is originates in the politics of the various office holders. Are politicians so indifferent to their own self interest that such a policy as being proposed by the article could be executed in good faith? Of course not. Politicians, and those that serve at them, are as notorious as any 'fat cat' in using their position and power to their own benefit at the expense of the others. All this policy does is feed a sort of populist anger that garners political support for those that suggest it and at the expense of real justice for the small minority that it targets... regardless of their past transgressions. One should remember that enshrining rights, such as prohibitions against search and seizure without convincing a court, exist largely to protect minorities from majority exploitation.
The real sin in the AIG case, to be fair, was not any action of AIG at all. It was that we bought into the bogus notion that a firm can be 'too big too fail' and must be bailout out by Government. AIG made bad judgments and bad investments and its owners (shareholders, including big investment banks) allowed it to be managed poorly. The company should have been allowed to fail, something all those involved earned. What we did instead was reward the foolish risk taking made by the shareholders and the managers and, worse still, told future generations of shareholders and managers that taking these risks is OK... the government will bail you out if you lose so there really is no risk at all... you're too big too fail. Let em fail! Stop taking my savings, diluting my money, borrowing on my behalf to save businesses that by all rights have earned their failure (including all those that chose to have a business relationship). There are other insurance companies, there are other investment banks, and there are others capable of filling the gap responsibly. Sure none of them have such good friends as Geithner, Paulson, Obama, & Bush... but they can rise to the occassion.
'In denying other aspects of the FOIA request, the Army stated 'disclosure of this information is likely to cause substantial harm to the Department of the Army's competitive position in the gaming industry.'
I'll be the first to admit that I'm a fan of America's Army and like the games. But that the Federal Government, much less the Army, should be concerned with its ability to compete against private industry? Isn't that contrary to our beliefs regarding the purposes of Government and of our economic system (at least in the U.S.)? And to top it off, it's denying a FOIA request on the basis, not of national security, an on-going criminal investigation or violation of someone's privacy, but on the basis of what could be called a trade secret? And it's so bogus to boot, they can invest as much as they want into the program to out-compete their private industry competitors without fear as they don't have to recoup their expenses... the Army won't go out of business if they spend foolishly. Private companies on the other hand do go out of business when they fail to have excess revenues to costs... unless you're a car company or a well connected bank of course. I know it's not the first time this has happened (Amtrak, USPS), but still... aren't the existing game companies good enough?
(Stepping off of soap box and taking big breath to facilitate big sigh)
The original author of the blog in the story has revised his analysis thus:
"In the course of re-reading the opinion to post it, I recognized that I was misreading a key part of the opinion. As I read it now, Judge Mosman does not conclude that e-mails are not protected by the Fourth Amendment. Rather, he assumes for the sake of argument that the e-mails are protected (see bottom of page 12), but then concludes that the third party context negates an argument for Fourth Amendment notice to the subscribers. I missed this because the reasoning closely resembles the argument for saying that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply at all, and I didn’t read the earlier section closely enough. That’s obviously a much narrower position, and I apologize for misunderstanding it the first time in the quick skim I gave it. Sorry about that: The fault is entirely mine."
http://volokh.com/2009/10/29/opinion-on-fourth-amendment-and-e-mail/
Actually, I had a friend die about three weeks ago. Got on Facebook to see how to handle the account over this past weekend and they had already implemented this service; in fact I didn't know it was a new way of handling it until a few days later Drudge and other sites (and eventually Slashdot) started reporting the story. It took less than a day from the time I made the request to the time the page was 'memorialized'. I'm not this person's family (they wouldn't be on Facebook), but it was clear from postings from other well established accounts what had happened (a lot of 'we'll miss you' postings, from when he passed away) so it was pretty easy to tell it was legit.
I think it's an appropriate service and I have no doubt that if somehow a fraudulent report caused a live person's account to be 'memorialized' that they still have all the data to make it whole pretty fast. Having said that, the last point is complete speculation on my part and not substantiated in any way... so don't take my word for it!
One self-criticism to my note... my stats are dated (2003) so the rankings may have changed, though I suspect that they are still generally true today. At the end of the day, we may trade off with those states wherein state government invests heavily in consumption entitlements rather than engage in frugality; I suspect the players I'm thinking of can be guessed at.
Yep, we Californians can vote for spending mandates and guarantees that must be accounted for in the state budget (Prop 98 ring a bell), but it's more than that. We really excel at ballot measures that add new debt. See, in California our constitution prevents simple majority tax increases in the legislature or by ballot measure (2/3rds must support to pass)... but there is no such restriction on issuing bonds for new spending. But even with the difficulty of passing new taxes, we're ranked third for highest income tax (Montana beats us, but has no sales tax and so does Vermont... and that kicks in at over $308K) by another measure related to business we're in second place and only by property taxes to come it at 8. I can only imagine what the rates would be if 2/3rds requirement wasn't there. I can tell this is one reason why one side of the isle want the Constitutional Convention for CA... get rid of that 2/3rds passage requirement! Unfortunately I don't think either side wants to cut spending... they just want to spend differently.
Cheers!
SCB
100% agreed. In fact, in the scenario I mentioned I wasn't on the operations side but on the business side of IT. However, our CIOs narrow focus on ticketing volumes, and the lack of insight to IT value this inspired in our executive team completely sidelined any IT value efforts. I found that midsized companies $100-500M tend to be very vulnerable to this mindset, depending on vertical, of course.
I completely believe in productivity assessment in IT operations and support done correctly. But the game, as you point out, is about the business case and investment of IT. A good CIO should be interested in the operational metrics, but really those are more internal to IT and should be the focus of the business. Other scorecarding techniques are available to summarize IT success vs. failure more completely and across disciplines. Portfolio management techniques are one way to address this.
If they're just monitoring how quickly tickets get closed and faster is always better, then your observation of the utility of the metric is spot on. Otherwise, productivity is a valid measure and how fast someone turns around work is important.
Corporate IT performance, and support/operations performance can include a timeliness measure, but the interpretation and use of the metric matter. So, for instance, the correct use of such a measure would be to see if a technician is turning work around quickly enough relative to others doing the same sort of work at a given level of quality. YOU CANNOT USE THIS MEASURE WITHOUT CORRESPONDING QUALITY MEASURE(S)... it becomes meaningless in the absence of those controls much to the OP's point.
Still, productivity measures are real and when you know, and control for, the factors that go along with that then you can make use of such a measure to effectively bring value to your organization.
Many lesser IT managers will, though, just look at 'how fast' or 'how many'. The last company I was with just looked at help desk tickets opened and closed, for instance, to judge help desk success. The numbers closed went up and the numbers opened dropped... therefore success right? Nope. This overly simplistic view, with no real quality measure, actually meant that it was so hard to get the help desk to do anything that users just stopped opening them and found 'out-of-band' ways of getting help. Those that were closed weren't necessarily complete, but again, users didn't get any value out of challenging so just gave up. So what our operations management was seeing as success was actually a more accurate measure of their failure!
A simple random sampling of tickets with automated 'how did we do?' surveys could have collected this information and provided some meaning to the productivity measures... as well as if people were closing things too fast or too slow while maintaining quality.
Firstly, my ISP rebuttal is a bit higher in the thread. Rather than retype it here, comment prior to yours for reference.
For Microsoft. Of course they try, and largely succeed in precisely what you accuse them of. But once their prices exceed their value, they too will cease selling as many products and make themselves vulnerable to competitors that provide greater value for price. There are computer makers that sell computers only loaded with Linux; yes very small right now, but do you think people would endlessly look at those alternatives and say, 'looks great, but I have to buy a Microsoft loaded PC' if Microsoft wasn't adding value in a way that the marketplace desired?
As for your Microeconomics 101 text book, whether just a glib remark or not,... I wouldn't take it on faith. There are many economists micro and macro that are a bit too academic for their own good. Many of them are now in Government. I prefer the Austrian school of economics as they tend to be more right in practice about the workings of the economy (http://www.mises.org and http://mises.org/story/621 more specifically for a discussion on monopoly).
Absolutely incorrect. My argument, in fact, relies on the opposite notion that even a monopoly can exceed the value of of its products in pricing and lose business as a result.
In the mid '90s as a sysadmin for a chain retail company, I regularly had the need to transfer many megabyte files around; occasionally very late at night, with tight time constraints, and without necessarily having access to our offices. I could have (and yes we checked) had a DS1 or fractional DS1 setup at my home. I could get it only from one source, the local telco, a monopoly, and there were no other 'broadband' options available (just pre-ISDN). But it would have cost $1000+ per month; not counting installation. Sparing me 6 or so hours through the night babysitting a transfer hoping the line wasn't noisy wasn't worth the price of the service offering from the monopoly to me or my employer. We didn't buy it and made due with dial up; when cheaper ISDN came along my employer provided me a circuit. The price matched the value of the service and we paid it. All with a monopoly.
Now by offering ISDN, wasn't the monopoly simply devaluing its T1s? They're a monopoly... they didn't have to do that, right?
You are right there is little that you can do. But then what conveys your desire to not be billed for services you don't want or use as a superseding right over the ISP's choice to package and sell their services they believe will make them the greatest profit? Further still by what right is your desire to prevent Disney from earning income from their products?
I agree with you that it's very displeasing, and I would get no more value from it than you since I'm not a Disney customer online, but your 'need' or desire doesn't convey a right to have others sacrifice their best interests to fulfill yours. Disney's right to attempt to profit from their products is paramount. If the ISP agrees that Disney's products are a valuable addition to its own products and would be desirable to its customers, the ISP has the right to pay the extra costs and add those costs and associated profit margins to their prices if they desire; if not the can turn Disney away. If ISP's service offering is of value to you at the price they offer it and you can afford it, you'll buy it; if not you won't.
If the ISPs feel it isn't a good investment or feel that it's unfair: they shouldn't pay for it. If they do think it provides enough value: they should if Disney asks them to.
Yes they will pass those costs on, but they can only put their prices up so high before they lose value to their customers and they walk. And yes even cable providers and ISPs have a threshold to their value beyond which the price ain't worth it.
If enough of their customers want Disney, they'll continue, if not they'll buck the deal.
Think about it: if Disney and other majors cost the ISPs too much, the ISPs may well tier their services for consumers; if consumers feel the extra price to access Disney is worth it more power to Disney and the ISP. The extra value will be worth it... I suspect on the Internet people would find other content (maybe even non-Disney content, shudder) rather than pay a premium. If ISPs don't offer enough service for price, people won't buy the service.
Going to the FCC or trying to steal the content isn't going to solve anything and ultimately punishes those that create the value.
I'd take a look at this...
http://mises.org/story/3416
But that's nonsense, because if the pricing weren't affordable relative to value customers would 'leave it' and the monopoly would shrink in size. If the prices were high relative to the costs, competitors would start to enter the market and investment would be there for the easy money.
Look at the history of Standard Oil and its pricing. Prices under the Standard Oil monopoly were very cheap relative to the immediate aftermath of it's break up. The breakup of ATT... did that help consumers? I haven't sudied it in quite the same way, but I recall there being more frustration with the baby bells than Ma Bell.
If Microsoft, which most people here will say is a monopoly, charged $700 for Windows Vista Home Basic... take it or leave it, they can do that and be profitable according to your line of reason... wouldn't that be about the best thing for Linux desktop ever? Before long they wouldn't have a monopoly.
Look at the telephone company that had infrastructure to your house. They now face competition from cable providers not because of government fiat, but because technology for communications is reducing the technical (and cost) barriers for making it happen. Power line and wireless technologies will even push that trend.
Just like the community re-investment act and the creation of government backed mortgages to ensure the 'less well off' can get loans housing loans from banks that otherwise wouldn't lend to them. Just like the Federal Reserve Bank keeping interest rates artifically low through much of the 90's and the first half of this decade.
All this was done to 'level the playing field' and make people's lives better. I have no doubt that was by and large the intension in these programs. And it worked for a while... 15 years or so. People that couldn't normally afford houses got houses, banking execs got rich because the government told them that the public would take the risk, and property owners saw their house values soar.
That worked out really well in the end... good thing government was protecting us.
When you say that there was no subsidy on the cable costs, the initial build out (the initial investment) sounds like it was subsidized. The issue if that was the case and they are getting a lesser payback than if that money where otherwise invested is that their act would have, perhaps in only some small way, depressed the effciency of the economy... that's not to say finacial disaster or maybe even anything noticable, but the growth on capital is a reflection of the efficiency of the use of that captial. I take less issue with community investments of this kind, very locally decided public commitments can be responsive enough and have enough information to work well... its when you start to expand this out beyond small groups of people that the errors in judgment by government officials will get more pronounced.
Based on your description, the infrastructure sounds quite nice there and it also sounds like they very wisely used it to their advantage.
What's wrong is that the process of arbitraily influencing costs and prices via government fiat can actually mask not just real economic benefits and costs, but also the environmental impacts as well: indeed, if the economics, outside of the artifical fees imposed by government were actually compared, you might find that it is less -environmentally- sound to recycle than to landfill.
The report implicity was trying to demonstrate this point and doing so via economic means. In all the free market cost elements of an activity, resource/raw materials utilization is a major component. If the free market costs of dumping are less than the free market costs of recycling, then dumping may well use fewer resources, consume less enegry and be overall more sound than recycling in the case of plastic. Government fees can hide the effects of resource consumption in costing (and by extension pricing)... and thus hide any real outcome of the environmental effecacy of recycling on that basis.
The interesting thing to note is that the individuals paid to conduct such studies have, themselves, a vested interest in the outcome. I'm not accusing the study authors that I read of fraud, but they see the world wanting one side to win in that debate.
Name one price set in the economy, outside the price that government charges for it's "services", that isn't ultimately 'take it or leave it'? Even negotiated prices will reach a bottom and top during the course of negotiation. The fact is that if a price for a service is too expensive relative to the value returned, the customer simply won't buy it: even in the case of so-called 'monopolies'.
Unfortunately, there are those that want something for nothing and often times they use the law to intervene on their behalf to take those resources that they haven't earned (otherwise it would be called theft).
How much of the operating expense is subsidized by revenue not generated through subscriber fees?
Any cost element that's not accounted for in the price calculation that subscribers pay directly makes the apparent benefit of such an arrangement apparent only... not real.
I read a study on plasitic recycling that did something similar; they wanted to show how much more economically sound it was to recycle, so they compared costs (including some estimated) of the recycling processes (transport, processing, etc.) with just plain dumping. And part of their rationale was that dumping fees were really high. But they didn't account for artifical elements in the fees (government environmental impact taxes and fees, etc. designed to make dumping more expensive) and the fact that significant portions of those fees went to subsidize recycling activities (a double whammy in terms of the study dollar per dollar there). This made to whole thing silly, but it looked good if you didn't ask the questions.
This low pricing sounds like it could be suffering from the same sorts of distortions.
You know... I've hired a bunch of people, and I've had a bunch of jobs over the years.
I not only look online to see what a potential employee is like, when a new boss comes my way, I research the hell out of them, too.
My personal political views, when found to be in conflict with someone, don't stop me from hiring someone. Indeed, say someone were in porn... I would still hire them if 1) I thought they could do the job and 2) they were deep enough in the org that no one would care (from the press point of view). As a hiring manager outside of work is outside of work, period. But, I can learn about how dedicated a person is that way... think how many top notch developers are in open source of their own desire for excellence, they have an tend to have an online presence and a reputation I can understand that I could never find in a simple interview or calling references. I'm out to hire the best that I can... not the most agreeable that I can: the best will contribute to the bottom line, the agreeable may or may not.
As for managers, damn shooting I want to know who I'm going to work for. And frankly, if someone bases a hiring decision for me based on out of work online activities... I don't want to work for them anyway...
People should stop being so pathetic about some of this stuff and understand their own value... including what they believe express it etc. An employer goes looking for you online... so what... if you have value and they are smart... they won't care... if you don't you should be fired anyway... if they fire a valuable employee... they get the worst of it anyway.
My two bits...
Enjoy!
Steven C. Buttgereit.