True -- and they do so because of the black market that exists to trade drugs.
Legalize currently-illegal drugs, and the black market -- and the massive profits which flow through it back to the druglords in the nations you mentioned (particularly Columbia) -- disappears, due to lack of what is currently an extraordinary incentive to produce and sell drugs... (It's not like we don't have the example of the Prohibition and the rise of Al Capone in Chicago as an historical example of what happens when drugs are made illegal.)
Let the gubberment track cell phones! It could put a hell of a lot more drug dealers in jail.
<sarcasm> Yes, because drug dealers are the worst of society's ills. Focus on the drug dealers instead of rapists, murderers, wife-beaters, and terrorists! </sarcasm>
In any decently-sized business in the financial services industry, it is generally corporate standard to have audit trails for any non-trivial work that is done.
For example, software that is more than 50-100 LOC and not written as a "one-off" app generally must be documented with a project proposal, requirements, design, and testing docs, and so forth. It depends on the size, scope, business need, computing environment impact, etc. of the app, but other documents -- such as a cost/benefit analysis, architectural board approval doc, a traceability matrix, etc. -- may be required too.
What about government? Why should the process by which the democratic part of the election of our republican form of government be subject to any less oversight and bureaucracy than the financial industry?
It should not be news that the government is finally getting around to doing what it has demanded of industry via burdensome regulation for years or even decades... It is hypocritical and -- for a supposedly "free market" economy like that of the U.S. -- economically bass-ackwards to have such a situation as this.
But before we even get there, basic economics would have that software is just not a market which lends itself to natural monopoly. Think infrastructure and startup cost:
The cost of a freely-downloadable compiler from Microsoft or GNU, for Windows or *nix, respectively?
The cost of a new, off-the-shelf desktop box is now down around $200, last I checked. Even a high school kid can afford those startup costs!
The software industry has one of the lowest startup costs of any I can think of; that's one of the things that attracted me to it (I can experiment in software, break things, etc. without costing me a dime, but the same is not true in the physical world of, say, mechanical engineering).
Now this is absurd, uncalled for, and a total cheap shot. It's obvious you know nothing about anarchism, or you'd realize that the definition of anarchism is irrelevant to violence.
Anarchism != violence, you are correct. One does not *necessarily* cause the other.
But in every instance of anarchism I'm aware of, violence has been a part of that instance. That creates an awfully-strong correlation factor.
It may have been a bit of a cheap shot, but given the then-parent's promotion of an-cap philosophy in their sig, and given the post's tendency towards that philosophy, it really wasn't much of a stretch.
Anarchism simply means the lack of a "right" to initiate force as a means to an end (i.e. government): that "right" is voluntarily banned from society.
True.
Are you really going to claim with a straight face that it is "impossible" for a group of human beings to live peacefully without some of them posessing the "right" to coercion over others?
There is no such natural right to coercion, that is true. The right of coercion is an artificial one.
But in order to impose a certain amount of order, a certain amount of coercion is necessary.
Consider, for example, the case of an infectious disease outbreak -- avian flu, to be timely. What do you do if such a disease starts spreading rapidly throughout a city? Let the disease run its course and kill thousands or millions, or quarantine those affected such that perhaps only a few hundred die?
Assuming we care about human life, the reasonable response, based on the simple cost-benefit analysis with the goal of minimizing deaths, is to quarantine those people, perhaps against their will -- as un-free a response as that is. But it is a case in which if that action is not undertaken, more people die.
It should be a strictly-limited procedure, of course, and the ability to implement such procedures should be dictated by the public, i.e. via a democracy or republic. But that is already the case in the U.S. and most developed nations around the world.
Another example is that of air pollution. Do we allow people to pollute as they please and wait for the lawsuits to show up at everybody's doorsteps demanding compensation for each given day's worth of inhaled smog? That is grossly economically-inefficient: one person mailing every other person on the roadway at their time of driving -- even assuming that one person could record and look up everybody they were driving near -- and iterating that person's experience over every other person in the city, is algorithmically-retarded; it is a many-to-many operation; an n^2 algorithm, in fact (if you have never studied computer science, then understand at least that n^2 algorithms are the worst-performing class of *common* algorithms there are). And, as a society, we certainly don't want our courts choked with such cases.
No, instead, we require catalytic converters on automobiles, and we require emissions checks.
The money that is "doled out", as you state, is actually loaned to non-Federal Reserve banks at the discount rate the Fed sets.
That's quite different from simply sliding money under the table...
Moreover, if the Fed pumps too much money into the economy, it creates inflation. Inflation devalues the value of the money that the Fed's supposed cronies have saved/invested. It puts jitters into people old enough to remember (or educated enough to have learned about) periods of high inflation, e.g. the late 1970s/early 1980s in the U.S..
Likewise, it tends to be the case that as the Fed's interest rates rise, bond prices fall and their yields rise (although, this hasn't been the case recently, hence, Alan Greenspan's "conundrum"). Savings account interest too, for instance, rises with Fed. interest rate hikes.
The major flaw of the Fed is that it relies on people -- fallible, corruptible, potentially-incompetent human beings -- to decide, basically, what the U.S. rate of inflation will be and, via foreign trade, change the forces of international trade quite significantly...
Natural monopolies can't exist without government backing them up. The usual culprits creating monopolies are licensing, regulations, specific mandates and safety requirements.
Microsoft is a natural monopoly. It got there without the "ususal culprits" you describe.
By economic definition of a "monopoly" -- which typically refers to a single producer controlling at least 75% of a given market -- and in the desktop OS market, MSFT is still a monopoly.
How does MSFT exist -- currently, as you and I write this, no less -- as a natural monopoly, in absence of government intervention? Indeed, it exists *in spite* of attempted government intervention (the DOJ lawsuit from a few years ago). A fair argument can be made (and I've done so in the past) that competition like Linux has entered the market and will destroy MSFT's stranglehold on the desktop OS market. I think that's likely in our lifetimes, despite the failed predictions of "this is the year of Linux on the desktop" we used to see on Slashdot until a couple years ago; only, I doubt it'll happen within at least the next 10 years.
Or try the diamond-mining company DeBeers (for which I think a better case for your argument of govn't protections can be made). They are currently the *world's* monopoly supplier of diamonds.
Or -- since monopoly depends on a market's scope, and since markets can change in size, the question of monopoly therefore becomes a question which may be changed solely in its scale (Murray Rothbard smartly did the same thing to illustrate the economy-wide positive effects of free trade, after all) -- how about the much smaller-scale hypothetical of the person on the only raft next to a sinking ship? In that case, the person clearly has a monopoly on the market for floating vessels with which individuals may save themselves drowning aboard a sinking ship. Such an event can occur out in the open seas -- as far away from government intervention as you'd like. It is a clear case in which government is irrelevant, yet, a natural monopoly still exists -- thus illustrating the flaw in your logic.
Such is the problem with ideological political-economy: to every ideological rule, there is a real-world exception. Life, insofar as we understand it presently, is not like software -- a single rule or set of rules does not always apply correctly (just look at govn't policies as a routine example of the failure of such simplistic thinking). There are always cases we haven't considered or accounted-for.
That isn't to say that govn't isn't responsible for many of the monopolies that have existed or continue to exist -- cable and telephone companies in the U.S. are perfect examples of that fact. The railroads of the late 1800s were another. The practice of law and medicine today are industries each gated by a single, and thus by definition, monopolistic, professional licensure organization (the ABA and AMA, respectively). Likewise, various unions gate entry into their professions, creating monopolistic suppliers of blue-collar labor. And so forth. It is beyond absurd based on history to believe that govn't is the solution to more than a small handful of problems (and in particular, preventing physical violence between two people in a fair manner - unless it's the govn't performing the violence, e.g. in the Rodney King case. Then you have the same problem as if the violence came from a private security firm in a theoretical an-cap society.).
But it is equally-ridiculous to claim -- as promoters of "anarcho-capitalism" (which is really anarchism after drawing the system out over any significant time scale, because the "capitalism" part becomes moot once society breaks down into violence - just look at what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit, for example: lots of anarchy and not a lot of capitalism, unless looting can be construed as capitalism now... Indeed, Adam Smith's version of "capitalism" in The Wealth of Nations called for
As a pseudo-economist -- I did get a minor degree in the subject -- and ardent defender of competitive capitalism (much-hated here on Slashdot, where long-since debunked and disproven socialist beliefs generally reign supreme), I will caution you to note that there is more to Microsoft's case of supply and demand than you're alluding to. There is certainly "standard economics" involved, but so long as there are limited resources in the world, this could be said of everything people do in life (even relating to the usually emotionally-analyzed situation of dating!).
You are right about the standard workings of supply/demand. Assuming a perfectly-competitive market where each firm must compete to maximize its profits, they will supply as much product at as low a price as possible as meets demand. The more competitors there are, the more competition exists to drive this theory of "perfect competition" towards its theoretical ideal.
But the theory of "perfect competition" cannot ever be fully-reached in reality; it is a continuously-variable limit (learn about these in calculus), with no discrete value ultimately reachable.
So it is with the game console world: there is no such severe competition in the console market, and (having paid attention to the console world since the 8-bit NES days as a kid) there never has been. Did you learn of "oligopoly" in your macro class? That is the case of only a small number of firms -- generally considered to be around 3-5 -- competing for marketshare.
This is, and has always been (at least since 1985), the characterization of the living room console gaming market. You currently have 3 console suppliers: Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo - that's it. And Nintendo has been such a relatively-small player that the market is, in practice, almost a Sony/Microsoft duopoly.
Because of this fact, and because Sony is planning to release their PS3 later than Microsoft will release their 360, Microsoft will have time between the two releases to exist as a monopoly supplier of a member of the next generation of game console that every Dick, Tom, Harry, and little Johnny will want to own and play.
Microsoft -- certainly no stranger to monopoly power -- is going to milk this situation by *artificially* limiting the supply of 360s. From your intro econ. classes, you undoubtedly know what happens when demand is constant as supply decreases -- the price of the product offered increases.
But raising the price is not Microsoft's intent. Their goal is more to "create buzz" for their console so as to sell more units at some later date when they decide to offer more units for sale. "Buzz", of course, translates into demand.
So rather than assuming the demand stays constant, what they're really doing is shifting the demand curve upwards by artificially shifting the supply curve downwards (i.e., they limit supply without relation to their actual limits on their ability to produce) . They are estimating a certain price point at which the reduced supply and the increased demand are still in equilibrium, so as not to piss off consumers with an increased price. Try it yourself: Draw a standard supply/demand graph; then draw the 2 lines shifted in the directions I specified; then draw a horizontal line from some price point on the left-hand side of the graph, and see where it intersects the shifted supply/demand lines.
What, exactly, are the econometric models Microsoft is using is anybody's guess, but they are no doubt some of the company's best-kept secrets, and vastly more-complex than any undergraduate economics degree could prepare one for (a stats or math undergrad, maybe)... Microsoft certainly has the money and incentive to hire a few good, graduate-degreed economists to come up with such estimates.
Is it a dishonest trick by Microsoft? If, by "honesty" we mean that we expect Microsoft to behave in a manner consistent with a
Taxing peoples' income twice clearly restricts interstate commerce. It is an incentive to live in the state in which business is conducted, rather than conducting business remotely; an outdated practice for our time.
This seems like something the ICC should take up, and as an interstate case, it's necessarily a federal case. Where's the reasoning for the USSC's refusal to hear the case? This is right up their alley...
Get a Citibank Dividend Platinum Select, pay off the balance every month, and after a few months (depending on the credit limit and the charges run through them), receive a $50 rebate check that can be then used to buy other stuff on the same card (true, it's to the 1% rebate tune of a whopping $0.50, or $2.50 at 5% if in a grocery store or gas station, but it's still better than nothing).:-)
Considering my quote was of the NSA's guiding principles (efficiency, security), the project derives itself from the things I quoted.
I then proceeded to ridicule those guiding principles. How is that unrelated to the project? And in turn, since the point of this article was relating to that project, how was my post "missing the point"?
Also, look up the word "semantics" sometime. Semantics is the linguistic study meaning of language, but my post has nothing to do with meaning; the meaning of the NSA's principles here are pretty clear...
My post rants not about syntax or semantics, but about the value of making overarching, broad statements like the one I quoted to begin with. Such statements might useful as a kickoff to a project, but then again, as I pointed-out, they are implicit in pretty much everything we do now. So I ask again: why do we pay people to make such statements?
And the answer that you gave -- that of beating the message into peoples' minds -- is probably as good an answer as I'll find.:)
I should've more-accurately said that our *rhetoric* is single-mindedly about security, even if our actual *practice* is single-minded fear.:-/ (guards in airports with automatic M16's will do absolutely nothing to stop any terrorist who manages to get on a plane)
NSA's work to enhance the security of software is motivated by one simple consideration: use our resources as efficiently as possible to give NSA's customers the best possible security options in the most widely employed products."
No fucking shit. Suppose somebody said "let's use our resources INEFFICIENTLY! And given our title of NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, let's NOT PROMOTE THE BEST SECURITY OPTIONS!" Would anybody really jump up and say "that's a *brilliant* idea!"?
Hell no.
Look, to anybody with any common sense at all, it's implicit in any organization that efficiency is important. But so is security. So is safety. So is customer satisfaction. So is employee satisfaction. So is profit (if a private for-profit org).
Is it *really* especially insightful to say "we should be efficient!" anymore? Or, now that 9/11 has warped our psyche to care singlemindedly about security (almost invariably at the expense of liberty), that another top priority is security? Not to anybody with a brain.
Why do we pay people to make such broad, fucking-obvious statements again? To remind us of what we already have known since we were teenagers?
Oh yes, I swear here and ruthlessly criticize somebody for making statements that have coincided with the goal of economy (implicitly or explicitly) for the last 230 years. Mod me troll now.
It's worth considering that with numbers like those, the data is almost-certainly skewed.
After all, people/organizations concerned with privacy issues will link to places where complaints can be filed. And those people have a desire to stop the privacy threat, hence, in their minds, there is an incentive to comment negatively.
But people who don't mind the privacy threat don't feel as much as though there's a reason to comment; hence little incentive to post a comment.
And so, you get articles on/., EFF.org, etc. where the poster/organization says "click here to complain!", whereas on sites just reporting the story, not taking a strong opinionated stance on it, there may be no such link.
I would posit that most people don't care enough about privacy to care about RFID in passports. Frankly, I'm considered a borderline-paranoid "privacy nut" by my friends - I don't sign electronic signature pads when I buy on credit (ask for a paper receipt), I opt-out of most junk-mail campaigns, I refuse my personal info at stores when they ask for it, and I'm fully-convinced Echelon exists and is currently in-use. And yes, I think the government goes way too far in invading our privacy most of the time, including in the USA PATRIOT Act.
Yet, I really don't have a problem with *most* uses of RFID I've seen so far. (inventory management at Wal-Mart? Great idea!) Tracking people via implantable chips, whether by government or private business, is the point at which I start crying foul, especially if it is to be mandatory. Nobody should be forced to be chipped, ever, for any reason; freedom is *always* more important than security, IMO.
Petzold literally "wrote the book" on Windows programming. While not discussing programming per se, using the Visual Studio IDE is increasingly-useful in Windows development. Regarding that aspect of Windows programming, he writes:
Even if Visual Studio generated immaculate code, there would still be a problem. As Visual Studio is generating code, it is also erecting walls between that code and the programmer. Visual Studio is implying that this is the only way you can write a modern Windows or web program because there are certain aspects of modern programming that only it knows about. And Visual Studio adds to this impression by including boilerplate code that contains stuff that has never really been adequately discussed in the tutorials or documentation that Microsoft provides.
It becomes imperative to me, as a teacher of Windows Forms programming and Avalon programming, to deliberately go in the opposite direction. I feel I need to demystify what Visual Studio is doing and demonstrate how you can develop these applications by writing your own code, and even, if you want, compiling this code on the command line totally outside of Visual Studio.
In my Windows Forms books, I tell the reader not to choose Windows Application when starting a new Windows Forms project, but to choose the Empty Project option instead. The Empty Project doesn't create anything except a project file. All references and all code has to be explicitly added.
When MSFT's best Windows development author starts complaining about MSFT's development environment, MSFT had better wake up and take notice...
The verb "to coin" is there for a reason. It means to make coins - pieces of metal representing value. It doesn't say "to print". The government has no authority to print paper bills and pass it off as currency.
You're making a argument regarding the medium of transfer of value. This argument is incredibly-weak in light of the purpose of the existence of money in the first place; namely, to be a more-efficient *representation* -- a pointer to a value, if you prefer Comp Sci terms -- of a physical quantity of value.
Without the element of efficient transport of a represented value via some medium -- credit card, paper currency, coins, shells, big-ass rocks (no, really, people used to use rocks that were as big as they were for currency!) -- the very concept of "money" becomes pointless. Why not go back to a barter system, if money is worthless? Quite simply, it's because the argument of greater efficiency of money stands on its own. Who wants to have to deal in trading pigs or cows when buying a loaf of bread or a new DVD?
Even assuming we stick with coins (not paper) as the only Constitutionally-valid form of currency the government can create, riddle me this:
What would happen if we replaced all our paper currency with coins of the same value?
Oh, wait, the Fed would stamp more metal coins as it needs, instead of paper. So, what difference does the medium -- of coins vs. paper -- make?
None at all, except that you are substituting a heavy, more-expensive-to-produce medium -- coins -- for a lighter, less-durable-but-much-cheaper medium -- paper.
The medium of currency is absolutely, positively, 100% irrelevant to the argument of whether we should base that currency on a gold standard or a fiat standard of "the public's labors" (as we do now).
In fact, I said as much in my previous post (in the very first paragraph: "#1) The idea of a gold standard is *NOT* that you would not have a paper money. A gold standard does not mean that we go back to a system of trading, literally, pieces of gold (taken to its logical extreme, we could go back to a system of barter, trading cattle for pigs and turkeys and such).").
The idea that we should go back to less-efficient forms of currency on the basis of government produceability is utterly silly and economically-inefficient. I would make such arguments from other perspectives, privacy/anonymity being chief among them (because sentimental value is irrelevant when the vast majority of the population doesn't care for one's own sentiments).
The only thing that's keeping the economy aloft is faith in the credit of the United States. If that faith should ever falter, we'd be spiraling down into hyperinflation so fast it would make your head spin.
Quite true. Much of our currency is held in bonds to prop up our national debt (which is increased with every year's budget deficit). Were the U.S. govn't to fail to pay for one of those bonds -- something it has never happened in U.S. history (hence, investment in U.S. government bonds is seen by investors as the safest investment in the world) --
The happens, sooner or later, to every country that adopts a fiat currency.
Over time, the chances that any single country will experience hyperinflation due to a fiat currency *do* rise. This is because over time, the behavior of those people who control the money supply (the Fed) will vary (hence the current hand-wringing over who President Bush will pick to replace Alan Greenspan, who has been probably the best chairman anybody can hope for under a fiat currency regime), and eventually, one of the outer points in the variances will be an extreme case. That extrema causes hyperinflation through poor decisionmaking.
Hence, such risks are mitigated as the number of people who decide the fate of the currency increases. But such probabilities, so long as we are dealing with the
The complaint thus-far seems to be "the U.S. runs it, and they have too much control. Forget that they created the Internet - seize it from them! Power to the people!"
It's like the rest of the world are a swarm of Marxist morons trying to overthrow their "evil capitalist oppressors."
What, exactly are the technical -- not politically-ideological, but *TECHNICAL* -- problems that has the U.S. has failed to solve? And why, exactly, would a massively-bureaucratic and corrupt attempt at a single world government body do any better job?
#1) The idea of a gold standard is *NOT* that you would not have a paper money. A gold standard does not mean that we go back to a system of trading, literally, pieces of gold (taken to its logical extreme, we could go back to a system of barter, trading cattle for pigs and turkeys and such).
Paper money and the gold standard have both nothing and everything to do with each other. On one hand, a gold standard would be the underlying metal against which the value of the paper money is determined; on the other hand, paper money only represents a quantity of gold, but is used to trade for other, non-gold goods/services.
Prior to the U.S. coming off the gold standard under FDR in the early 1930s, we had paper money that was tied in value to a certain amount of gold. $1 was worth X ounces of gold -- gold, I might add, which was held by the U.S. Federal government.
Money thus represented a physical quantity of a universally-desired (irrational though it may be) commodity. The quantity of money was tied to the supply of gold at some particular rate.
Today, under our fiat system of currency, money does not represent goods (e.g. gold), but labor -- each dollar bill represents a guarantee by the U.S. government to pay the owner of the dollar bill in a product of some form. But that product must be produced, ultimately, by the fruits of at least a small amount of labor (if nothing else, the process of developing the idea of the product). Money today, thus, represents the labors of Americans. Increase the money supply by printing more money and the value of American labor will be reduced by it (more money supply at a constant level of labor means there's more cash to go around, and thus, inflation); the reverse is also true.
The difference is that under the gold standard, you could literally go to the Federal govn't and demand a quantity of gold in exchange for your money. Under our current fiat standard, you certainly can't go to the government and demand a quantity of labor from other people in exchange, even though that is (ultimately) what it represents...
FDR took away the ability to demand gold in exchange for coins and bills, and he took all Americans' gold too while he was at it, because he was a socialist pinko who believed that doing so would save the U.S. from economic disaster (clearly it didn't). The govn't paid people for this taking, at a rate of $20.67/oz, the official price of gold for 97 years to that point. After taking everybody's gold (and silver), FDR promptly had gold revalued up to $35/oz.
Hell of a way to make money for the govn't -- just take peoples' gold and price it at whatever level is convenient, regardless of real-world market conditions...
I might add that this is part of the folly of a gold standard. Even if we revert back to one, what, exactly, guarantees that the govn't won't come along and take us off the gold standard again? Or define gold to be worth whatever it wants it to be worth? And since the govn't can define the value of money, Constitutionally (see #2), how is that ultimately any different from the Federal Reserve defining the value of money by controlling the supply of fiat money?
The fact of the matter is that the government will take what it wants, when it wants, and the only prevention against this fact is an armed, angry, government-restricting people. Of course, we don't have such a populace anymore; we have an "entitlement population"...
#2) The idea that paper money is somehow "unconstitutional."
Just because a quantity of currency is tied to a quantity of gold does not mean the pieces of currency could not have RFID chips embedded in them. They are not logically-connected problems in any way.
You could have a $460 bill (that's about what gold is going for, IIRC), with an RFID chip embedded in the paper it's printed on. And that $460 bill could be exchanged with the Federal Reserve (or whichever government arm (e.g. the Treasury) would control access to the gold and exchange a portion of that gold for an appropriate payment) for 1oz. of gold.
But the RFID chip would still be in the paper...
The point about government control over inflation is true though.
As to the merits of the gold standard, well, the God of Monetary Economics Himself, Milton Friedman, disagrees with the gold bugs... (personally, I see merits to both sides of the gold coin)
Eclipse and its parent project, IBM's WebSphere, are mighty big "exceptions" in the Java world.
I agree though that C# is no better. VMs will always eat RAM and CPU time, and the vast majority of the time, they do so unnecessarily... (why run an app in a VM --.NET or Java -- if your target end-user environment consists solely of your standard, homogenous x86/Win32 systems? Why not compile a native binary instead, which will run faster and be leaner in RAM and on disk (and thus, faster to distribute over a network)?)
I do find it a bit humorous that you refer to your G5 as "older". The current top-of-the-line Apple box CPU generation is "old"? Hardly.
Not long ago, I graduated from university with a CS degree and work as a developer in a Fortune 50 firm you have undoubtedly heard of (it is perhaps *the* best-respected business in its industry). In the short time I've been there, here are some of the things I've learned about corporate bureaucracy:
* Be honest, but not necessarily open and forthcoming, depending on the type of person and relationship to you. As Abe Lincoln once said, "you can fool some people all of the time, or you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Sooner or later, inconsistencies in your story will develop, people will catch on, and you'll have trust issues because of it.
That said, an earlier post made a good comment about technical vs. business people. I work with technical people all day, and they do appreciate the facts, unfiltered. Business people, in my limited experience, want to live in la-la land thinking that everything is just fine in the business. Usually, they also pay your salary, and if you want them to continue doing so, you'd best continue telling them that which lets them live in la-la land.
* A good manager handles your non-technical needs. You should not have to obtain software; that is your manager's job upon your request and his/her approval. You should not have to make the case for security approvals; that is their job upon your statement of need to your manager. You should not have to deal with business/financial people; that is your manager's job (or the job of *his* manager).
* Follow procedure. No matter how much bureaucracy sucks, going outside the bounds of bureaucracy is typically a fireable offense. Do as the company policy states, and when the money-men ask you why you're so inefficient, you can justify every one of your actions with policy they had set at the time of your action.
* Keep a factual, unbiased logbook/audit trail of bureaucracy. In the event that somebody with an incentive to reduce bureaucracy comes along, they may appreciate examples of bureaucracy and ideas for its reduction. Plus, it helps you to keep your facts straight when remembering how you followed procedure.
* The bureaucracy in your company is still not as bad as it is in your healthcare company.
* Most corporate bureaucracy is the result of government regulation. Sarbanes-Oxeley in particular has bureaucratized the financial sector like you would not believe! So let's not be *too* quick to blame it entirely on the business.
* Keep the ball in everybody else's court. Always make sure that you've done your due-diligence in responding to peoples' emails and that nobody is waiting on your decisions. That way, you can go into weekly status-update meetings and blame "the other guy" for being slow and wasteful, not you.
* Never underestimate the ability of the bureaucracy to surveill you; be paranoid. Always assume you have no privacy, assume that everything you say will be remembered or caught on a hidden microphone, and everything you write will be stored in offsite backups forever, and that all of this will be audited someday, either by the company or by the government. Always assume the boss knows exactly when you clock-in and clock-out. Assume that the toilets have sensors in the pipes to detect a variety of performance-reducing drugs, e.g. alcohol, marijuana, etc., and that there are tiny spy cameras in the bathrooms monitoring you. Always assume the company has an NSA-grade data-mining system solely for the purpose of combing the Internet looking for information written about the company -- proprietary information leaked by an insider, negative commentary, legally-damaging information, etc..
* Perceptions matter. See the clocking in/out issue previously: it doesn't matter that you're on salary; being salaried has absolutely *nothing* to do with setting your own hours, contrary to business idealists' belief and its original intent. Being salaried has everything to do with ensuring that t
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True -- and they do so because of the black market that exists to trade drugs.
Legalize currently-illegal drugs, and the black market -- and the massive profits which flow through it back to the druglords in the nations you mentioned (particularly Columbia) -- disappears, due to lack of what is currently an extraordinary incentive to produce and sell drugs... (It's not like we don't have the example of the Prohibition and the rise of Al Capone in Chicago as an historical example of what happens when drugs are made illegal.)
<sarcasm>
Yes, because drug dealers are the worst of society's ills. Focus on the drug dealers instead of rapists, murderers, wife-beaters, and terrorists!
</sarcasm>
In any decently-sized business in the financial services industry, it is generally corporate standard to have audit trails for any non-trivial work that is done.
For example, software that is more than 50-100 LOC and not written as a "one-off" app generally must be documented with a project proposal, requirements, design, and testing docs, and so forth. It depends on the size, scope, business need, computing environment impact, etc. of the app, but other documents -- such as a cost/benefit analysis, architectural board approval doc, a traceability matrix, etc. -- may be required too.
What about government? Why should the process by which the democratic part of the election of our republican form of government be subject to any less oversight and bureaucracy than the financial industry?
It should not be news that the government is finally getting around to doing what it has demanded of industry via burdensome regulation for years or even decades... It is hypocritical and -- for a supposedly "free market" economy like that of the U.S. -- economically bass-ackwards to have such a situation as this.
The cost of a freely-downloadable compiler from Microsoft or GNU, for Windows or *nix, respectively?
The cost of a new, off-the-shelf desktop box is now down around $200, last I checked. Even a high school kid can afford those startup costs!
The software industry has one of the lowest startup costs of any I can think of; that's one of the things that attracted me to it (I can experiment in software, break things, etc. without costing me a dime, but the same is not true in the physical world of, say, mechanical engineering).
Anarchism != violence, you are correct. One does not *necessarily* cause the other.
But in every instance of anarchism I'm aware of, violence has been a part of that instance. That creates an awfully-strong correlation factor.
It may have been a bit of a cheap shot, but given the then-parent's promotion of an-cap philosophy in their sig, and given the post's tendency towards that philosophy, it really wasn't much of a stretch.
True.
There is no such natural right to coercion, that is true. The right of coercion is an artificial one.
But in order to impose a certain amount of order, a certain amount of coercion is necessary.
Consider, for example, the case of an infectious disease outbreak -- avian flu, to be timely. What do you do if such a disease starts spreading rapidly throughout a city? Let the disease run its course and kill thousands or millions, or quarantine those affected such that perhaps only a few hundred die?
Assuming we care about human life, the reasonable response, based on the simple cost-benefit analysis with the goal of minimizing deaths, is to quarantine those people, perhaps against their will -- as un-free a response as that is. But it is a case in which if that action is not undertaken, more people die.
It should be a strictly-limited procedure, of course, and the ability to implement such procedures should be dictated by the public, i.e. via a democracy or republic. But that is already the case in the U.S. and most developed nations around the world.
Another example is that of air pollution. Do we allow people to pollute as they please and wait for the lawsuits to show up at everybody's doorsteps demanding compensation for each given day's worth of inhaled smog? That is grossly economically-inefficient: one person mailing every other person on the roadway at their time of driving -- even assuming that one person could record and look up everybody they were driving near -- and iterating that person's experience over every other person in the city, is algorithmically-retarded; it is a many-to-many operation; an n^2 algorithm, in fact (if you have never studied computer science, then understand at least that n^2 algorithms are the worst-performing class of *common* algorithms there are). And, as a society, we certainly don't want our courts choked with such cases.
No, instead, we require catalytic converters on automobiles, and we require emissions checks.
"But that's force!" you cry... Yes, it is. Bu
Were it only that simple.
The money that is "doled out", as you state, is actually loaned to non-Federal Reserve banks at the discount rate the Fed sets.
That's quite different from simply sliding money under the table...
Moreover, if the Fed pumps too much money into the economy, it creates inflation. Inflation devalues the value of the money that the Fed's supposed cronies have saved/invested. It puts jitters into people old enough to remember (or educated enough to have learned about) periods of high inflation, e.g. the late 1970s/early 1980s in the U.S..
Likewise, it tends to be the case that as the Fed's interest rates rise, bond prices fall and their yields rise (although, this hasn't been the case recently, hence, Alan Greenspan's "conundrum"). Savings account interest too, for instance, rises with Fed. interest rate hikes.
The major flaw of the Fed is that it relies on people -- fallible, corruptible, potentially-incompetent human beings -- to decide, basically, what the U.S. rate of inflation will be and, via foreign trade, change the forces of international trade quite significantly...
Microsoft is a natural monopoly. It got there without the "ususal culprits" you describe.
By economic definition of a "monopoly" -- which typically refers to a single producer controlling at least 75% of a given market -- and in the desktop OS market, MSFT is still a monopoly.
How does MSFT exist -- currently, as you and I write this, no less -- as a natural monopoly, in absence of government intervention? Indeed, it exists *in spite* of attempted government intervention (the DOJ lawsuit from a few years ago). A fair argument can be made (and I've done so in the past) that competition like Linux has entered the market and will destroy MSFT's stranglehold on the desktop OS market. I think that's likely in our lifetimes, despite the failed predictions of "this is the year of Linux on the desktop" we used to see on Slashdot until a couple years ago; only, I doubt it'll happen within at least the next 10 years.
Or try the diamond-mining company DeBeers (for which I think a better case for your argument of govn't protections can be made). They are currently the *world's* monopoly supplier of diamonds.
Or -- since monopoly depends on a market's scope, and since markets can change in size, the question of monopoly therefore becomes a question which may be changed solely in its scale (Murray Rothbard smartly did the same thing to illustrate the economy-wide positive effects of free trade, after all) -- how about the much smaller-scale hypothetical of the person on the only raft next to a sinking ship? In that case, the person clearly has a monopoly on the market for floating vessels with which individuals may save themselves drowning aboard a sinking ship. Such an event can occur out in the open seas -- as far away from government intervention as you'd like. It is a clear case in which government is irrelevant, yet, a natural monopoly still exists -- thus illustrating the flaw in your logic.
Such is the problem with ideological political-economy: to every ideological rule, there is a real-world exception. Life, insofar as we understand it presently, is not like software -- a single rule or set of rules does not always apply correctly (just look at govn't policies as a routine example of the failure of such simplistic thinking). There are always cases we haven't considered or accounted-for.
That isn't to say that govn't isn't responsible for many of the monopolies that have existed or continue to exist -- cable and telephone companies in the U.S. are perfect examples of that fact. The railroads of the late 1800s were another. The practice of law and medicine today are industries each gated by a single, and thus by definition, monopolistic, professional licensure organization (the ABA and AMA, respectively). Likewise, various unions gate entry into their professions, creating monopolistic suppliers of blue-collar labor. And so forth. It is beyond absurd based on history to believe that govn't is the solution to more than a small handful of problems (and in particular, preventing physical violence between two people in a fair manner - unless it's the govn't performing the violence, e.g. in the Rodney King case. Then you have the same problem as if the violence came from a private security firm in a theoretical an-cap society.).
But it is equally-ridiculous to claim -- as promoters of "anarcho-capitalism" (which is really anarchism after drawing the system out over any significant time scale, because the "capitalism" part becomes moot once society breaks down into violence - just look at what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit, for example: lots of anarchy and not a lot of capitalism, unless looting can be construed as capitalism now... Indeed, Adam Smith's version of "capitalism" in The Wealth of Nations called for
So you're good with numbers in your head... now try that on a PC! :P
As a pseudo-economist -- I did get a minor degree in the subject -- and ardent defender of competitive capitalism (much-hated here on Slashdot, where long-since debunked and disproven socialist beliefs generally reign supreme), I will caution you to note that there is more to Microsoft's case of supply and demand than you're alluding to. There is certainly "standard economics" involved, but so long as there are limited resources in the world, this could be said of everything people do in life (even relating to the usually emotionally-analyzed situation of dating!).
You are right about the standard workings of supply/demand. Assuming a perfectly-competitive market where each firm must compete to maximize its profits, they will supply as much product at as low a price as possible as meets demand. The more competitors there are, the more competition exists to drive this theory of "perfect competition" towards its theoretical ideal.
But the theory of "perfect competition" cannot ever be fully-reached in reality; it is a continuously-variable limit (learn about these in calculus), with no discrete value ultimately reachable.
So it is with the game console world: there is no such severe competition in the console market, and (having paid attention to the console world since the 8-bit NES days as a kid) there never has been. Did you learn of "oligopoly" in your macro class? That is the case of only a small number of firms -- generally considered to be around 3-5 -- competing for marketshare.
This is, and has always been (at least since 1985), the characterization of the living room console gaming market. You currently have 3 console suppliers: Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo - that's it. And Nintendo has been such a relatively-small player that the market is, in practice, almost a Sony/Microsoft duopoly.
Because of this fact, and because Sony is planning to release their PS3 later than Microsoft will release their 360, Microsoft will have time between the two releases to exist as a monopoly supplier of a member of the next generation of game console that every Dick, Tom, Harry, and little Johnny will want to own and play.
Microsoft -- certainly no stranger to monopoly power -- is going to milk this situation by *artificially* limiting the supply of 360s. From your intro econ. classes, you undoubtedly know what happens when demand is constant as supply decreases -- the price of the product offered increases.
But raising the price is not Microsoft's intent. Their goal is more to "create buzz" for their console so as to sell more units at some later date when they decide to offer more units for sale. "Buzz", of course, translates into demand.
So rather than assuming the demand stays constant, what they're really doing is shifting the demand curve upwards by artificially shifting the supply curve downwards (i.e., they limit supply without relation to their actual limits on their ability to produce) . They are estimating a certain price point at which the reduced supply and the increased demand are still in equilibrium, so as not to piss off consumers with an increased price. Try it yourself: Draw a standard supply/demand graph; then draw the 2 lines shifted in the directions I specified; then draw a horizontal line from some price point on the left-hand side of the graph, and see where it intersects the shifted supply/demand lines.
What, exactly, are the econometric models Microsoft is using is anybody's guess, but they are no doubt some of the company's best-kept secrets, and vastly more-complex than any undergraduate economics degree could prepare one for (a stats or math undergrad, maybe)... Microsoft certainly has the money and incentive to hire a few good, graduate-degreed economists to come up with such estimates.
Is it a dishonest trick by Microsoft? If, by "honesty" we mean that we expect Microsoft to behave in a manner consistent with a
"We've got the supply, and we can demand whatever the hell we want!"
Oh for the PS3 to be released within a week of the 360...
No, only Republicans have big-money sponsors! Duh...
Who's that George Soros guy again?
Taxing peoples' income twice clearly restricts interstate commerce. It is an incentive to live in the state in which business is conducted, rather than conducting business remotely; an outdated practice for our time.
Because it is a restriction, and ultimately serves the same function as a tariff -- and since tariffs between states are illegal, by Constitutional definition (Sec. 9, Clause 5) -- it would seem to me that this double-taxation ought to be illegal too. The NY Appeals court saw things differently.
This seems like something the ICC should take up, and as an interstate case, it's necessarily a federal case. Where's the reasoning for the USSC's refusal to hear the case? This is right up their alley...
I do the exact same thing.
:-)
Get a Citibank Dividend Platinum Select, pay off the balance every month, and after a few months (depending on the credit limit and the charges run through them), receive a $50 rebate check that can be then used to buy other stuff on the same card (true, it's to the 1% rebate tune of a whopping $0.50, or $2.50 at 5% if in a grocery store or gas station, but it's still better than nothing).
Considering my quote was of the NSA's guiding principles (efficiency, security), the project derives itself from the things I quoted.
I then proceeded to ridicule those guiding principles. How is that unrelated to the project? And in turn, since the point of this article was relating to that project, how was my post "missing the point"?
Also, look up the word "semantics" sometime. Semantics is the linguistic study meaning of language, but my post has nothing to do with meaning; the meaning of the NSA's principles here are pretty clear...
My post rants not about syntax or semantics, but about the value of making overarching, broad statements like the one I quoted to begin with. Such statements might useful as a kickoff to a project, but then again, as I pointed-out, they are implicit in pretty much everything we do now. So I ask again: why do we pay people to make such statements?
And the answer that you gave -- that of beating the message into peoples' minds -- is probably as good an answer as I'll find.
Good distinction...
:-/ (guards in airports with automatic M16's will do absolutely nothing to stop any terrorist who manages to get on a plane)
I should've more-accurately said that our *rhetoric* is single-mindedly about security, even if our actual *practice* is single-minded fear.
No fucking shit. Suppose somebody said "let's use our resources INEFFICIENTLY! And given our title of NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, let's NOT PROMOTE THE BEST SECURITY OPTIONS!" Would anybody really jump up and say "that's a *brilliant* idea!"?
Hell no.
Look, to anybody with any common sense at all, it's implicit in any organization that efficiency is important. But so is security. So is safety. So is customer satisfaction. So is employee satisfaction. So is profit (if a private for-profit org).
Is it *really* especially insightful to say "we should be efficient!" anymore? Or, now that 9/11 has warped our psyche to care singlemindedly about security (almost invariably at the expense of liberty), that another top priority is security? Not to anybody with a brain.
Why do we pay people to make such broad, fucking-obvious statements again? To remind us of what we already have known since we were teenagers?
Oh yes, I swear here and ruthlessly criticize somebody for making statements that have coincided with the goal of economy (implicitly or explicitly) for the last 230 years. Mod me troll now.
It's worth considering that with numbers like those, the data is almost-certainly skewed.
/., EFF.org, etc. where the poster/organization says "click here to complain!", whereas on sites just reporting the story, not taking a strong opinionated stance on it, there may be no such link.
After all, people/organizations concerned with privacy issues will link to places where complaints can be filed. And those people have a desire to stop the privacy threat, hence, in their minds, there is an incentive to comment negatively.
But people who don't mind the privacy threat don't feel as much as though there's a reason to comment; hence little incentive to post a comment.
And so, you get articles on
I would posit that most people don't care enough about privacy to care about RFID in passports. Frankly, I'm considered a borderline-paranoid "privacy nut" by my friends - I don't sign electronic signature pads when I buy on credit (ask for a paper receipt), I opt-out of most junk-mail campaigns, I refuse my personal info at stores when they ask for it, and I'm fully-convinced Echelon exists and is currently in-use. And yes, I think the government goes way too far in invading our privacy most of the time, including in the USA PATRIOT Act.
Yet, I really don't have a problem with *most* uses of RFID I've seen so far. (inventory management at Wal-Mart? Great idea!) Tracking people via implantable chips, whether by government or private business, is the point at which I start crying foul, especially if it is to be mandatory. Nobody should be forced to be chipped, ever, for any reason; freedom is *always* more important than security, IMO.
When MSFT's best Windows development author starts complaining about MSFT's development environment, MSFT had better wake up and take notice...
You're making a argument regarding the medium of transfer of value. This argument is incredibly-weak in light of the purpose of the existence of money in the first place; namely, to be a more-efficient *representation* -- a pointer to a value, if you prefer Comp Sci terms -- of a physical quantity of value.
Without the element of efficient transport of a represented value via some medium -- credit card, paper currency, coins, shells, big-ass rocks (no, really, people used to use rocks that were as big as they were for currency!) -- the very concept of "money" becomes pointless. Why not go back to a barter system, if money is worthless? Quite simply, it's because the argument of greater efficiency of money stands on its own. Who wants to have to deal in trading pigs or cows when buying a loaf of bread or a new DVD?
Even assuming we stick with coins (not paper) as the only Constitutionally-valid form of currency the government can create, riddle me this:
What would happen if we replaced all our paper currency with coins of the same value?
Oh, wait, the Fed would stamp more metal coins as it needs, instead of paper. So, what difference does the medium -- of coins vs. paper -- make?
None at all, except that you are substituting a heavy, more-expensive-to-produce medium -- coins -- for a lighter, less-durable-but-much-cheaper medium -- paper.
The medium of currency is absolutely, positively, 100% irrelevant to the argument of whether we should base that currency on a gold standard or a fiat standard of "the public's labors" (as we do now).
In fact, I said as much in my previous post (in the very first paragraph: "#1) The idea of a gold standard is *NOT* that you would not have a paper money. A gold standard does not mean that we go back to a system of trading, literally, pieces of gold (taken to its logical extreme, we could go back to a system of barter, trading cattle for pigs and turkeys and such).").
The idea that we should go back to less-efficient forms of currency on the basis of government produceability is utterly silly and economically-inefficient. I would make such arguments from other perspectives, privacy/anonymity being chief among them (because sentimental value is irrelevant when the vast majority of the population doesn't care for one's own sentiments).
Quite true. Much of our currency is held in bonds to prop up our national debt (which is increased with every year's budget deficit). Were the U.S. govn't to fail to pay for one of those bonds -- something it has never happened in U.S. history (hence, investment in U.S. government bonds is seen by investors as the safest investment in the world) --
Over time, the chances that any single country will experience hyperinflation due to a fiat currency *do* rise. This is because over time, the behavior of those people who control the money supply (the Fed) will vary (hence the current hand-wringing over who President Bush will pick to replace Alan Greenspan, who has been probably the best chairman anybody can hope for under a fiat currency regime), and eventually, one of the outer points in the variances will be an extreme case. That extrema causes hyperinflation through poor decisionmaking.
Hence, such risks are mitigated as the number of people who decide the fate of the currency increases. But such probabilities, so long as we are dealing with the
Dammit... OK, you got me on that one. :P
I'm going to go back to preschool and learn to read now...
The complaint thus-far seems to be "the U.S. runs it, and they have too much control. Forget that they created the Internet - seize it from them! Power to the people!"
It's like the rest of the world are a swarm of Marxist morons trying to overthrow their "evil capitalist oppressors."
What, exactly are the technical -- not politically-ideological, but *TECHNICAL* -- problems that has the U.S. has failed to solve? And why, exactly, would a massively-bureaucratic and corrupt attempt at a single world government body do any better job?
Paper money and the gold standard have both nothing and everything to do with each other. On one hand, a gold standard would be the underlying metal against which the value of the paper money is determined; on the other hand, paper money only represents a quantity of gold, but is used to trade for other, non-gold goods/services.
Prior to the U.S. coming off the gold standard under FDR in the early 1930s, we had paper money that was tied in value to a certain amount of gold. $1 was worth X ounces of gold -- gold, I might add, which was held by the U.S. Federal government.
Money thus represented a physical quantity of a universally-desired (irrational though it may be) commodity. The quantity of money was tied to the supply of gold at some particular rate.
Today, under our fiat system of currency, money does not represent goods (e.g. gold), but labor -- each dollar bill represents a guarantee by the U.S. government to pay the owner of the dollar bill in a product of some form. But that product must be produced, ultimately, by the fruits of at least a small amount of labor (if nothing else, the process of developing the idea of the product). Money today, thus, represents the labors of Americans. Increase the money supply by printing more money and the value of American labor will be reduced by it (more money supply at a constant level of labor means there's more cash to go around, and thus, inflation); the reverse is also true.
The difference is that under the gold standard, you could literally go to the Federal govn't and demand a quantity of gold in exchange for your money. Under our current fiat standard, you certainly can't go to the government and demand a quantity of labor from other people in exchange, even though that is (ultimately) what it represents...
FDR took away the ability to demand gold in exchange for coins and bills, and he took all Americans' gold too while he was at it, because he was a socialist pinko who believed that doing so would save the U.S. from economic disaster (clearly it didn't). The govn't paid people for this taking, at a rate of $20.67/oz, the official price of gold for 97 years to that point. After taking everybody's gold (and silver), FDR promptly had gold revalued up to $35/oz.
Hell of a way to make money for the govn't -- just take peoples' gold and price it at whatever level is convenient, regardless of real-world market conditions...
I might add that this is part of the folly of a gold standard. Even if we revert back to one, what, exactly, guarantees that the govn't won't come along and take us off the gold standard again? Or define gold to be worth whatever it wants it to be worth? And since the govn't can define the value of money, Constitutionally (see #2), how is that ultimately any different from the Federal Reserve defining the value of money by controlling the supply of fiat money?
The fact of the matter is that the government will take what it wants, when it wants, and the only prevention against this fact is an armed, angry, government-restricting people. Of course, we don't have such a populace anymore; we have an "entitlement population"...
#2) The idea that paper money is somehow "unconstitutional."
See the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 5:
Congress has the Constitutionally-defined power to control the money supply, period, and the power to determine the value of our money (i.e. to
True.
No, you said "older". Go re-read:
(emphasis mine)
What a language indeed!
What? That's ridiculous.
Just because a quantity of currency is tied to a quantity of gold does not mean the pieces of currency could not have RFID chips embedded in them. They are not logically-connected problems in any way.
You could have a $460 bill (that's about what gold is going for, IIRC), with an RFID chip embedded in the paper it's printed on. And that $460 bill could be exchanged with the Federal Reserve (or whichever government arm (e.g. the Treasury) would control access to the gold and exchange a portion of that gold for an appropriate payment) for 1oz. of gold.
But the RFID chip would still be in the paper...
The point about government control over inflation is true though.
As to the merits of the gold standard, well, the God of Monetary Economics Himself, Milton Friedman, disagrees with the gold bugs... (personally, I see merits to both sides of the gold coin)
Eclipse and its parent project, IBM's WebSphere, are mighty big "exceptions" in the Java world.
.NET or Java -- if your target end-user environment consists solely of your standard, homogenous x86/Win32 systems? Why not compile a native binary instead, which will run faster and be leaner in RAM and on disk (and thus, faster to distribute over a network)?)
I agree though that C# is no better. VMs will always eat RAM and CPU time, and the vast majority of the time, they do so unnecessarily... (why run an app in a VM --
I do find it a bit humorous that you refer to your G5 as "older". The current top-of-the-line Apple box CPU generation is "old"? Hardly.
Not long ago, I graduated from university with a CS degree and work as a developer in a Fortune 50 firm you have undoubtedly heard of (it is perhaps *the* best-respected business in its industry). In the short time I've been there, here are some of the things I've learned about corporate bureaucracy:
* Be honest, but not necessarily open and forthcoming, depending on the type of person and relationship to you. As Abe Lincoln once said, "you can fool some people all of the time, or you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Sooner or later, inconsistencies in your story will develop, people will catch on, and you'll have trust issues because of it.
That said, an earlier post made a good comment about technical vs. business people. I work with technical people all day, and they do appreciate the facts, unfiltered. Business people, in my limited experience, want to live in la-la land thinking that everything is just fine in the business. Usually, they also pay your salary, and if you want them to continue doing so, you'd best continue telling them that which lets them live in la-la land.
* A good manager handles your non-technical needs. You should not have to obtain software; that is your manager's job upon your request and his/her approval. You should not have to make the case for security approvals; that is their job upon your statement of need to your manager. You should not have to deal with business/financial people; that is your manager's job (or the job of *his* manager).
* Follow procedure. No matter how much bureaucracy sucks, going outside the bounds of bureaucracy is typically a fireable offense. Do as the company policy states, and when the money-men ask you why you're so inefficient, you can justify every one of your actions with policy they had set at the time of your action.
* Keep a factual, unbiased logbook/audit trail of bureaucracy. In the event that somebody with an incentive to reduce bureaucracy comes along, they may appreciate examples of bureaucracy and ideas for its reduction. Plus, it helps you to keep your facts straight when remembering how you followed procedure.
* The bureaucracy in your company is still not as bad as it is in your healthcare company.
* Most corporate bureaucracy is the result of government regulation. Sarbanes-Oxeley in particular has bureaucratized the financial sector like you would not believe! So let's not be *too* quick to blame it entirely on the business.
* Keep the ball in everybody else's court. Always make sure that you've done your due-diligence in responding to peoples' emails and that nobody is waiting on your decisions. That way, you can go into weekly status-update meetings and blame "the other guy" for being slow and wasteful, not you.
* Never underestimate the ability of the bureaucracy to surveill you; be paranoid. Always assume you have no privacy, assume that everything you say will be remembered or caught on a hidden microphone, and everything you write will be stored in offsite backups forever, and that all of this will be audited someday, either by the company or by the government. Always assume the boss knows exactly when you clock-in and clock-out. Assume that the toilets have sensors in the pipes to detect a variety of performance-reducing drugs, e.g. alcohol, marijuana, etc., and that there are tiny spy cameras in the bathrooms monitoring you. Always assume the company has an NSA-grade data-mining system solely for the purpose of combing the Internet looking for information written about the company -- proprietary information leaked by an insider, negative commentary, legally-damaging information, etc..
* Perceptions matter. See the clocking in/out issue previously: it doesn't matter that you're on salary; being salaried has absolutely *nothing* to do with setting your own hours, contrary to business idealists' belief and its original intent. Being salaried has everything to do with ensuring that t