The Baltimore area had a severe thunderstorm Friday night. I was working on that day's post (still unpublished, but will be after I've completed it later today) around 11 PM EDT when the power went off, then on, for maybe a handful of cycles before finally going dead until about 3:30 AM this (Monday) morning. This was more miserable since the last major outage because of the heat, which built up to about 87 degrees Fahrenheit in my home. Opening the windows didn't help much because there isn't much of a breeze.
I had left my bedroom window open and was having a pleasant dream: I was in a seminar with a group of people when the male moderator was talking and this lovely woman Linda was sitting beside him. He starts talking "love this, love that". Channeling my inner Paul Simon ("Don't talk of love"), I snap back, "Why do you keep talking about 'love'? Enough already!" The moderator blankly stares at me and asks, "What do you have against love?" I said, "Nothing. I'm single and unattached..." At this point, the moderator gestures to Linda as if to say "There you go!" Did they set me up? Linda is looking at me with a serene smile; I can tell that she likes me. I continue, "In fact, if Linda is available, I would ask her out in a heartbeat."
At that point, loud booming thunder nearby resonates through my open bedroom window and wakes me up. I groan and said, "Thanks a lot, God. It was just getting to the good part." And then I realize what the thunderstorm meets. BGE's outgoing message said that work crews were working throughout the weekend to restore power to about 500-600,000 residents/households in the area, but restoration efforts may be impeded by ongoing bad weather forecast through the weekend. This was the first foul weather I experienced since the power outage. I groaned; did this delay restoration even more? I finally got back to sleep at 1:30 AM--and was pleasantly surprised to wake up to my bedroom light switching on two hours later.
BGE and I have a difficult relationship. It started with an expenses-paid job interview back in 2003; the Chicago market for Oracle DBA's was all but dead; one statistic I've heard was in the wake of the Nasdaq meltdown, 9/11 and the financial scandals (in particular, Arthur Andersen), we had lost more white-collar jobs than anywhere else in the country. I was applying for gigs in other areas (e.g., St. Louis, Philadelphia and New Orleans). As I flew to Baltimore, I noticed my suit was getting tight (in most cases, we work business casual, so I rarely wear suits except on interviews); after I got back, I found my weight was at an all-time high, and I took a tip from a project DBA I had met the prior year about the Atkins (low carb) diet and over the coming year would drop some 90 pounds. [I started looking at nutrition issues more rigorously, which is why I have a separate nutrition blog.]
I thought the interviews for a position as an Oracle Apps DBA (E-Business Suite, Oracle's enterprise-level software competing against SAP) went well, but they settled on another candidate; I was okay with that because this position was more of a staff position, and I was a senior consultant. Job hunting is a game of numbers; rejections come with the territory, and you can't take them too personally. But one remembers these things, especially when you fly halfway across the country to do the interview.
BGE has done a number of things to annoy me as a customer since moving to the area in 2004 (I initially worked on a gig at the National Archives in nearby College Park, just inside the Capitol Beltway.) One of the more recent ones was when they recently changed website logon processes, and I found myself unable to logon as usual which I've routinely done for years every month; even the automated logon remedy link wasn't working properly, requiring a nontrivial, time-consuming manual call to tech support.
But the third thing that annoyed me was an inability of getting usable feedback on the outage: just common sense stuff that turns out isn't so common --like GETTING A PROGRESS REPORT. (Even some of the worst-designed computer systems and operating system utilities I've seen try to do that, e.g., large file copies.) BGE's outgoing message did provide very rudimentary, defensive statuses (paraphrasing: "we've had a massive outage involving several hundred thousand residences due to the Friday storms; we have work crews on it; we've also got people coming in from out of state to help"). As a DBA, I've had to deal with different types of outages or problems where managers unrealistically want an instant diagnosis and time estimate before I've had a chance to diagnose the problem. I normally ask the managers to give me a few minutes and I will report back to them, and I'm anal-retentive about following up with my users or managers promptly.
In the case of BGE, I assume that the company is working on the problem: they don't earn revenue from customers not using electricity. What I want to know is something more than "it'll be up when it's up", "the world is complex", etc. More specifically, I want to know things like, are we talking hours? Days? What is the daily and/or cumulative restoration? If I have to dial in on a customer's VPN connection on Monday, maybe I need to look at booking a room at an available hotel in an outlying area. I don't expect to have an exact estimate.
This post is not intended to be a rant on BGE; I'm grateful to the workers whom finally resolved the issue. I think in part it stems for an area I've researched since publishing my dissertation in the mid-1980's: usability; I've written a number of articles and book chapters on the subject (around the end of the 1980's, early 1990's). I've always been fascinated why people don't use certain software functionality, why they write things on slips of paper (e.g., passwords), notes in documentation, ask other people (than use computerized help or user documentation), etc. Many people confuse appearance with usability--say, a fancy computer interface. Usability refers to the fit of the technology to its user; it is more like having a good waiter whom doesn't interrupt your meal, but knows when you're ready for the next course, a coffee refill, etc. It provides quick and easy access for the advanced user and training wheels for the novice user. It makes the user's time more productive, oriented to the task at hand, not with the busy work. I think I run into a handful of usability issues every day. For example, I may have logons to hundreds of websites; I have several accounts (my cable provider, my electric company, financial service accounts, etc.)
And then I'll call my ISP, and without batting an eye, they will ask for, say, some 20-character account number: are they living in the real world? Their idiosyncratic account number has no meaning except in the context of THEIR system, for THEIR convenience. Those silly customers! They should know better than to call us without a past statement in hand--haven't they been trained properly? Why, we're doing them a favor! It's not like they can spend their money elsewhere...
I've often referred to these systems as Procrustean in nature. Remember my favorite Bastiat quote? "Treat all economic questions from the viewpoint of the consumer, for the interests of the consumer are the interests of the human race." That is, the consumer, not the producer.
I've pointed to such examples in terms of dealing with the government. One minor example is submitting paperwork for a security background check as a federal subcontractor. The federal agencies often use the same paperwork for doing public trust background check. Some of them use an online version called e-QIP; others want the full-paperwork. (You go from 5 to 10 years back, with tedious level of detail; if you've done a series of multi-month assignments, it can be tortuous.) I should only need to present my most recent work experience (versus complete what I've done in the past), but just to give an example, a federal contractor told my agency that I had to fill out the paperwork (the end client was the social security administration) just to be eligible for an interview (which did not commit the contractors to an interview or an offer). It was all for THEIR convenience: once they made their selection, they wanted to hit the ground running.
The federal government is a bureaucracy unlike any other, and I've had my fill of bureaucracies in the private sector as well. I've written a few simple examples in past posts, but let me just pick a couple of personal experiences off the top of my head.
In one case I was managing the databases for 4 application systems at NASA. Oracle generates archived redo logs that DBA's use in addition to some database copy for recovery, cloning, migration, etc. The latest database copy kept on file (which, when I worked there a few years ago was 3 months old). What that means is there is absolutely no reason to retain archive logs past 3 months. (In fact, for most practical purposes, beyond a week, because you're not going to go back to a database missing the last 3 months of updates.) I was unable to get government permission to delete copies of logs over 4 years old over the several months I worked there.
In a second case, while I was working at National Archives and controlled a number of Unix servers on which some critical databases were stored, I got a heads up that some government auditor was up in the server room and had accidentally rebooted some of my servers "by accident". Within business hours. Most IT professionals have to do maintenance outside peak hours (business hours), maintenance requests have to be approved by management, etc. I went up there to confront him and I catch him in my main server rack; he has pulled out my DLT device (tape backups) and he's asking me what it is. What is he doing pulling out computer gear of which he doesn't know the functionality? He did not work through my client in St. Louis managing the application (for veterans to request copies of their military records); he had not sought to coordinate his audit activities consistent with our operational schedule.
In a third case, for a Navy station in southern Maryland, I had been brought in to install and configure a version of Oracle's application server (at the time 9iAS). Oracle had just released the 10G version. When you do a new install, you want to go with the latest release; that's what I always told my customers as a former senior principal with Oracle Consulting. The Navy project manager was on vacation. Even though I was working on a test server, I was told that I had to wait to get her explicit permission before I could INSTALL and/or test the software; otherwise, I could be brought up on charges. (The project manager herself was grossly incompetent. They were trying to upgrade a Developer 6i application. The upgrade obsoleted certain custom print drivers; the existing application required clerical assistants to do some busy work setting up Microsoft Word for using the generated reports. Oracle's new way of handling outputs involved specifying document types--like pdf or rtf files. The prime contractors had not alerted the PM about the change. The contractors had not modified the applications to make them 9iAS compliant; I worked with a couple of developers to that effect. At the end, the project manager screamed at my "incompetence" because under the new output types, her clerical personnel didn't have to do busy work with Microsoft Word, which is, after all, important. She considered ANY deviation from the status quo--even process improvements--fundamentally unacceptable.) Maybe improved Oracle technology frustrated her attempts to find make work projects for clerical personnel!
Reading During the Interim
- Christian Sanchez. The Government Accountability Project (whistleblower.org) in last fall's bulletin spotlighted the Border Agent whom had been sent to Port Angeles in Washington state where the Border Patrol is setting up a nearly $6M new facility housing up to 50 agents. Sanchez alleged that his supervisors to protect their budget told Sanchez to book overtime--working 10 hour days--even though there was little if any actual work to do. Sanchez, since whistleblowing the situation, has been threatened with termination and he and his family are being tailed. I went on the website this morning to look for updates; whereas Port Angeles statistics are not separately reported, since 2010, Port Angeles has gone from 4 to 36 agents, and the general area has reported nearly a quarter drop in arrests. Now silly us: we thought maybe more agents would result in more arrests, in an area where the biggest infiltration is by the occasional timber truck; but those politico bureaucrats can spin the results to say their deterrence by massive manpower strategy is working! The President doesn't have the budget to process undocumented aliens not accused of selected crimes, but he does have the resources to seal off the Canadian border (it must be the irresistible lure of the US' higher unemployment rate!) Hmmm. Thumbs UP! for Sanchez and all government whistleblowers!
- Reinventing the Post Office? Thumbs way, way DOWN! Josh Sanborn of Time suggests half a dozen business ideas to juice up the Post Office's permanent decline in cash cow first-rate mail. One would involve two-way secure hardcopy-digital email conversion and delivery; others involve converting rural outlets into some variation of an Internet cafe (and/or reselling Internet services), value-added direct marketing services, using Postal trucks for various monitoring services, and more diversified product or financial services. Let me simply give a general response: the USPS has been granted monopoly privileges. To use these privileges to compete against private-sector companies is "more of the same" crony capitalism. Some business models become obsolete over time: the telegraph, the dial-up Internet service market, etc. Email is better, faster, and more reliable than snail mail; there are software and/or services to filter spam, ensure secure transfer, etc. I do empathize with the fact that Congress has been meddling with the USPS, playing "Mother, may I?" with cost-saving measures, like closing branches and plants, adjusting pricing of stamps, etc. But the more general response would be to privatize postal mail, as has been widely done outside of the US.
- Ron Paul, "End the Fed": Thumbs UP! Granted, the book is 3 years old, but the basic issues are the same. For more general critiques of the book, you can check, e.g., here. I have read certain columns by Ron Paul, but not this book. For those who have not read the book, "End the Fed" was a rallying cheer during his unsuccessful pursuit of the 2008 GOP Presidential nomination. I find the personal anecdotes fascinating: e.g., as an Air Force flight surgeon, taking time while in Pakistan to go to a black market in a huge cave, stocked with goods from the West and Soviet-affiliated Afghanistan; his post special election win in 1976 meeting with one of the partners of Brown & Root (by the way, a big thumbs up for their help with data collection for my dissertation)--where the partner discovered that Ron Paul wasn't interested in playing the campaign finance game but in sticking for principle; the anti-bank janitor in his school; his early interest in coin collecting; etc.
As you would expect, you have a big dose of Austrian School economics; he talks about going to my alma mater (UH) to see Mises lecture a year or two before the great economist died; he also name-drops FA Hayek, Rothbard and others. Ron Paul also talks about Milton Friedman, but is rather dismissive of the monetarist/Chicago School, which he sees as tied to an expanding money supply. He points out that what the Fed does masks the natural thermostat of increasing savings and investment rates, which discourage herd mentality overinvesting (malinvestment) in a particular sector (e.g., Nasdaq's high tech stocks or housing) He sees central banking as a perversion of the very principles of the free market (agreed). He suggests that the Fed, a government-sanctioned cartel of banks, has a vested interest in its decisions and inflation is a cruel tax that hurts small savers/fixed-income people, e.g., pensioners. (Deflation, e.g., of certain assets--say, housing in the bust phase--also is a consequence of Fed incompetence.) He takes a dim view of fractional reserve banking, with its "magic" multiplier effect, and argues that we have a fundamental inconsistency between the warehouse function of banking and speculative lending, that federal guarantees engage in moral hazard by .
I find his summaries of conversations with past chairmen, i.e., Volcker, Greenspan, and Bernanke, very fascinating. Ron Paul would like to see a return to commodity money, e.g., the gold standard. Of course, FDR's decision to outlaw ownership of gold in an executive order is a key factor in the subsequent Depression economy (Congress restored personal ownership in the mid-70's.) I was intrigued by the tidbit about the federal government obviously trying to manipulate gold prices (downward) during the 1960's by dumping gold on the market. Then Nixon in 1971 abandoned gold convertibility which Paul considers tragic, a cause of the inflation over the coming decade ending with Volcker's using high interest rates (up to 20%) to break the back of inflation.
There are parts to Ron Paul which I find a little irritating: he comes across as a little condescending and preachy (which is a characteristic I find particularly present among progressives), making it clear that the vast majority of Congressmen are not competent in discussions of monetary policy (it's definitely true but probably better left unsaid). Then he uses the need to fund empire-building and wars. I depart from him there; neither President Paul nor President Guillemette would have gone into Iraq or Afghanistan. I've made it clear that we need to streamline our obligations. But I don't see us getting much of anything from Iraq or Afghanistan from a traditional perspective of building an empire: we have usually left occupied countries, don't seek to exploit such countries (e.g., Iraq oil for the US at below-market prices) and don't impose Draconian terms of settlement like in the aftermath of WWI on Germany. The amounts of spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, although significant, are a fraction of Defense costs, and Defense accounts for roughly 20% of national spending; money is fungible. So if you argue about the full budget, yes, government spending overall is atrocious. I think Iraq and Afghanistan are examples of badly chosen battles and more an issue of scope creep and incompetence, occurring across the government, not just the Defense Department. (I think if pressed, Ron Paul would probably concede what I've just said.)
Ron Paul has a particular distaste for what he calls "pragmatism"; I found that a little disturbing because I've sometimes described myself as a more pragmatic Ron Paul. I think Ron Paul was disappointed that President Reagan's handlers had basically steered him away from the libertarian positions that he privately admired and necessary reforms (including the Fed) because it was not in his political best interests to be seen as "extreme". I can say, at least in my case, I have no problems whatsoever taking an unpopular stand. I have often taken positions over the past year which disagreed with majority votes in Congress, even veto-proof votes (e.g, the Patriot Act renewal). I would vote for ending the Fed as we now know it; at the very minimum, I would strip away its opaque, unaccountable dealings (reading stories about how Bernanke privately telegraphed his upcoming decision on Operation Twist which was to buy long-term T-bills (to force down rates) so one or more people loaded on them and thus profited by selling them at Fed-bid higher prices, is just nauseating) and its questionable mandate to goose the economy.
One of the reasons, however, I didn't end up backing Ron Paul dealt not with his policies but more to do with leadership and administrative skills. Ron Paul definitely was a different choice; his policies on the Fed, foreign policy, and black markets (e.g., drug prohibitions) offered a sharply different perspective. The problem has been building coalitions; he is starting to see some things go his way, like an all-but-certain audit the Fed initiative. I am not suggesting sacrificing one's principles, but a series of confidence-building steps, based on the Pareto principle, e.g., restricting Fed options when the dollar is seen as declining against major currencies, enacting sunshine provisions, and providing for term limits to Fed appointments and for appointee Congressional recalls.
A gadfly President would be easily marginalized; Ron Paul can easily reach college-age/young adults. He needs to popularize his message for older voters, especially the ones whom are relying on unsustainable retirement age entitlements. I think the shame principle can go a long way: how can any loving parent leave a greater financial burden than he himself inherited? (By the "shame principle", I'm talking about exposing to public scrutiny shameful practices; in recent posts, I've repeatedly referenced past processed meat scandals, like evidence of rat feces in certain vendor sausages.) We don't need excessive federal meddling: the free press does the same thing without unsustainable bureaucratic empire building.
I think the issue has more to do with fiscal policy: granted, monetary policy can monetize the federal debt, which is moral hazard and as Ron Paul attempts to suggest is the Fed's innate corrupt relationship with the government. (Ron Paul makes a telling point about Nixon-selected Fed Chairman Arthur Burns attempting to pander to Jimmy Carter with accommodating monetary policy for reappointment, to no avail.)
I love Paul's chapter on "The Current Mess" (maybe it's because I've been saying the same things piecemeal in dozens of posts) When he writes "The post-meltdown bailout economy has been one of the most frightening sights I've seen in all my years in Washington. President Bush, anxious not be seen as another Hoover (who in fact was a horrible interventionist, contrary to what civics-book history says), embarked on a crazy program. He found himself committed to some $700 billion in bailout money. The Fed has committed trillions of dollars.", Paul gets it spot on. When you try to talk about this topic, it's difficult to organize it in a concise way, but I find Paul's rant cohesive and compelling.
As I write, I haven't finished the final two chapters; he is making a case for ending the Fed. As a committed free marketer, I agree with Ron Paul on principle. The issue has more to do with dealing with predictable resistance to change. All but a few people have lived their whole lives with a Fed in existence. I have no doubt about the superiority of the invisible hand, but Ron Paul is preaching to a small choir.
