No matter what side of the argument you are on,
you always find people on your side
that you wish were on the other.
Jascha Heifetz
Some Comments on the FAA Controller Furlough Soap Opera
I remember a few years back doing an in-person interview for a contractor DBA gig with an FAA vendor (I didn't get the job). I've done a lot of interviews at federal agency facilities, but I thought it was easier to get into Quantico (Marine headquarters) than this place. During the interview I brought up a matter close to the heart of any DBA: backups. (We use backups not only for disaster recovery but for purposes like refreshing test environments: we would never risk a production problem by directly inserting untested changes.) My contact implied something like a rolling 5-day window, with essentially no longer-term backups This seemed highly unusual, and I continued questioning about the infrastructure. At some point, he mentioned that his company had requested relevant infrastructure, and the FAA told them, "Great idea, but we don't have the money. Here's an idea: take it out of the money we're already paying you, and we'll be happy to take ownership of the equipment." Of course, the conversation stopped there. But obsolete technology goes beyond IT infrastructure (see the video below).
Nick Gillespie points out that the federal budget has doubled since the Clinton Presidency. Yet I don't recall the hypocritical Dems moaning about the austerity under Clinton--a level the GOP isn't even asking for. Even if you control for inflation; spending is about 50% more. And yet a mere 1-3% of a budget cut is enough to cause furloughs at the nation's busiest airports? There are salient missing facts (I don't know what they are, but I'll know them when I see them): other agencies can find savings to cut without mass furloughs, but not the FAA. Surely the FAA hires more than air traffic controllers, there must be ways to consolidate/share existing personnel, e.g., from lightly used airports; and heaven knows what work rules or other collective bargaining nonsense plays a role. Poole doesn't directly say this in the video below, but making the system more state of the art could better leverage existing manpower.
Apparently even if we accept things at face value, why didn't Obama proactively ask for any necessary discretion in agency funding to make cuts? That's an issue of managerial competence. (The "solution" which has been adopted is not to increase the FAA's budget but give it more flexibility to shift funds across the budget managers didn't already have.)
This is not the first time we've heard of politicians micromanaging things. For example, DoD has to purchase equipment it doesn't want, can't close bases it doesn't need, etc. The same crap goes on with the USPS; it can't change prices, delivery policies, or shutter money losing offices
You already know the only reasonable response to this: PRIVATIZE IT. And in terms of the video below, as much as it pains me to admit it, even Gore got something right for once. (Notice how the progressives love it when the Canadians socialize their healthcare system, but not when they privatize their version of the FAA. )
A Casualty at the Boston Marathon Bombings:
Religious Liberty
From Jennifer Graham of the WSJ:
Close to the bombing site are Trinity Episcopal Church, Old South Church and St. Clement Eucharistic Shrine, all on Boylston Street. When the priests at St. Clement's, three blocks away, heard the explosions, they gathered sacramental oils and hurried to the scene in hopes of anointing the injured and, if necessary, administering last rites, the final of seven Catholic sacraments. But the priests, who belong to the order Oblates of the Virgin Mary, weren't allowed at the scene.
But it is a poignant irony that Martin Richard, the 8-year-old boy who died on Boylston Street, was a Catholic who had received his first Communion just last year. As Martin lay dying, priests were only yards away, beyond the police tape, unable to reach him to administer last rites—a sacrament that, to Catholics, bears enormous significance.Why? Because Women Don't Think the Laws Apply to Them....
On occasion, I've shared some experiences from my work experience. When I started working on my UH MBA, I was working in the now-defunct APL timesharing industry. [APL is a concise, powerful interpretive computer language introduced during the IBM mainframe era of the 1960's. APL was particularly suited for rapid application development; timesharing was a bridge solution before a company invested in new mainframes; we also provided an alternative to backlogged IT departments. In the Houston area, we mostly served the energy corporations. The industry disappeared by the time I completed my doctorate.]
My last boss in the industry was a narcissistic character and inept, unethical manager; I could write several pages, but a starting point was when he decided to move the branch office from within Houston's loop (closer to clients) to the northwest suburbs because it would cut down his commute. That wasn't all--we would only occupy part of the expanded office. He intended to set up his own (competitive?) operations staffed entirely by female programmers. An enlightened boss? Hardly; female programmers were "cheaper"--he was hoping to pocket any alleged wage difference. Let's just say I got in trouble when I found that he had taken my office chair during the move and put in his still vacant female programmers' room--and he had replaced mine with one that had a broken caster; I got caught swapping back my old chair.
I mentioned this incident in passing in a past post. One of our clients one month had a few thousand dollars left in his residual discretionary "use it or lose it" budget. My boss, always looking for ways to expand his monthly bonus, agreed to rewrite an application in exchange for "dollar-burning" the amount. (We earned revenue by metered computer time charges; We had a "dollar-burn" utility that was designed to do nothing constructive but rack up charges to a specified limit.) I think this predated my employment; in any event, the assignment was given to my principal colleague--and this is my point for bringing up the anecdote. APL is a very powerful language, and there were stylistic alternatives. Many APL coders had distinct coding preferences, not unlike some writers may prefer different fonts. My colleague redefined the task from addressing the client's wish for functional changes for stylistic changes in accordance with his own preferences. This was not what the client paid for--he never saw the code, just its functional results. So my boss, who by the way couldn't read a line of APL code, pulled the assignment from my colleague and handed it to me. (Not that my "what have you done for me lately" boss was happy about it: he would have me working on this month's bonus.)
I have zero patience for paternalist (or should I say, maternalist) obsession with surface-level characteristics of language, the self-appointed, morally self-superior people obsessed with controlling the behavior of other people, especially viewing generic terms through present cultural bias.
This obsession with surface-level details I see as a mark of an inferior mind and is characteristic of many (if not most) progressives/social liberals like Barry Obama. (I'm not saying language isn't important. While I was a professor, I did not allow students to address me by my given name--it was "Dr. Guillemette" or "Professor Guillemette". I also try to respect other people's preferences; for example, Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek despises others classifying him as a "conservative" economist.)
Do you need any further proof of the inanity of modern ideological feminism? From Reuters (my edits):
Washington state's governor signed into law [issued his imprimatur] on Monday the final piece of a six-year effort to rewrite state laws using gender-neutral vocabulary, replacing terms such as "fisherman" and "freshman" with "fisher" and "first-year student." Lawmakers have passed a series of bills since 2007 to root out gender bias from Washington statutes, though a 1983 state mandate required that all laws be written in gender-neutral terms unless a specification of gender was intended.
Several words, however, aren't easy to replace, said Kyle Thiessen, the state'scode reviser[censor], who heads up the 40-staff WashingtonCode Reviser's Office[Office of Political Correctness] agency.
Washington state is the nation's fourth to boast of eliminating gender bias from its official lexicon, following in the footsteps of Florida, North Carolina and Illinois, [Democratic state Senator Jeanne] Kohl-Welles said.
Other states that have passed gender-neutral constitutional mandates include California, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Utah, Kohl-Welles said. At least nine other states are currently considering gender-neutral legislation, she said.Instead of frittering away taxpayer money giving laws a pushing-on-a-string presentist face lift which adds zero to the functionality of laws, which I consider a form of economic rent-seeking for special-interest feminists, do something useful, like spring cleaning--repealing obsolete or counter-productive laws, stripping regulatory drag on business, and countless infringements on economic liberty... Stop engaging in bureaucratic trivial pursuit. (For an alternate take, see Carpe Diem.)
Isn't It Time for Medicaid Reform?
Reason has a great essay by surgeon Jeffrey Singer, How Government Killed the Medical Profession. Among other things, he rants about the square peg in a round hole Procrustean government coding processes, game playing with add-on charges to make up for money-losing more complicated procedures.
Food Trucks in DC Under Legislative Assault
More on Prairie Dogs vs. Property Rights
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Gary Varvel and Townhall |
The Temptations, "I Wish It Would Rain"
