Gov cannot shrink and survive, it needs to provide more value

"To convert to new software would be a very time consuming and expensive undertaking – technical staff would have to learn how to manage the new software and make sure there weren’t incompatibilities with existing applications and services, and agency staff would have to learn all new software for word processing, spreadsheets, and the rest of the desktop and server based productivity software they use. Then we would have to make sure that we were reasonably compatible with the rest of the state and our constituents."

Unlike the writer of the FUD scare tactic rhetoric in quotes, I have a more precise counter: Switching to a free software that performs almost exactly like Microsoft Office Suite should not wreck the communications norms of state government. I worked for Microsoft as a contract engineer, using OpenOffice to open my Microsoft boss's spreadsheets, I would add data to the spreadsheets, and email back to them. The documents were then sent on to other tech teams. There was never a moment of incompatibility in the two pieces of software.

As our economy shifts to a less consumerist paradigm, and tax income for the state shifts to a smaller footprint, managers within gov achieving more on less is not an option. It is, rather, a fitness test of our time. This fitness test is nothing like the Reagan Era attempt to simply diminish gov, for in the current fitness test voters like myself want gov and its services to remain strong. Strong while living on a smaller tax income.

If managers misperceive the current fitness test as a mandate to shrink services for citizens, while maintaining their internal organizational norms, their whole edifice faces extinction.

original post as comment

Context:

ZDnet.com: Washington state rejects open source.

The Sudden Snap of Network Hygiene

Collapsitarian-ism is a new pass time and thing to blog about. Economics and terrorist systems disruptors are working together to end the world as we knew it. Like most, I worry and fret over this. Unlike many, I want the industrial to survive, and many institutions and ways of living to be purged from the world.

There are two such candidates for purging in New York Times articles. Here they are:

1. End the University as We Know It
2. Money for Nothing

The university article muses about what's to be done, offering a paradigm busting restructuring as a solution. I attended undergraduate and graduate schools that were unconventional and created as antidotes to the op-ed author's critique. These schools still managed to cultivate a kind of irrelevance in a large swath of graduates. Social justice had taken on such a powerful a priori that lucid, creative, and innovative inquiry suffered. I am speaking of course about the Janus faced object called Postmodernism and also the New Left. They both are cognitive systems that first reference a history of Anglo-American success in subjugating or simply out-competing other cultures, then the same cognitive systems move on to color every hue of their epistemology and language game to symbolically aid anyone who died as a victim of Anglo-American abuse. Social justice is not served, and resulting epistemologies of the graduates (crap such as time being radial, mysticism superior to empiricism) deem them useless at anything other than psychological shell games. I will say the science programs at my undergraduate school, similar to what the op-ed described in the article, turned out a fine crop of graduates.

A sudden snap is probably needed for this, seeing how even alternative types of schools show a predominant tendency towards little value in their output.

The Worthless Class of the Upper Class is another thing entirely. I am not being a Marxist here, in a meritocracy an uneven living standard amongst citizens is not always social injustice, inequity of outcome is desired. It is a social injustice of the most extreme kind if, in a meritocracy, a Worthless Class is also an Upper Class. Which is exactly what Krugman is pointing out.

So what we need is more social justice within a meritocracy. The surest way for that to be accomplished is more turbulence and wild swings of scale in which zones become autonomous then global again in irregular punctuation. I am not hoping for violent chaos that hurts good people, I am hoping for long overdue network hygiene to remove the useless who sit at the dinner table of our economy.

Anti-empiricists doomed to defeat?

So our faculty in Antioch C3, a lot of New Agers, and a lot the New Age Left, believe we can change ANYTHING through feedforward, to hell with empiricism since thats just derivative of Western civilization.

So I came across this:

"Grand strategy, according to John Boyd (arguably America's best military strategist), is a quest to isolate your enemy's (a nation-state or a global terrorist network) thinking processes from connections to the external/reference environment. This process of isolation is essentially the imposition of insanity on a group. To wit: any organism that operates without reference to external stimuli (the real world), falls into a destructive cycle of false internal dialogues. These corrupt internal dialogues eventually cause dissolution and defeat. " (context link)

Does this mean the Mystical Morons are doomed due to a deterioration of meaningful dialogue?

Connections are Poverty?

The buzz coming through a circuit of cool and informed people is a SXSW talk by Bruce Sterling declaring that only the desperate ( middle class to poor) need social connections -especially Twitter and Facebook. See: Let Them Eat Tweets - “Connectivity is poverty”. I love Bruce Sterling, see his point on this one, think its valid, but would like to turn the thesis on its head and say "Connection is poverty, and the wealthy may need it".

There is this Depression going on. If things slide just right -with combinations of less buying, a terrorist act here and there, failed governments, etc etc; we could see social/economic collapse in places named Florida, San Diego, or maybe the whole industrialized world.

The NYT article posits an old vision of Wealth as the privilege to not have to learn, communicate or do things.

Good work if you can get it. If the world slides just right, and a lot of things we take for granted are suddenly ad hoc, Wealth as the Village Idiot that Needs No Friends Nor Skills will be an unenviable and undesirable archetype to emulate.

Josh Dressel's Open Source story on ZDNet

Friend from my days in Olympia, a fellow Evergreen student into open source software. He is now with the WA Department of Natural Resources ( DNR ) as IT support. He responded to a dept request for cost cutting ideas with a switch to open source software that would save the state 1.8 million dollars. He has since encountered resistance for his efforts from dept management. ZDNet has done this story: Washington state rejects open source.

Black leader gives order to kill black men who are desperate for work

President Obama gave orders to use force ( orders to kill ) if Somalian pirates posed imminent danger to a U.S. hostage [ see story].

We can capsulize this narrative with "Black leader gives order to kill black men, who are desperately making a living, and who are holding a white man hostage ".

All I can say is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. The militant and caustic radical narrative that promotes a black solidarity imbued with hostility and violence against Anglo-American whites, justified by black instances of poverty or desperate employment choices -that narrative just got dissed by America's first black President.

With each bullet the President sent into those pirates, legitimate civil rights and social justice was cleansed a little more from the parasites of radical militancy.

• Black President: 3
• Black Thugs: 0

Republicans for what they are against

Just a short post here to highlight the latest Republican crack whore in the mens restroom sort of morality. Most Senate and all House Republicans in Congress have just voted NO for stimulus legislation. This is fine for those who've been consistent Ron Paul style politicos. But of course few to none are. Secretary of Defense Gates just submitted a proposed budget that breaks with the last several decades of military pork projects that do little to serve strategic advantage. Let me be explicit: every American that has participated in a Teabag event, or was against the stimulus bill on grounds of too much government spending, AND is making an uproar of discontent over the zeitgeist of Gate's austere defense spending....THAT American is either a traitor or an imbecile.

Network Communication of Bacteria