Did You Like Tetris?

Tetris Hell.

Note that the linked site may have content which could offend, as it clearly states.

Regards  —  Cliff

Tea Party Membership, Part II

Can you be Black and enjoy a Tea Party?

And tell me that this quote is wrong.  Clarence Page:  “President Barack Obama’s election has inspired a record number of African-American candidates to run for Congress this year.  What’s surprising is that they’re running as Republicans.”

Regards  —  Cliff

Hat tip to Instapundit

You Can't Legislate Morality

Yesterday My brother Lance referenced the NPOESS,♠, which has just been cancelled.  This is the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System, and thus the acronym, although I am not sure NPOESS qualifies as a "word".  Maybe "N pose", as in a corrupt pronunciation of impose.

There are two lessons to be drawn here.

The first is that it isn't just the DoD that can't bring big programs in on time and under budget.  The rough rule of thumb is there are three things:  schedule, cost and performance and you can have any two, but not all three.

The second is more important as the US Congress promises to reform government acquisition.  You can't legislate morality.  I have been hearing that old saw for as long as I can remember.  If that is true, why do we think we can make government acquisition fair and pure by adding up laws?

In the article linked to above you can see one of my favorite bloggers cited.

According to University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn Reynolds, who blogs as “Instapundit”, there are more than 50,000 pages of federal laws and 161,117 pages of federal regulations.

My younger brother, John Krieger, and an associate, John Pritchard, two years ago, took a golf ball and started adding a Band Aid each time a new law was passed or a new rule added and within a year it was the size of a regulation hardball and now is approaching softball size.  There is an article in the National Contract Management Association magazine, but they lock their website down to paying members only.  If I find a no-cost access, I will post it.

If we want to reform government acquisition we need to reduce the number of rules, agree that people will make mistakes, find some reasonable sanctions short of firing for mistakes as opposed to fraud and provide more education for the workforce and more authority at lower levels.♥  Then sit back and see if this isn't better.  The system doesn't improve by tying the hands of college educated folks trying to do their job.  Sure, there will be the odd person who will abuse their position, but the current system isn't preventing that outcome.  It is time to try something new, like creating space for creativity and responsibility in the contracts writing and administrating work force.

In the mean time, better information for understanding our environment will be delayed.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Lance, embedded like this, where you see a word or a few words and the link is hidden underneath them.
♥  I remember an incident went I was working Research and Development (R&D) procurement at Eglin AFB.  I made a bone-headed mistake and, I am assuming, one of the two companies competing for the work (and it wasn't a lot of work) complained to the SES who watched over contracting efforts.  Mr Gartner called me into his office, told me I had done wrong and then sent me back upstairs to do better.  Back in the day one learned from one's mistakes and while the ASPR as it was known, was large, it wasn't what the FAR is today.

Climate Change

Here is an eight part discussion of Climate Change in the German Magazine Der Spiegel, translated into English.

This article looks at the current uproar over Climate Gate, from a European perspective, and talks about the future of the planet and uses places in Germany as examples.

I got this from my Middle Brother, Lance, who forwarded it in an EMail from a friend of his.  My Brother thinks that I am a climate Denier, and thus am guilty of not properly discerning the signs of the times.

Actually, I am a skeptic, based upon the fact that I have not seen a lot of data on the way various rates of change in the climate will impact the planet and because of the way climate scientists have acted in a very unscientific way, playing close hold with their data and resisting those with alternative views.  I guess it has been ever such—there is a prevailing scientific view and changing it is a lot of hard work.  Look at the simple issue of doctors washing their hands.  It took years for the prevailing wisdom to move to hand washing as the way to go.  Not accepted until after the death of its strong advocate, Ignaz Semmelweis.

Regards  —  Cliff

Jobs Returning from Overseas?

This is old news, but my excuse is that it took me a while to find it again, after I first saw it.

This report suggests that the economics of manufacturing AND delivery is causing some companies to rethink their decisions with regard to "off shoring".

Perhaps, if we want to bring jobs back to the US, the Federal and State Governments should be focusing on infrastructure and simplification of rules and regulations.

If we accept that the days of the UAW riding high may be over and scope down our expectations a tad (having grown up in the 1940s and 50s my goal was to some day earn $10,000 a year) we can again have good, solid manufacturing jobs.  That said, with jobs coming back, unions could again grow in size and responsibility and partner with management.  At the same time, manufacturing executives need to accept that they are not going to be the next Bill Gates, compensation wise.  Going along with that would be a recognition that not every smart manager is a smart manager.  If author Nassim Taleb♠ is to be believed, a lot of times successful managers are just folks who have caught a long run of luck.

Put another way, if we are all willing to share and share alike we can have a bigger pie overall.

Thanks

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  For example, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable and Fooled by Randomness:  The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

Parents and Education

I am one of those who believes parents are key to educating their children.  A few kids are self-starters, but I bet even young Abe Lincoln needed a little bit of encouragement from his parents.

So, I was in strong agreement with Derrick Z Jackson's OpEd in today's Boston Globe, "Bring in the Parents".

Last year, researchers at the Harvard School of Education said, “efforts to include family involvement in children’s learning and development at home have always been, at best, on the distant margins of educational policy.’’

This is true despite years of data — not to mention common sense — indicating that when parents reinforce high expectations, bug their kids about homework, take an interest in their school life and use family time for learning experiences, their children end up more engaged and more successful.  “It’s no one big thing,’’ Heather Weiss, the director of the Harvard Family Research Project, told me.  “It’s years of those little things from the parent that reinforce to the child that if you want to have a good life, this is what you must do.’’

And, I suspect we may be in a bit of a downward spiral in that young men and, especially, young women who leave school before getting that high school diploma may have not had good parental coaching and perpetuate that with their own children.

On the other hand, we don't need a nanny state sticking its nose into every household across the fruited plain.  We need to be creative about this, but we do need to take action to engage parents.

This is probably a long range program, and as Heather Weiss of the Harvard Family Research Project says, it is the little things.  The other day my wife was in the Post Office and noted two immigrant mothers talking to their child.  One was using English and the other what one would assume was the native tongue.  The first mother was giving her child a small leg up in the competition to finish high school, go to college and move into the Middle Class.

Maybe local communities should be catching the ones who drop out of high school and placing them in alternate programs that include part time work and a focus on the basics of reading, writing and math, along with parenting skills.

We need to be doing research and experimentation.  For sure, we have taken the current education paradigm about as far as it will go and now we need a new paradigm.

Regards  —  Cliff

If Only

I just get in from Philly, but part of that is due to taking my wife out to dinner as thanks for her driving down to New Haven, CT, from Lowell, to pick me up at the train station.  The reason my wife picked me up in New Haven is that Amtrak is not going all the way to the Route 128 and Boston stations.  And, the reason for that is that Rhode Island is water logged and since Thursday Amtrak has not been pushing trains east towards Providence.  Actually, the track near Kingston, RI, is under water, per Amtrak.

On the other hand, the company lawyer noted:

Rhode Island would be OK if Buddy Cianci was still running the show!

I laughed out loud at that line when I read it in an EMail a minute ago.

The fact is, the train, like the airplane and the ship, is subject to the whims of weather.  Maybe not as sensitive as an airplane (for example, the theory amongst older pilots that there is no reason to fly through a thunderstorm in peacetime), but still, when the water comes up it can be a problem.

On today's Acela, one passenger said her son had seen on the WWW that Amtrak doesn't expect to restore service until the 15th of April—a half a month.  But, having just checked the Amtrak webpage, all I can see is through Sunday, the fourth.  In the mean time some trains are being pushed through Springfield, MA, and then on down.

As an aside, when we showed up at the Route 128 station to retrieve my car, the person taking money for parking told me that some people had been paying $300.00 to get there by cab from New Haven.  That is a pretty nice piece of change for someone traveling for pleasure or business.  On the other hand, I got $60 knocked off my ticket by Amtrak as a refund for not getting me all the way to Route 128.

At least I am hope safe and sound and got to spend some time with my wife on the highway.

Regards  —  Cliff