Most liked posts in thread: The fleecing of America.

Exactly Nathan, they are there working for themselves not us.... The only way to end it is term limits. Also should end retirements for poiticians after only four years of work, good or bad.... Don't you think it ironic that these same folks recieve a wonderful health care plan paid for by us for the rest of there lives, which they have already said they would not give up for a public option like the rest of us would have....:crazy:

My point being is that to think that this group of folks can take close to a third of our national product and manage it well is just plain ridiculous.:nonod:

In the interest of bipartisnship, this is a piece of pork I always thought was speacial....

$50,000,000 added in conference for an indoor rainforest project in Coralville, Iowa by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). The project, which originally was included in the Energy Policy Act of 2003 bill that failed to pass in December, 2003, became so indispensable that Sen. Grassley added it to the Omnibus Appropriations Bill in late January 2004. When completed, Iowa will have the world’s largest enclosed rainforest, spanning five acres. A local businessman, Ted Townsend (heir to the Townsend meat-packing fortune), came up with this idea while contemplating his legacy on a treadmill. Since then, Townsend has worked to see that taxpayers will pay dearly for his dream to be realized. The project, which is estimated to cost $225 million, includes a generous $5 million from Townsend. This tropical boondoggle has some big name supporters, such as former Iowa Governor Bob Ray (R), who is the chairman of the institute Townsend founded to oversee the production of the rainforest. Ray imagines that it will solve the state’s “demographic problems†by drawing more people to move to Iowa. Ray also believes that mass quantities of retiring baby boomers will “crisscross the country†to visit the indoor rainforest. Senator Grassley claims that it will somehow help the University of Iowa. Ultimately, this project will do nothing for Iowa’s population, energy industry, or the environment, but it will soak the taxpayers.

Wow, wonder how many folks could have gone to an actual rain forest and studied it for that amount of money.....:lol:

 

What he said! Nice!

Republicans/Democrats-different brands of self centered crooks

 

Watch out for Term Limits...

we have them in CA, and what you end up with is people who don't know how to get things done still looking to get re-elected, just to different positions that meet the rule of the particular set of term limit laws in play. Overall, I'd say CA took a big step backwards with them.

Matt

 

Have you seen a lot of competence in the White House?

Even with what one would consider a good president (choose your favorite one), by the time that they get up to speed it's on to the next election. While I'm not sure that more than 4 years is a good idea (lock in an idiot, wonder how bad Bush could have screwed the pooch if we'd have had him for 12 years instead of just 8!), an awful lot of time is spent learning then running.

but then the President is a bit of a unique play. It seems to be a post where you never really run for anything else after (other than great man of state!)

Matt

 

One of the big arguments against term limits seems to be that getting things done in Washington is "complex" and that the less experienced you make the legislators, the more power transfers to the career bureaucrats / staffers who actually write all the bills and do all the work.

Well... yes... IF all things remain equal. The thing that drives me nuts is that it takes 1,000 pages to write a bill now, but it only took FOUR (albeit large pages with small writing) to do the entire US Constitution.

The complexity is a major part of the problem. Complexity of the tax code, complexity of the bills, complexity of the budgets, everything. I haven't asked them personally, but I suspect the Founders didn't anticipate complexity at this level, driving the amount of corruption, pork, incompetence, unforeseen unintended consequences, etc. that we have today.

IF the legislators were actually the ones who had to legislate, IF they were allowed a relative small staff with proscribed duties, IF they actually had to read and understand every bill, IF the IRS had to provide free and indemnifying tax services to anyone who needs help filing their return, along with several other examples, then the system would drive complexity out of itself.

Again, not a "Democrat" or "Republican" issue - an "American" issue.

 

Term limits would limit the effect lobbyist have and give our representatives more time to do what they are actually in Washington to do (WORK), not spend all their time raising money to get relected. Might not be such a bad idea to broom all the long timers so they can't teach the new folks how it's done Paul.:aureola: No system is perfect but I am sure that we can't fix the problems in Government by having more Government.... If you have a basket full of bad apples it doesn't matter how many more you put in, the apples will still be bad.

PS: Sure wish CA had adopted term limits for their Senators and Congressman too Matt...:lol:

 

From what I've seen...

Term limits seem to give lobbiest more leverage, as they understand how to play the game and manipulate better. Also, if you're going to loose your gov position, it might be harder to piss off your next employer.

And the complexity issue does have some merit. Here in CA we have a water problem that was decades in the making, and actually implementing a solution will take a lot of work against many intrenched interests, and may require capital improvements to water distribution that will require many years to decades to fully implement. People who are limited in time served don't have much perspective on the arc of this issue here.

And it's just a fact that things are more complex now than they were when the nation was founded. There is more diversity of views and interests that all want to be heard.

Really, I think that there are two things that really screw us all: The willful ignorance of many of our populous, and the rediculous notion that corporations deserve the same voice as people (leading to lots of lobbying and corporate dollars buying influence). Why not say commercial speach is nothing deserving of special protections, companies can't spend any money on lobbying, and if employees (and CEOs or whatever) want to express thier views to the government, they can spend thier own time and money to do so. As it is now, the power brokers get to double dip: They can decide to spend corporate dollars to influence decisions, and they can spend thier own resources to do the same. Those that don't get to decide how the corporate dollars are spent are locked out of the biggest source of influence peddling there is.


Matt

 

.....and how many times do the politicians cash in when they leave office by becoming lobbyist (or as they call it, Consultants)? I would support limitations on Lobbying.. But you still would have the problem with the career politician who owes so many favours to so many that there is no way that they can make a clear thinking decision... One thing that should be changed is our representatives overseeing themselves and setting their own benefit packages, an independent review board of some sort might help...

Sorry Matt but I just cannot subscribe to the notion that the human condition has changed so much if any that the values and ideals that our founding fathers had are in some way out of date.. Just a bit of time in the history books will reveal that we still have the same motivations, desires, weaknesses and differences that we've had sense Biblical times. Yes we can fly, travel in space, use the internet, cure many diseases but we are the same species as we always have been...

 

Urban legend or not, I would rather foot that bill then let my near $1800 bucks a month of tax go to fund a war in iraq AND afghanistan just to make some FAT oil men richer. Hell I would rather give my $1800 bucks to the poor or even to schools than to those FAT republican oil men.

 

Democrat oil men go to the gym. So they're exempt.

 

I'm not buying it, either. It's more complex because we embrace complexity. Jack Welch always told his managers something like this (I paraphrase)- "Don't come in here and tell me how complex your business is. Tell me how simple it is. Tell me the 2-3 key things that, when focused on and executed properly, will result in success. If you don't understand your business well enough to distill it to that essence, then you're the wrong guy."

Yes, we've dug some labrynthian holes for ourselves... but how did we make the holes so complex? By distributing more shovels and encouraging more digging. Lobbying is definitely a contributor. But fostering complexity is one hallmark of a leadership vacuum - regardless of the party of whoever does it. Whether we're talking circuit design, software development, structural engineering, business organization, tax code, healthcare bills, water regulations.... doesn't matter. Simpler solutions are better. And they can be arrived at in all domains via leadership. In the absence of leadership, you get 1,100 page bills that don't actually solve anything, but push a lot of dollars around.

 

But

way back when to get news from one town to the other, it took someone on a horse hours or longer to get there. Time compression means that a lot more happens a lot faster than it did before, and response time are expected to be second, minute or hours, not days or weeks.

The economy was based on a much smaller base of industrial skills than we have now.

Sure, the underlying organizational concepts may be very similar to what was done back then, but back then, consensus was achieved by convincing a much smaller group with less diverse background and interests.

The Jack Welch quote is cute, but not at all accurate. Sure the concepts behind a good business vision are pretty simple (or should be, this is the key behind the "elevator pitch" in the VC world - if you can't say how you're going to create value quickly and sussinctly, then you're not going to succeed). But then, a good company with inventory control that is efficient, resource utilitzation that's efficient, forcasting that's efficient and the like doesn't do all that with a couple of guys standing at the coffee pot running things from a set of post-it notes. It takes good, complex, but reliable back-end systems to keep the machine humming, and even good old boy Jack would admit that. Or are you posulating that GE was run without complex systems. Here's another Welch quote: ''I don't give a damn if we get a little bureaucracy as long as we get the results." the point of this one is he says that complexity or simplicity isn't the goal, results are the goal. If it takes complexity (his additional bureaucracy), so be it. It's about results.

So, one can argue about the results we get for complexity, but quoting Jack as saying all things should be simple isn't accurate or correct. Whatever it takes to get results is more of his philosophy, whether complex or simple.

Matt

 

You're still rationalizing.

Do you allow a committee to design your circuit boards? Did you poll everyone on NAM for their input how how to route traces? Or does an expert design them based on minimizing the complexity to just what's necessary to meet the need? The the most Fast Easy Solutions try to build every conceivable feature into one device, or only the features that are rationally related to one another?

You can certainly pick apart my example - and you did - but the point was supposed to be that leadership eschews UNNECESSARY complexity. To the point of making those who thrive on complexity highly uncomfortable with the whole concept. And it made you squirm. :lol:

I've worked for and with some great entrepreneurs, who have been very successful building business - not simple businesses - and they eschew complexity. I've led some very successful teams using that philosophy. It drives my detail-oriented people NUTS... until they become successful through focus on the important few details.

 

And that works if there are those

that are there to catch the other details that are required for success.

The key to what you say is to focus on required details, and ignore the distractions. No one has a 100% hit rate on that determination.

You can cite selective example of simplicity all day long, and in some cases they actually work. Thing is that large systems can't work without some level of detail. the analogy you're pushing is that the captain of the ship doen't have to sweat all the small things, and that's true. But someone has to track all those important details in order to ensure that the whole system works. The notion that all in the system can have the same simple "high altitude" view of a few key ideas just fails in pretty much every organization that one examimes in detail.

The notion that this makes me squirm isn't correct. I'm a physicist, one that reduces the concepts to the simplest that does the job, and sometimes that's pretty complex (just look at weakly-coupled many-body mathematics that is used to describe gasseous diffusion or concept propogation in social networks, or the matrix mathematics used for reletavistic electro-magnatism, or the group theories of sub-atomic particles.) I'm data driven, what works works. Simple tounge in cheek statements about what should be or why we're screwed rarely are that which works.

Now back to the government. There's a lot that is not right with it, and there is a lot of good people who work for the benefit of our nation within it. It's a complex thing where improvement requires more than nice sound bites.

What a lot of this comes down to is that there isn't agreement on what everyone thinks is nessesary in our government functions. Those feature that I see as unneeded look to me to be waste, and to others they are the core business of providing for the citizenry. That's what happens in a diverse country like ours.

This doesn't have a lot to do with the original topic, the fleecing of America. Some of the fleecing is waste due to inefficiency. It's also true that every elected official at all levels has run on getting waste out of government, and none have really made any headway. A lot of the fleecing is that what one views as waste are programs that others view as usefull. This will never go away because we're never going to have national consensus on what government's role really is. But the biggest form of fleecing is the interests (corporate, political, whatever) pushing programs that are in thier interest that acutally move risk and expense to the taxpayers (like deregulating restrictions on banks that hold federally insured deposits), bridges to nowhere that brings dollars to a state with seniority (stevens) but with no need for a bridge, and a populous that doesn't care enough to do much about it.

Matt

 

And yes... A committe does do our boards

A committee of two! We're a two man company, and there are very, very few things that we do that aren't checked by the other. Sure Guenter does the layout of the boards, but I get a graphic of the layout to check for errors. The idea of measure twice cut once is more complex than measure once and then cut.

I don't think we really disagree here. But what I do think is that we have a different idea of what our government should be and what services it should provide. You'll always see me as a "big government spender" not because I embrace un-needed complexity, but because of what I think our government should be doing. You want to use a machete on the gov, me a scalple.

Saying that I'm made uncomfortable by simplification isn't really on topic or relevant, independant of how true or false a characterization it is.

Matt

 

UMMM how long would it take a commttee of 100 to find the right wire or another connection point, years instead of months?

True genious is making something complex simple....:idea:

The problems any society faces, can only be solved by understanding the Human Being and what motivates it..... If we cannot find a way to motivate the folks in DC to be good stewards of OUR money, then all the government you can imagine will not stop them from wasting it away.... Until we find that solution they cannot be intrusted with anymore of our hard earned dollars..:nonod:


Wow, pretty simple..:lol:

 

I actually agree with most of that...

But the quote is genius is making the comples seem simple. The iPhone is anything but simple, but the user interface is really kicking cell phone asss all over the world.

But here's where I get in a lot of conflicts (my dad and I argue about this as well). I lay the blame for the government we have at the feed of the citizens. We're the ones that create the environment where the current system thrives. Till the attitude of the citizens of the good ol' USofA change, we're gonna keep all the flaws of the current system of government.

Many take the tac that thier individual contribution to the mess is without blame, and that government is something that the proverbial they forced down from above.

Matt

 

Actually was quoting my mentor Paul Mitchell when he was teaching me my craft years ago and that is the way he said it...

You are partly correct Matt, we the public need to DEMAND more from our representatives. I get very tired of hearing folks say " all politicians lie " as if it is acceptable. I truly believe that we have a right to expect more from them and if you are going to ask the people to put yourself in a leadership position, be it a Congressman. Senator, Pesident, Councilman, Mayor, preacher, etc., that you should hold yourself to an even higher standard of integrity than the average person, and be judged to a higher standard.

If we don't demand more, they sure won't change.