5 ms·

I realize I'm unfairly ignoring 90% of your rant, but I just want to say I disagree with "too much government" as the issue here. When my computer breaks, I don

by zecho 13y ago

I realize I'm unfairly ignoring 90% of your rant, but I just want to say I disagree with "too much government" as the issue here. When my computer breaks, I don't throw away my computer. I fix the problem. Size doesn't matter. Focus does. Large organizations can have plenty of thoughtful focus, too. When two terrorists explode bombs at a public event, I definitely don't want less "gumment." I want effective government. In this case, every Senator knew about the wiretapping. Why did they allow it to continue? We elected our government. The government isn't the problem. We are. So in that respect, I agree with you. We're short on well-informed citizens.

flagnog 13y ago
yeah, but when your computer breaks it doesn't pull out a firearm and order you to add drives, a better graphics card, more monitors and a faster internet connection. And then raid your bank account if you don't do it fast enough. Size does matter.
- zecho 13y ago
  I don't think the government has done that to any US citizen regarding NSA wiretapping or data collections under FISA. Please don't conflate secret national security courts and closed meetings with fantasy. It doesn't help any discussion.
  - flagnog 13y ago
    the fantasy would be if we didn't have the secret courts and illegal wiretapping by an administration that promised to be the most transparent in history.
graycat 13y ago
I tried to make clear: Big gumment brings two problems. First, it wastes money. That's the smaller problem but still quite significant (we need to get our economy going, and wasting money hurts). Second, big gumment is a real threat to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and nearly everything we want. But you want to emphasize "effective" gumment. Okay. So did I: I said that we should get the NSA being "safe and effective" for our country. "Safe" mostly means that the NSA doesn't trash our Constitution and ruin the US, and "effective" means what you want, catch the bad guys. Now we come to the hard part: Catching the bad guys. In the case of Boston, as I pointed out, Russia told us. Russia was correct. So, really, it's getting clear: The NSA's ideas of all that 'big data' is not very effective. I know; I know; some of the Senators will say that in the secret hearings the NSA, FBI, DHS, CIA, etc. guys explain all the bad guys they stopped, bad guys that never made the news. Given Boston, I don't believe it! What I believe is that they go after some guy in the second grade in the lunch room who takes the bread from his sandwich, cuts it out to like like a gun, shows it around his lunch table, and the big gumment guys shut down the school. Or they go after Aaron Swartz. They are just not competent. So, they are not effective. "Big" is always a threat: Ike warned about the military-industrial complex, and the bigness is much of the positive feedback loop that has it grow. Sure, we'd both like more competence. Remember 9/11? Or, remember one of the core reasons? Right: Some semi-, pseudo-, quasi-bright guy had one of his better ideas: If a terrorist tries to take over an airplane in mid-flight, then don't resist and, instead, let him have it. Presto: Open, engraved invitation to 9/11. Bet you can't do that now. Even if managed to get on an airplane with various weapons, bet couldn't take over the plane and fly it into a big building. So, need the TSA, DHS, and NSA for that? Nope: Just change the silly rule that says give an airplane to any terrorist who asks. Competence is more difficult. I'm all for more in competence. But big and competent don't go well together. Look, it's not worth trashing our Constitution, setting up an organization that could take us to Hitler, and wasting the big bucks to set up an NSA that could catch another Boston bomber, even if such an organization could catch another bomber, which likely they can't. Heck, again, the Russians told us about those two loser, wacko nutjobs, which is much better info than we could have hoped for from the NSA, and still we did nothing. Big gumment in England? Go after a guy because of something about pictures of nude children on his computer that turned out to be his grandchildren playing with water in the yard. Big gumment in the US? Have some Department of Natural Resources (DNR) go after a couple with several cats, several dogs, and a five year old deer they had raised from a fawn whose mother had just been killed in an auto accident, really, a minute or so before the fawn was born. So the DNR has in their imagination that deer, with their hoofs, can hurt people. Of course, in this case, the deer has been just fine, in the house, with several dogs and cats, for five years, not even hurting the furniture. Big gumment. And we have the Aaron Swartz case, gumment going wacko over some PDF files readily available to everyone at MIT for free and in paper form in nearly every research library in the world for the cost of photocopying. Big gumment. We saw in the IRS case big gumment abusing its powers. Well, the NSA data would be an engraved invitation to more such abuses -- shakedowns, blackmail, payoffs, kickbacks, etc. In reality, the more effective gumment you want will have to be smaller gumment. There's a recent example with the F-35. Supposedly part of the problem with that program is that someone wants to change the specifications on some screw, so they have a meeting all day with everyone affected, 600 people, that is a representative from each of all the possibly affected subcontractors or some such. The solution? The Lockheed Skunk Works deliberately kept small enough to keep up communications and keep down the huge meetings. For the NSA phone data, that sounds like the old project Total Information Awareness or some such. There has been a little company on a few floors of a not very attractive office building on the space of a shopping mall in a suburb of Boston. Once I went for an interview. I used to do 'artificial intelligence', i.e., 'expert systems', and they were big on that, likely from what some people at DARPA are still dreaming about. So, they wanted to get data on phone calls, maybe e-mail messages, postcards, whatever, with data on from, to, and date, and then build a big directed graph with an arc for each communication and a node for each person sending or receiving. Then they wanted to do some analysis of the graph, look for 'cliques' or some such. While they explained, I tried to stay awake, but being really interested was asking too much. BS. Total BS. But it looks like the graph people have taken over the NSA. All the brighter people in Russia are likely doing a ROFL. I'm not laughing: It's expensive, dumb, and dangerous. Just cut it back.
- machfive 13y ago
  while you make good points, please stop spelling it 'gumment', it makes you sound like one of the nutjobs.
  - crazypyro 13y ago
    I honestly had no idea what he meant by "gumment" and thought it was similar to a gauntlet or something. Had to say it out loud before I finally got it. Whats the fucking point of abbreviating something like government to gumment? It just makes you look unintelligent...
    - ByronT 13y ago
      It made me hungry for gumbo.
    - graycat 13y ago
      'Government' is too respectful. 'Gumment' has the contempt of some barefoot guy in the hills of east Tennessee out in the woods with a home built still. I find that contempt very appropriate. Otherwise your point is well taken.
  - rdouble 13y ago
    I've never been able to figure the gumment/gubmint guys out. Are they making fun of rednecks? Or are they assuming the role of some sort of redneck freedom fighter? Do rednecks even say "gumment?"
    - graycat 13y ago
      I don't remember just where I got 'gumment', but I did spend a lot of time in Tennessee! But, I stand corrected and more highly polished before the more sensitive HN audience and will use 'government' (cough, cough, upchuck). But we should always keep in mind who's paying the bills: They are supposed to be working for us.
squidsoup 13y ago
In the United States I'm not so certain that you can place the blame on uninformed citizens given that you effectively have a 2 party political system and both parties have been complicit in domestic surveillance.
- graycat 13y ago
  In general, you put both the McDonald's and Wendy's close together in the best location on Main Street so that they can each get a good shot at half the business. Else one of those two is out at one end or the other of Main Street and gets only about 1/4th business. Much the same for political parties: They look like there's not much difference. Some of the Dems are a bit left of Mao, and some of the Repubs are a bit to the right of Genghis Khan, still the actual parties want to look close to the center. But where is the 'center'? And what issues are hot in the center? That depends a lot on the voting citizens and what the media thinks they can get away with pushing. I contend that with better informed citizens, we would have had political debates on a much higher level, have just avoided The Great Recession because we never would have done something as dumb as the bubble blowing, and done much better on addressing the issues in foreign policy that got us to throw away a few trillion dollars, etc. Clinton was paying off the national debt; without the costs of the wars and with the taxes from full employment instead of the unemployment from The Great Recession, we could have had the debt paid off by now or nearly so. Why would it be good to pay off the debt? Because then the US Treasury is not borrowing so much money and, then, interest rates are lower for the rest of us and, in effect, our economy has more 'seed corn', investment capital for growth. For all those years since Clinton, we could have the economy charging ahead, without inflation, so fast that companies would be recruiting in the poor areas, providing buses from the poor areas to the offices, paid training in the offices, etc. It was happening in the 1960s. Let's take one issue: Abortion. I claim that in reality, in practice, no matter what you believe about abortion, good, bad, or indifferent, actually there's no real issue. Why? Because Roe v Wade was decided about 40 years ago, and there's no chance it will be changed. When we are well on the way to getting 2/3rds of the House, 2/3rds of the Senate, and 3/4ths of the states ready to change Roe v Wade, abortion can be an issue again. In the meanwhile, what is abortion in politics? Sure, a way to get some people all wound up over something that's not going to change. Why? Because some Repubs feel strongly that abortion is really bad and want to hear that some politician is 'against it'. Because a lot of Dems believe that someday they might need an abortion and want that option open to them so want to hear some politician is 'for it'. Either way, Roe v Wade's not going to be changed. So, with better informed voters, just informed enough to realize that Roe v Wade is 40 years old and a constitutional amendment takes the 2/3rds, 2/3rds, and 3/4ths, we could just quit talking about abortion and move on to, say, how to get the economy going and how to say out of absurd foreign adventures. In our democracy, the voters get the government they deserve. Better informed voters stand to get better government. If the voters get smarter, then the two seemingly dumb-dumb parties will keep up with the voters.

by zecho 13y ago

flagnog 13y ago

yeah, but when your computer breaks it doesn't pull out a firearm and order you to add drives, a better graphics card, more monitors and a faster internet connection. And then raid your bank account if you don't do it fast enough. Size does matter.

zecho 13y ago
I don't think the government has done that to any US citizen regarding NSA wiretapping or data collections under FISA. Please don't conflate secret national security courts and closed meetings with fantasy. It doesn't help any discussion.
- flagnog 13y ago
  the fantasy would be if we didn't have the secret courts and illegal wiretapping by an administration that promised to be the most transparent in history.

graycat 13y ago

I tried to make clear: Big gumment brings two problems. First, it wastes money. That's the smaller problem but still quite significant (we need to get our economy going, and wasting money hurts). Second, big gumment is a real threat to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and nearly everything we want. But you want to emphasize "effective" gumment. Okay. So did I: I said that we should get the NSA being "safe and effective" for our country. "Safe" mostly means that the NSA doesn't trash our Constitution and ruin the US, and "effective" means what you want, catch the bad guys. Now we come to the hard part: Catching the bad guys. In the case of Boston, as I pointed out, Russia told us. Russia was correct. So, really, it's getting clear: The NSA's ideas of all that 'big data' is not very effective. I know; I know; some of the Senators will say that in the secret hearings the NSA, FBI, DHS, CIA, etc. guys explain all the bad guys they stopped, bad guys that never made the news. Given Boston, I don't believe it! What I believe is that they go after some guy in the second grade in the lunch room who takes the bread from his sandwich, cuts it out to like like a gun, shows it around his lunch table, and the big gumment guys shut down the school. Or they go after Aaron Swartz. They are just not competent. So, they are not effective. "Big" is always a threat: Ike warned about the military-industrial complex, and the bigness is much of the positive feedback loop that has it grow. Sure, we'd both like more competence. Remember 9/11? Or, remember one of the core reasons? Right: Some semi-, pseudo-, quasi-bright guy had one of his better ideas: If a terrorist tries to take over an airplane in mid-flight, then don't resist and, instead, let him have it. Presto: Open, engraved invitation to 9/11. Bet you can't do that now. Even if managed to get on an airplane with various weapons, bet couldn't take over the plane and fly it into a big building. So, need the TSA, DHS, and NSA for that? Nope: Just change the silly rule that says give an airplane to any terrorist who asks. Competence is more difficult. I'm all for more in competence. But big and competent don't go well together. Look, it's not worth trashing our Constitution, setting up an organization that could take us to Hitler, and wasting the big bucks to set up an NSA that could catch another Boston bomber, even if such an organization could catch another bomber, which likely they can't. Heck, again, the Russians told us about those two loser, wacko nutjobs, which is much better info than we could have hoped for from the NSA, and still we did nothing. Big gumment in England? Go after a guy because of something about pictures of nude children on his computer that turned out to be his grandchildren playing with water in the yard. Big gumment in the US? Have some Department of Natural Resources (DNR) go after a couple with several cats, several dogs, and a five year old deer they had raised from a fawn whose mother had just been killed in an auto accident, really, a minute or so before the fawn was born. So the DNR has in their imagination that deer, with their hoofs, can hurt people. Of course, in this case, the deer has been just fine, in the house, with several dogs and cats, for five years, not even hurting the furniture. Big gumment. And we have the Aaron Swartz case, gumment going wacko over some PDF files readily available to everyone at MIT for free and in paper form in nearly every research library in the world for the cost of photocopying. Big gumment. We saw in the IRS case big gumment abusing its powers. Well, the NSA data would be an engraved invitation to more such abuses -- shakedowns, blackmail, payoffs, kickbacks, etc. In reality, the more effective gumment you want will have to be smaller gumment. There's a recent example with the F-35. Supposedly part of the problem with that program is that someone wants to change the specifications on some screw, so they have a meeting all day with everyone affected, 600 people, that is a representative from each of all the possibly affected subcontractors or some such. The solution? The Lockheed Skunk Works deliberately kept small enough to keep up communications and keep down the huge meetings. For the NSA phone data, that sounds like the old project Total Information Awareness or some such. There has been a little company on a few floors of a not very attractive office building on the space of a shopping mall in a suburb of Boston. Once I went for an interview. I used to do 'artificial intelligence', i.e., 'expert systems', and they were big on that, likely from what some people at DARPA are still dreaming about. So, they wanted to get data on phone calls, maybe e-mail messages, postcards, whatever, with data on from, to, and date, and then build a big directed graph with an arc for each communication and a node for each person sending or receiving. Then they wanted to do some analysis of the graph, look for 'cliques' or some such. While they explained, I tried to stay awake, but being really interested was asking too much. BS. Total BS. But it looks like the graph people have taken over the NSA. All the brighter people in Russia are likely doing a ROFL. I'm not laughing: It's expensive, dumb, and dangerous. Just cut it back.

machfive 13y ago
while you make good points, please stop spelling it 'gumment', it makes you sound like one of the nutjobs.
- crazypyro 13y ago
  I honestly had no idea what he meant by "gumment" and thought it was similar to a gauntlet or something. Had to say it out loud before I finally got it. Whats the fucking point of abbreviating something like government to gumment? It just makes you look unintelligent...
  - ByronT 13y ago
    It made me hungry for gumbo.
  - graycat 13y ago
    'Government' is too respectful. 'Gumment' has the contempt of some barefoot guy in the hills of east Tennessee out in the woods with a home built still. I find that contempt very appropriate. Otherwise your point is well taken.
- rdouble 13y ago
  I've never been able to figure the gumment/gubmint guys out. Are they making fun of rednecks? Or are they assuming the role of some sort of redneck freedom fighter? Do rednecks even say "gumment?"
  - graycat 13y ago
    I don't remember just where I got 'gumment', but I did spend a lot of time in Tennessee! But, I stand corrected and more highly polished before the more sensitive HN audience and will use 'government' (cough, cough, upchuck). But we should always keep in mind who's paying the bills: They are supposed to be working for us.

squidsoup 13y ago

In the United States I'm not so certain that you can place the blame on uninformed citizens given that you effectively have a 2 party political system and both parties have been complicit in domestic surveillance.

graycat 13y ago
In general, you put both the McDonald's and Wendy's close together in the best location on Main Street so that they can each get a good shot at half the business. Else one of those two is out at one end or the other of Main Street and gets only about 1/4th business. Much the same for political parties: They look like there's not much difference. Some of the Dems are a bit left of Mao, and some of the Repubs are a bit to the right of Genghis Khan, still the actual parties want to look close to the center. But where is the 'center'? And what issues are hot in the center? That depends a lot on the voting citizens and what the media thinks they can get away with pushing. I contend that with better informed citizens, we would have had political debates on a much higher level, have just avoided The Great Recession because we never would have done something as dumb as the bubble blowing, and done much better on addressing the issues in foreign policy that got us to throw away a few trillion dollars, etc. Clinton was paying off the national debt; without the costs of the wars and with the taxes from full employment instead of the unemployment from The Great Recession, we could have had the debt paid off by now or nearly so. Why would it be good to pay off the debt? Because then the US Treasury is not borrowing so much money and, then, interest rates are lower for the rest of us and, in effect, our economy has more 'seed corn', investment capital for growth. For all those years since Clinton, we could have the economy charging ahead, without inflation, so fast that companies would be recruiting in the poor areas, providing buses from the poor areas to the offices, paid training in the offices, etc. It was happening in the 1960s. Let's take one issue: Abortion. I claim that in reality, in practice, no matter what you believe about abortion, good, bad, or indifferent, actually there's no real issue. Why? Because Roe v Wade was decided about 40 years ago, and there's no chance it will be changed. When we are well on the way to getting 2/3rds of the House, 2/3rds of the Senate, and 3/4ths of the states ready to change Roe v Wade, abortion can be an issue again. In the meanwhile, what is abortion in politics? Sure, a way to get some people all wound up over something that's not going to change. Why? Because some Repubs feel strongly that abortion is really bad and want to hear that some politician is 'against it'. Because a lot of Dems believe that someday they might need an abortion and want that option open to them so want to hear some politician is 'for it'. Either way, Roe v Wade's not going to be changed. So, with better informed voters, just informed enough to realize that Roe v Wade is 40 years old and a constitutional amendment takes the 2/3rds, 2/3rds, and 3/4ths, we could just quit talking about abortion and move on to, say, how to get the economy going and how to say out of absurd foreign adventures. In our democracy, the voters get the government they deserve. Better informed voters stand to get better government. If the voters get smarter, then the two seemingly dumb-dumb parties will keep up with the voters.