latetotheparty

Here’s the very best summation I’ve seen connecting the dots

“If I go hire a lawyer, what am I looking for? I’m looking for competent advocacy. Whatever else you say about these people in Justice, they have fucked up confirmations of a Supreme Court justice; they’ve mishandled the prosecution of terrorism cases; they’ve mishandled the writing and the passage of the Patriot Act. And now they have aggressively and foolishly taken on the appointment of U.S. attorneys”—who traditionally get named via consultation with the U.S. Senators from the state in which the district is located—”and turned this political move into a seeming criminal conspiracy. If these guys were the lawyers you hired to handle your divorce, you’d complain to the state bar.”
—- Jonathan Shapiro, USC Law School  (former Asst US Attorney under Bush 41)

( the whole piece by Chris Lehmann is perfectly framed, at NYObserver.com: http://observer.com/20070402/20070402_Chris_Lehmann_opinions_newsstory1.asp )

I am such a geek…

A list of infrequent HTTP/1.1 status codes.

HTTP 220 (The Clooney): Same as 200 with a little something in there for your trouble.

(thx, djacobs)

… and a lot’s happened.

From today’s Chicago Sun Times, Obama’s wife Michelle is quoted introducing her husband to the crowd at the University of Illinois on Sunday 2/11, “Don’t be fooled by people who claim that it is not his time. The kind of leadership we need now is more intangible — it’s not practiced, it’s not calculated.”

Excuse me, but I sort of WANT a little “practiced” in my President. (Haven’t we just lived through six years of un-practiced?)

From a monday night check of the Lansing State Journal website (the complete, published story):

Two East Lansing students diagnosed with whooping cough

Midday Update
By Nicole Geary
Lansing State Journal

Local health officials are concerned that staff and students at East Lansing High School may have been exposed to pertussis, or whooping cough, since two ninth-graders were diagnosed with the contagious disease.

Ingham County Health Department Medical Director Dean Sienko said anyone experiencing symptoms should seek medical attention. He recommends all students and staff, especially those connected with the ninth grade, get an optional booster vaccine for protection.

Whooping cough is spread by respiratory droplets dispersed into the air by coughing or sneezing.

Superintendent David Chapin said free vaccines will be available at the school on Wednesday and Thursday.

He’s sending a letter to all high school households today.

For more on this report, read Tuesday’s State Journal.

What are the symptoms? What does the letter say? Why are there no links to WebMD or wikipedia?

This is bad journalism, and bad for public health to boot. Sadly, typical for the LSJ.

Brilliant explanation of the opportunity cost of little fixes that will take “only two hours” (at Agile Advice via Joelonsoftware):

“It just takes 2 hours. It can’t hurt!”
It can. We development managers learned it the hard way. We know how programmers think. We know how expensive switching their context is. If Sarah spends just two hours thinking of her old project, she loses a day of productive work on the new one. One day is 10% of a carefully planned iteration wasted if she spends 2 hours sidetracked.In the wild nature of software development shops, however, it never takes 2 hours. 2 hours is the time Sarah is on the phone trying to clarify the problem. 2 hours is the time she is waiting for this phone call, reluctant to get into anything serious. 2 hours is the time Sarah is tweaking her development environment to build her old project. 2 hours is the time Sarah is spending to see if she can come up with a very restricted workaround. 2 hours is the time Sarah is on another phone call, explaining the potential workaround. Not enough time for real solution, no time spent on actually resolving the problem. 10 hours of unplanned and unproductive time is spread out over 3 days. 30% of iteration wasted.

At this point the planning goes down the toilet. The iteration is dead. The new project is slipping late. The rush around the old project yields little results either: with no time for a real solution the best bet there is a quick and dirty fix.

But the harm goes further. Sarah was eager to spend time on programming - she wasted it. She is robbed of her professional satisfaction, the good feeling of achieving the iteration goal and releasing project on time. On the next iteration planning session Sarah can’t help thinking “Why kill time if we don’t stick to the plan anyways?” The team gets the message: “We are NOT seriously doing iterative development. We are going ad-hoc”.

From a response to the WSJ “Capital” column on executive pay:

Check out a chart of the income tax rates (Siegel has a good one in his book “Stocks for the Long Run”) and you’ll see the tax rate on the highest incomes was 90% from the mid-1940’s to 1962 and then 70% from 1962 to late 1970 — hmmm — the same time when CEOs’ comp stayed relatively the same as hourly workers. In 1981 the top marginal tax rate dropped to 50% and is now 35%. When the extra dollar earned by CEOs stopped going mostly to Uncle Sam, the CEOs decided they wanted/needed more.

“…The city government over the past 20 years mostly has poured money into general beautification and infrastructure rather than wooing specific industries, says Glen Marker, director of research for World Business Chicago, a not-for-profit economic development corporation headed by Mayor Richard M. Daley…”

God help me for quoting Peggy Noonan, but she’s right in an aside in “Is there Progress Through Loss” published in Opinion Journal today, 10/28:

(An unreported story this year is the lack of imagination, seriousness and respect in the work of political consultants on both sides. They have got to catch up with American brightness.)

The ultimate problem lies with the consultant business model: spread-too-thin firms who look for the shortest-distance-between-two-points solutions– solutions that lack depth and, if you will, soul.

Couple the poor executions with pounding them into people by over-running them (2000 points is a common buy level nowadays– 100 points meaning that the equivalent of 100% of the people in the market will view the ad once. So, the average person in a market will see the ad 20 times– kind of hard to take, if the ad has all the imagination of “Head on: apply directly to the forehead!”) and you have a real overdose problem.

LOVING: crisp fall pre-election fall days, with enough sleep/time to enjoy them.
HATING: people who ask for professional advice by email and then never even acknowledge receiving the reply. What’s up with that?

(guide to life tip: thank people even if you don’t agree with them)

I am liking Peggy Noonan these days. And not just because she’s confirming one of my central principles of decisionmaking: we are all prisoners of our own experience. She illustrates this twice in one column (in today’s WSJ), two sides of the Bushies’ coin: they had no combat experience, but did have experience listening to State Dept. drones:

“…I have come to give greater credence to the importance, in the age of terror, among our leaders, of having served in the military. For you need personal experience that you absorbed deep down in your bones, or a kind of imaginative wisdom that tells you even though you were never there what war is like, what invasion is…”

(snip)

“…Here I add something I have been thinking about the past year. It is about the young guys at the table in the Reagan era. The young, midlevel guys who came to Washington in the Reagan years were always at the table in the meeting with the career State Department guy. And the man from State, timid in all ways except bureaucratic warfare, was always going “Ooh, aah, you can’t do that, the Soviet Union is so big, Galbraith told us how strong their economy is, the Sandinistas have the passionate support of the people, there’s nothing we can do, stop with your evil empire and your Grenada invasion, it’s needlessly aggressive!” Those guys from State — they were almost always wrong. Their caution was timorousness, their prudence a way to evade responsibility. The young Reagan guys at the table grew up to be the heavyweights of the Bush era. They walked into the White House knowing who’d been wrong at the table 20 years before. And so when State and others came in and said, “The intelligence doesn’t support it, we see no WMDs,” the Bush men knew who not to believe.

History is human.”