I got a couple of interesting emails in the last couple of days.
First, Jerry sent me this gem:
Congress now speaks at almost a full grade level lower than it did just seven years ago, with the most conservative members of Congress speaking on average at the lowest grade level, according to a new Sunlight Foundation analysis of the Congressional Record using Capitol Words.
And, for those of you who want to get into the details of why West Virginia was buying $22,500 routers to bring Internet service to rural libraries with two PCs, Brian sends this deeper dive into the issue. It turns out that West Virginia has paid almost $1.2 million for maintenance on routers that have been in boxes for two years.
Southern Beale
How is that possible? How do you pay maintenance on routers that aren’t set up? A maintenance contract, perhaps? I’d be looking into kickbacks on that scheme.
In other news, today I learned the reason we don’t have high-speed rail in this country is because after World War II, the big, bad government set rail speed limits. Yes, it’s true! You’d think a problem like that would have been easy to solve but apparently, no! Once the government sets a speed limit it’s evidently permanent!
Okay children, that is today’s Wingnut History Lesson! Now, remember to turn in your Atlas Shrugged book reports tomorrow!
{{ head —> desk —> BANG BANG BANG }}
aimai
A full grade level? The Republicans dropped from 4th grade to gibbering. That’s at least three grade levels.
aimai
Southern Beale
@aimai:
The best part is that they blamed the Tea Party. LOL.
Schlemizel
I have to say I called it that a huge part of the cost was Cisco’s over-inflated support costs. If you are talking to a Cisco sales drone keep you hand on your wallet because they have no mercy.
dr. bloor
What happens to the average grade level when you factor out The Orange Boner’s sobbing?
Jay in Oregon
@Southern Beale:
It’s not that unusual, though I wouldn’t say it’s a great use of taxpayer money.
I do technical support for a small(-ish) company that sells some custom software; specifically, I handle customers who purchase maintenance contracts. It’s not that uncommon to hear “yeah, we bought this almost a year ago and we’re just now getting around to installing it…”
EDIT: Also, what Schlemizel said.
Jado
I’m not sure what the big deal is – WV voters send morons to Charleston/ morons blow money on unnecessary government contracts and then cry poor mouth while cutting taxes for coal barons/ voters, children, and innocent bystanders in West Virginia suffer.
It a Libertarian’s dream!! The FREE MARKET in Action!! WOO HOO!!
Of course, the fact that some of those contracts may have involved corruption or kickbacks is neither here nor there. After all that’s just the cost of doing business in a “free” market.
AYN RAND FOR PRESIDENT!!!
NotMax
Couple of tech stories related to Congress and the gummint:
Wyden: White House-backed cybersecurity bill sacrifices privacy
Expect to hear/read a lot more about the CISPA bill (or, as I deem it, the Congress Instigates Stopping Privacy Altogether bill) mentioned in that link as it slithers through the process.
File this next one under “No sh*t, Sherlock:”
Ex-FCC commissioner laments decline of competition
geg6
@Southern Beale:
Heh.
On another (but related to Teahadist idiots) note, I found this story chuckle worthy:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/05/craven_is_as_craven_does.php?ref=fpblg
You can almost hear him speaking veeeeerrrrrrrryyyyyyy sloooooooooooowly in those two emails to his Teahadist
overlordsfans.Holden Pattern
Maintenance (means you get firmware updates) & tech support contracts run from day of sale (or sometimes from the day the period allocated for initial testing ends). Nobody runs those contracts from “installation” because the vendor has no idea when that is.
The problem here is still mostly WV’s procurement process.
Saxifrage
Check out the list of Congress’ top SAT words arranged by frequency and speaker in the Sunlight link.
Top word: Compromise
Top speaker of this word: Harry Reid (who personally accounts for almost 10% of uses of the total uses of “compromise” in Congress)
There’s your 21st century American political history in a nutshell.
jonas
Both Democrats and Republicans are talking dumber as of late, though the GOP’s descent into preschool pablum has been notably faster. I think this has less to do with Congresspeople getting dumber and more to do with, as the article points out, the fact that our political discourse is increasingly carried out in brief, consultant-crafted, poll-tested press releases or tweets designed to avoid making real policy arguments (which would require explaining things). This allows its user to deflect the worst of all political epithets: “elitist”. Since this anti-intellectualism is particularly virulent on the Right these days, GOP Congresspeople are forced to act like a dumbed-down version of Larry the Cable Guy in order to get elected.
joes527
I’m having a hard time getting all worked up over the West Virginia thing. Shit like that happens _all_ _the_ _time_ in the private sector. Sometimes actual capacity planning is more expensive than just buying the package deal and putting shit on the shelf ’till you can figure out what you are doing.
The myth of a perfectly efficient private sector is just that – a myth. (actually, it is a myth that has become a religion)
So the public sector isn’t perfectly efficient either.
Meh.
Matthew B.
I wouldn’t make too much of this; the Flesch-Kincaid test (like all similar automated tests) is almost worthless. The linked post does at least point out that the Gettysburg Address and King’s “I have a dream” speech have low Flesch-Kincaid scores.
Gin & Tonic
@joes527: This.
You pay maintenance on stuff you buy from the point in time you buy it, or some objectively-defined time shortly afterward. If your IT staff doesn’t get it installed or working correctly, that’s your problem, not the vendor’s. This is not unique to Cisco, and not unique to the public sector. It happens everywhere all the time.
As to Schlemizel’s point about “keep your hand on your wallet”, people who can’t tell when their wallet is being lifted shouldn’t be signing purchase orders. Especially purchase orders with eight digits in them. Again, this is not in any way unique to Cisco.
RareSanity
What happened in WV, is something that engineers in both government and private sector, complain about all the time.
The “business” and “sales” types, that are usually the decision makers in organizations, do not consult people that know what they’re talking about, before making decisions like this. Then when it bites them in the ass, they always blame the salesperson they were talking too.
Even the most entry-level IT guy working for the State, if asked, would have said, “You guys don’t really need the type of routers they’re trying to sell you”. All WV needed, was a crapload of 1100 series routers, which are about $400 a piece.
How long would it really have taken, for someone in procurement, to pick up the phone and call the IT “manager”, and simply ask, “Cisco is trying to sell us router X to put in the libraries, what do you think”?
But no. All of the “decision makers” feel like they’re experts on the subject, because the salesperson used a bunch of buzzwords, and they now think they possess the expertise to purchase network equipment.
Like Schlemizel said, you don’t meet with a Cisco salesperson ignorantly, and then allow them to “sell” you something. You meet with a Cisco sales person informed, and tell them which products you need. They are merely the distributor for those products.
You let any salesperson tell you what you need, and more often than not, they will bend you over and ride you till the cows come home.
This is why engineers make horrible salespeople. We are problem solvers and minimalists. It is hard for us to try and sell someone, something that, we know good and damn well they don’t need.
joes527
@RareSanity:
We actually make lousy buyers too.
We can mouth the words “too much local optimization is itself inefficient” but we don’t really believe it.
gaz
@RareSanity:
Yeah, that’s largely accurate in my experience, but I know a few that are good at wearing both hats. Watch out for those people, they are dangerous! =)
RareSanity
@joes527:
My boss, a wise and grizzled veteran of engineering, always says, “Sometimes you have to shoot the engineer and get on with the project”.
@gaz:
Yeah, the types that wear those two hats, are almost the “black hats” of the engineering world, they use their powers for evil. I like to think that they are really salespeople that have uncommon technical ability, rather than engineers with uncommon sales abilities.
Michele C.
Why don’t I ever get a tech-support job where I don’t do anything for millions of dollars?
Villago Delenda Est
I read somewhere, perhaps in the comments here, that the WVA situation was that Verizon sold them some sort of package that included the Cisco routers. I find this very believable, in that you should never, ever trust a telco sales rep on anything technical. All they know about is their commission, few of them have the slightest clue as to the technical or bureaucratic implications of what they’re selling.
Mike Jones
I’ve worked in technology companies selling to state and local governments as a systems engineer for about 20 years, and I’m not really surprised by this. I think several of the earlier comments are probably spot on. The initial purchase was probably either a) some sort of package deal where the cost of the routers was buried, or b) some pet legislator directing the deal. As for the maintenance, I see that *all the time*. Government purchasing rules seem to end up forcing people to buy more than they need up front because it’s easier to get one big appropriation for a project than to get it split up over a few years, so there is often equipment sitting and waiting for the next phase of a project. And yes, the manufacturers generally require than maintenance be purchased along with the equipment and kept current, because otherwise people would wait until something broke then purchase maintenance to get it fixed.
Mike G
I work in corporate IT and I see this all the time.
This is basically institutional inertia. The effort to evaluate the different libraries, determine which ones need which model of router, and make a staggered series of purchases of combinations of router models and maintenace contracts concordant with actually putting them into production soon after the purchase, is just too daunting with the approvals and paperwork involved in a top-down bureaucracy.
So the process becomes “F* it, pick one model and make one purchase for everybody”.
And Cisco bones everyone on their service contracts. You don’t buy their gear for the value-for-money.
AA+ Bonds
That sounds like good Republican message discipline to me
AA+ Bonds
@RareSanity:
No offense, but if more engineers could figure out where a comma goes in a sentence . . .
AA+ Bonds
Certainly, everyone on both sides could stand to learn some skills. My latest experience was with the propeller-heads in the IT department doing an end run and convincing the boss to shut down all access to streaming media sites for all departments to speed up connections.
The problem? They included the communications/PR and marketing offices in their power play . . . and if that wasn’t bad enough, it was in the middle of a week when access to those sites was crucial. You better believe those IT guys were back in the boss’s office by the end of the day.
People outside of the tech crews could stand to learn more about what they’re using, and the tech folks could stand to learn a little more about business processes and the value of communication and consultation (the communications/PR department, for what it’s worth, has become a secondary IT department for internal solutions).
AA+ Bonds
@Matthew B.:
And those examples, to me, shows why the scale may not be “worthless”, even if it has been overrated: I find that lower scores tend to match up with positive feedback from the folks I most respect. F-K checks are a rough way to curb people writing for a popular audience.
This does point to message discipline, though – the Republicans jumped on the technology first and still do it better.