Look. Just before I get to the snark, I want to recall that the Democrats do not have a guaranteed lasting tech advantage. The machine knowns no party. There are plenty of smart GOP leaning engineers. Even more important, tech is a tool in politics, not a magic wand — as DougJ pointed out a couple of days ago. One of these days we’ll be back at a point of parity in the computer wizard department.
That said, I can’t help thinking that the latest GOPster attempt to bottle their answer to Obama’s data magic isn’t off to a great start. Not with boss talk like this:
Mike Shields, chief of staff for the RNC, told NBC he’s begun the work of “fundamentally restructuring” the organization’s use of technology ….
[Shields said] “By first combining digital, data and tech you are creating synergy in all of those areas based upon what data you are creating and what it tells you about voters…”
Lots of ways to snark this, and I’m sure you all can fill that parameter space pretty well.
As for me? Well, first I’ll grab the low hanging fruit. “synergy?”…
“Synergy?!” …
SYNERGY!!!!!!!
He actually said that? That’s so…sweet, almost. So very ’90s. If I’m a Republican techie hearing that, I’m weeping into my medicinal a.m. cocktail.
Put it another way: I don’t see the RNC approaching nerdvana until Reince Preibus and his minions actually get this joke:
(Via the irreplaceble xkcd.)
Mark S.
Some people still use “synergy” unironically?
BGinCHI
“digital, data and tech”?
What?
And with no Oxford comma?
These guys are finished.
dmsilev
Synergy? Seriously?
Does anyone sell consultant-be-gone spray? I think the RNC might need some; they’ve got a bad infestation.
RSA
I spent the past weekend writing Lisp code… Fun stuff. It’s going back to my roots–after brief exposure to the language in college, I worked on Lisp machines (mainly TI Explorers, but occasionally a Symbolics, a Lambda, a MacIvory, or a MicroExplorer) for the next ten years or so.
aimai
I said this below in a thread but its worth repeating here: technology is, of course, only as good as your ground crew. Yesterday I got doorknocked by a woman out with “minivan” the same handheld iphone app we used in the co-ordinated Obama/Warren campaign. They have already uploaded (presumably) every Warren voter and they are going door to door and just touching base with their voters to assess whether Warren/strong democratic voters are aware of/planning to vote for Markey. She also passed off literature about Markey and Green technology.
She had both me and my husband (different names) at our location but not enough information about him so I filled that in for her. Now they know that on election day if we haven’t voted they can come and drag us out and be sure that we will vote for Markey. Two sure votes are more important than wasting money converting votes or trying to persuade someone else’s voters to change their votes (although that’s good too in an off season election its turnout that matters. Plenty of people are going to say they will spite vote or vote for the republican or vote for your candidate and simply never show up at the polls because they forget to vote on a strange day).
Minivan makes easy, accessible, and useable a huge amount of data and that may help people be willing to canvass and to GOTV. But its not a panacea for an unattractive or unknown candidate (Markey’s basically unknown and he is going to get in because we are yellow dog democrats and Warren is making everybody happy. He’s drafting off her popularity).
To get back to the Republican issue: I don’t think knowing where your pissed off angry white elderly voters live , and where the hispanic voters live, in more granular detail is going to help GOTV when your actual candidate is pissing on actual voters by promising to cut medicare or prevent amnesty or whatever other thing Republicans have to promise in a changing electorate.
Higgs Boson's Mate
That susurrus is the sound of legions of grifters practicing nerd speak.
Wag
I think the problem is that they are CREATING data, not ANALYSING data.
Case in point is Karl Rove’s “polling” around the 2012 election. When they created polling data, it told them what they wanted to hear, instead what should have been obvious if they had opened their eyes.
Omnes Omnibus
Methinks Mr. Shields doesn’t actually understand anything about the topic.
jrg
(cons)
NonyNony
(At least) Two things are going to hinder Republicans being able to replicate the Democratic technology successes from last cycle:
1) They still don’t seem to have internalized the reason why the Obama team’s use of technology was so successful. It was used to support a GOTV effort of a huge magnitude. The Democratic party in an inclusive party (aka a “Big Tent” party) and so it has a huge pool of voters. The problem the Dems have always had is that that pool is wide but shallow – voters don’t always turn out and need to be pushed, driven, cajoled and otherwise convinced to turn out at elections. The tech used this cycle enabled that in a way that hadn’t been able to be done before.
The GOP doesn’t have that problem. They are an exclusive party and so they aren’t going to see the same advantages of this kind of tech any time soon. They need to figure out their own techniques (and frankly they had a “tech advantage” for the last decade and a half with the basic structure of corporate media, talk radio and their “ownership” of the Fox News propaganda outlet – this is just the Democrats finally figuring out that they need to play their own game and not try to play the Republican’s game.)
2) The Republican party apparatus is full of grifting “consultants” who can say things like this with a straight face and still be handed wads of cash:
I mean seriously – what kind of string of nonsense is that? It can mean just about anything anybody wants it to mean. Which is the first mark of a grifting consultant – the ability to use a whole lot of words to say nothing, and let you infer what you want on top of their words.
The Moar You Know
Classic managerial bullshit mission statement, complete with “synergy”. The hard work of relieving the rubes of their pocket money is obviously not done yet.
One day, when the economy is patched back together, the GOP will want to win races. I expect they’ll have some pretty decent tech for that. Or a whole lot of rednecks with pickup trucks and AR-15s. Either way, they’ll get serious and our so-called “tech advantage” will have met its match.
Obviously that day is not going to be here for a while, so sit back and enjoy the ride.
Higgs Boson's Mate
“I have ordered several barrels of tech which I will pour over digital and data. I will create a new paradigm when I pour the resultant synergistic mass through a colander and serve the votes on a bed of green lettuce.”
Higgs Boson's Mate
“I have ordered several barrels of tech which I will pour over digital and data. I will create a new paradigm when I pour the resultant synergistic mass through a colander and serve the votes on a bed of green lettuce.”
Bulworth
The Internet…it’s a series of tubes.
jrg
@Wag: Indeed. Good data is hard to come by. That’s why it’s so well protected from damage and theft.
I don’t care how well you can program a computer… If you’ve got no ground game and your core demographics are technologically illiterate, you’re dead in the water.
piratedan
well he most definitely won buzzword bingo, sounds more like a lame ass corporate mission statement than a game plan
NonyNony
@RSA:
I’m jealous – Lisp is a beautiful language. All of my work lately has been in Java.
Wag
FTFY
Amir Khalid
Tinkerng at the margins, I believe it’s called. This seems to say that the Republican party has missed the lesson of 2012: they lost because of a party philosophy that does nothing for the country, promoted by an unappealing candidate.
Rather than re-examining the philosophy, which is going to involve some painful soul-searching and no small political risk, they’re working on IT infrastructure for the next presidential campaign. So in 2016 American voters can be disappointed by the Republican platform that much faster.
Wag
@jrg:
…but hard data is good to come by,
Omnes Omnibus
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: You forgot the Thermomix. And in a TL thread…
RSA
@NonyNony:
It is! The undergrads in my CS department all know Java by the time they take my classes, and occasionally I’ll introduce them to a bit of Lisp. Some concepts are easier to explain in the language, I think.
NonyNony
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Need to be more proactive.
Amir Khalid
Someone should have asked the obvious question by now: By any chance, does this Mike Shields have pointy hair?
gelfling545
Say what?
mouse tolliver
The word synergy always makes me think of Jem and the Holograms. Because I’m old.
Alex S.
They also want to overhaul their polling. It’s all about creating a better image, a shinier surface. They think it’s all about getting each and every likely republican voter, but they seem to ignore that republicans are already more likely to vote (usually). Higher turnout usually means an advantage for democrats. Most apolitical people lean, if forced, towards the Democrats.
Nied
Good lord even their jargon is out of date. These days it’s all about “Event Horizons” and “Pain points” oh and “Cloud.” Gotta work cloud in there because cloud fixes everything! Got several hundred hours of programming that needs to be done? Put it on the cloud that’ll fix it! Hardware upgrades? Cloud. Meticulous database translation? The cloud will do that for you.
Villago Delenda Est
Yes, it’s low hanging fruit.
It’s a sure sign you don’t really know what the fuck you’re talking about. Someday the GOP will get a clue, but it won’t happen soon…there’s too much marketdroid bullshit permeating their feeble brains.
Russ
This might lead to a problem.
“what data you are creating “
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Amir Khalid:
Well put. There are already reams of data that show that Republicans’ ideas are unpopular. They aren’t interested in data, they’re looking for something to replace divisive racism as a way to manipulate voters.
Carl Nyberg
The problem for the GOP is that it is an authoritarian movement that has relied on its allies in the media to shepherd the rubes with propaganda.
But letting people organize online means the rubes get to take control of the message.
The GOP formula doesn’t translate well online.
It’s not obvious how to keep the hardcore bigots (the ones who want to use government to screw people they don’t like) part of the coalition when the GOP is shooting for a softer message.
Villago Delenda Est
@Nied:
My unix geek friends roll off their chairs and choke with laughter when someone mentions “the cloud”.
It’s shit you spoon feed to MBA fucktards.
R-Jud
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Needs moar “robust”. I suggest “robust new paradigm”.
MomSense
@Russ:
facepalm.
Corner Stone
I could be mistaken, but I believe the last time they created data it told them about the voters who were going to put Mitt in the WH by a landslide.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@R-Jud:
I was going to include more clichés, but my gorge started rising because it reminded me of the innumerable meetings I once had to attend.
Zifnab
@NonyNony:
Wow. I’m going to have to seriously disagree with you there. One of the myths of the 2010 election was that Democrats stayed home. In truth, it was more about Republicans showing up. The GOP still reaps big dividends when it engages in (faux-)grassroots campaigns and waves the Tea Party flag triumphantly. Freedomworks and the Tea Party were, in many respects, a very clever means of organizing GOTV for Republicans who didn’t really want to be affiliated with Republicans.
Every campaign, at the end of the day, is about GOTV. If your guy is the one knocking on someone’s door and saying “Please vote”, you don’t have to do much more than that before the uninformed voter prefers your candidate. Everything your candidate does is ultimately geared towards convincing people to get off their couches, head to the polls, and pull your lever.
Soonergrunt
@aimai:
GOTV only works if there are actual TVs to GO.
Bubblegum Tate
Good god. What’s the over/under on the number of times the phrase “outside the box” is used?
b/w
“It’s synergy, Lemon–it’s bigger than all of us!”
Villago Delenda Est
This is the problem the GOP has. They can’t sell their real policy positions. They can’t change them…it’s who they are…so it’s diversionary attack time. “Look over there… squirrel/shiny/undeserving blah/brown person!”
bjacques
Whenever someone says “synergy,” I like to raise my hand and ask whether that’s like how booze and downers together kill you more than twice as quickly as either will alone, or cheap red wine and a fistful of Seconals can morph you into a biker looking for a fight.
A fart is also a cloud, also known as an airborne toxic event.
jrg
@Villago Delenda Est: Uh, huh. Tell that to Amazon. Better yet, tell it to Obama.
Just because the term ‘cloud’ is over-used doesn’t mean that abstracting a service from it’s hardware lacks value. Anyone who’s moved a VM from one physical machine to another can understand that.
catclub
Reminded me of the demotivator on consulting:
“CONSULTING:
If you’re not part of the solution,
there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.”
Corner Stone
The problem the GOP has with technology is that it means fewer grifters get paid. If you can refine your message to motivate the most likely people to come out and vote for you, i.e. efficiency, then that means less broad spectrum ad buys.
It means a whole host of 1980’s style political advertising models go away. And of course that means all the dinosaur grifters who’ve been grifting for 3 or 4 decades get cut out of the pie.
So the new fangled manager jargon speakers will carve out their niche and get their grift. But IMO the GOP won’t change their fundamental architecture because that would mean those getting all the big grift would have to take less in order for candidates to actually have a chance at winning.
And that clearly isn’t worth it.
bjacques
@Zifnab: If that’s so, then that magical new technology would just be enabling the Republicans to do what they can do already, only with more moving parts, so more opportunities to fail publicly and spectacularly.
Not that I’d ever tell *them* that.
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake” – Napoleon.
Omnes Omnibus
@jrg: The “cloud” as a universal solution is bullshit. Clouds as potentially useful tools are not bullshit. Fifteen years ago, one could BS people by putting “e-” in front of a term.
Villago Delenda Est
@Wag:
Well, Nate Effeminate Silver analyzes data, and look what happened…analyzing data results in an inexplicable GOP defeat.
Creating data, on the other hand, by “unskewing” the polls, gives you the sort of outcome you want.
Never mind that imagining the voters will put your guy in office has all the real world impact of an X-Wing pilot taking out the Death Star, according to the script!
catclub
Another poster I found on consultants.
“The most expensive way to solve a problem, that never
really existed, with people that don’t even work for your company.”
ET
I worked for big a consulting company for 5 years. Synergy is the most overused, hackneyed, BS word EVER. I give myself permission to ignore anyone who uses it. Which is sad because it was a good word.
Soonergrunt
@jrg: “Anyone who’s moved a VM from one physical machine to another can understand that.”
And the world is just bursting with those people.
“The cloud” is nothing more than a (hopefully) secured network drive. Maybe a remote session if you want to get sophisticated about it. All else is hype.
jrg
@Soonergrunt: All hype, my rear. Did you even read the article I linked? Dropbox is not the only ‘cloud service’ available.
Villago Delenda Est
@jrg:
“Cloud” in this context is waving your hands with a “solution” that doesn’t require any thought (or massive expenditure of labor and capital) to implement.
That’s what my UNIX geek friends mock. It’s the fact that this “simple” concept is VERY complex once you look under the hood. There are all those servers and data pipes that are connected to it. The “cloud” has always been there…it’s just that we used to call it something else, and tech folks understood how much work was required to make it function in a manner that an MBA dipshit could readily grasp.
Nied
@jrg: This is an excellent point, on the other hand I almost had a huge server upgrade project (which actually involved moving six physical servers to VMs on three) that I’d been fighting for blown up when a consultant for an unrelated project started telling my boss that we could skip the hardware upgrade and just move our CRM implementation “to the cloud.” When I pointed out that this would also involve a software upgrade and re-programming quite a bit of custom code we had (which had already been quoted as taking several hundred hours by our devs) his response was “but what if it didn’t need that, what if we just moved it and went from there?” Like the cloud would just remove the need for programming or database translation.
I ended up wasting two months putting that down.
scav
The creating data is the more killer for me. There’s empty calories (synergy) and there’s drinking battery acid. first you get visions and then you die.
NonyNony
@Zifnab:
Arg – I edited part of my comment out, so I can see why you’d think I was saying that. I meant to have in there: Not only are the GOP an exclusive party, their smaller group of voters turn out and vote consistently without a massive GOTV effort on the party’s part. And that means the GOTV tech used by the Democratic party isn’t going to be as helpful to the GOP, because their voting base already gets out the vote on its own. They might get some small gains, but they need to look elsewhere to get a big push. (This is related to what you were saying about the Tea Party being a big GOTV movement for Republicans who don’t want to think of themselves as Republicans – likewise Fox News and so on. But the technology isn’t going to help them as much because they’re already doing this stuff, just in a different form).
But I disagree about 2010 being just about the GOP getting more voter turnout rather than Dems dropping the ball. A single data point isn’t sufficient, but as an example here’s Ohio 2008 presidential numbers:
Barack Obama (D): 2.9 million
John McCain (R): 2.7 million
and here’s the 2010 gubenatorial numbers:
John Kasich (R): 1.9 million
Ted Strickland (D): 1.8 million
and here’s the 2012 presidential numbers:
Barack Obama (D): 2.8 million
Mitt Romney (R): 2.6 million
Both groups lost votes in the off-year, but the (D)s lost a larger proportion of their potential voters than the GOP did. A GOTV push that got 10% more Democrats to the polls would have won it for Strickland, and notice that the differential in Obama’s two victories is about 10% of his vote total each time. So the larger drop-off in Democratic votes severely hurt Strickland in ’08 – a fairly popular governor up against a grifter.
(I don’t use our Senate race as an example because we had Lee Fischer, who lost big time and no amount of GOTV was going to save his sorry ass from that loss. GOTV matters, but before you can GOTV you have to have a candidate that there is a V to GO.)
Corner Stone
@jrg: The cloud is like any other tool. Appropriate for some tasks and the incorrect choice for others.
But the hyperbole here making fun that “The Cloud” will save us all is not too far stretched, IMO. IME, it’s a lot like the offshoring craze of a decade ago. I can’t tell you (I Joe Biden literally can’t tell you) how many of those companies and firms fell ass over teakettle to shove through offshoring agreements and are now either bringing them back, have brought those services back, or are planning to bring them back.
Nied
@jrg: This is an excellent point, on the other hand I almost had a huge server upgrade project (which actually involved moving six physical servers to VMs on three) that I’d been fighting for blown up when a consultant for an unrelated project started telling my boss that we could skip the hardware upgrade and just move our CRM implementation “to the cloud.” When I pointed out that this would also involve a software upgrade and re-programming quite a bit of custom code we had (which had already been quoted as taking several hundred hours by our devs) his response was “but what if it didn’t need that, what if we just moved it and went from there?” Like the cloud would just remove the need for programming or database translation.
I ended up wasting two months putting that down.
Soonergrunt
@jrg: “Dropbox is not the only ‘cloud service’ available.”
No, it isn’t. It isn’t even the best. But to call cloud services anything other than remote hosting is hype. There is no special magic to any of it, and if industry has finally found a way to make the same technology that corporations and businesses have been using for years available to the masses for reasonable costs/fees, then that’s really wonderful. But it’s not magic.
crosspalms
Worked all morning creating data. After a break, I’ll switch to creating jobs. It’s nose to the grindstone here at Modern GOP.
lol
“Synergy” is obnoxious, but that’s what the Obama campaign did well. Microtargeting is standard now but it doesn’t tell you everything, especially with people who appear to be “undecided”. The model will tell you that 50% of a certain group will go your way; that’s not the same thing as 100% of that group being undecided. They’re actually probably already decided and you just need to pick out which 50% it is to turn them out.
The beauty of OFA was utilizing all the sources of information it had available (especially social media) to figure out which 50% were Obama supporters.
The Republicans had a big tech advantage in 2000-2004.
Every state party had access to VoterVault. They used microtargeting well before the Dems did. And they managed to expand their base in 2004.
And then it all just sort of stagnated. The Dems caught up by using microtargeting everywhere in 2006, got VAN into every state in 2008 and then model the shit out of everything in 2012. Meanwhile, the GOP seems like it’s still stuck in 2004. You haven’t seen much innovation.
They can still catch up on tech and probably will. But the GOP’s real problem is the policies. All the tech in the world won’t help if only 27% of the public thinks you make sense.
Petorado
Disappointed that “plethora’ and “myriad” didn’t make their way in Mr. Shield’s statement. He coulda had the trifecta.
Cassidy
Macs suck. Android phones are the devil and work like a child’s playtoy.
I don’t speak techie but wanted to get in on the [what appears to be] argument.
jrg
@Corner Stone:
Absolutely true.
Sorry if I got a little testy, but the disconnect between people bashing cloud computing while praising the Dem’s tech advantage (which in OFA’s case used cloud and web services extensively) was too much to bear.
Soonergrunt
@Cassidy: But where do you stand on the Command Line vs. GUI question, and is EMACS better than multi-mode fiber optic?
Joshua Norton
By first combining digital, data and tech you are creating synergy
I’m in Tech Management and this is probably the opening line of 9/10ths of the “gee whiz, get a load of all this new cool stuff” Dog & Pony shows I have to sit thru whenever I’m forced to take a sales meeting. I’m surprised that my eye rolls aren’t audible by this time.
scav
Oh christ, what was the one about the freaking bus? I’m clearly supressing it for neural protection. And we were awash in breaking down silos, although that one in context at least made sense although I spun a lot of cycles pondering missile v. silage.
Nied
@Soonergrunt: In my story above I eventually prevailed by asking my boss “Why would our need to have stuff reprogrammed disappear just because we’re renting someone else’s servers instead of buying our own?”
Craig
As Robert Townsend said of synergies, “Two and two usually make three and you know it.”
Villago Delenda Est
@jrg:
We’re bashing the selling of cloud technology to clueless MBA fucktards who are uniquely susceptible to the use of shiny objects to distract them from hard cold reality.
Putting your shit “on the cloud” is what that idiot Weiner did with this dick pictures. Once you put your dick pictures on the intertubes in any way, you’ve lost control of them.
This is how I feel about “cloud” computing. It can be a useful tool, but it’s no substitute for having your own servers under your control, preferably several of them geographically diverse, to protect your data from harm.
But that costs money that might have gone to hookers and blow for the MBAs, so….
Xecky Gilchrist
This GOP tech fetish is pure cargo-cultism. Until they have any other approach to it than that, they’re going to blow a lot of money on quacks and not get much for it.
Watch for their next candidate to be John Frum.
Jay in Oregon
@Nied:
That’s the key to de-mystifying The Cloud: it’s just a marketing term for “Other People’s Servers”.
Southern Beale
SYNERGY!
It’s got electrolytes, you know.
/snark
jrg
Ugh. I think I’ll leave before I spend the rest of the day getting into public vs private clouds.
Soonergrunt
@jrg: I wasn’t doing anything like that. The point I was trying to make is that whether you have your systems and data in a rack down the hall, or in a rack in somebody else’s building in North Carolina, you still need DBAs, email and printer Admins, and desktop support, or at least a working knowledge of these things yourself.
A computer is a computer is a computer, and “the cloud” isn’t anything other than a marketing term, that like most other marketing terms is designed to separate the gullible from their money. If the Republicans are buying a bunch of marketing hooey instead of fixing their structural problems* then so much the better, but that doesn’t mean that the Obama campaign did anything magical. They did something first (with respect to political campaigns.)
*Their primary structural problem being that they are assholes.
Cassidy
@Soonergrunt: Apple sucks.
ETA: Seriously, anytime something electronic boots up and does what I want it to do, it’s magical to me. I’m like a caveman starting a fire when it comes to computers. I had to give up the dance of victory years ago, though, because my wife kept looking a tme funny.
aimai
@NonyNony:
Really great use of the terms big tent/inclusive and exclusive. You have put very simply what I knew but did not understand: or rather, what I was trying to get at clumsily in post upthread by saying it doesn’t do you any good to have analyzed where voters you won’t appeal to (hispanics/blacks/immigrants) need and want.
aimai
@Xecky Gilchrist:
John Frum. He Come.
high-pH Chemist
I’m honestly surprised he didn’t work “Cloud” and “cloud-based” into that spiel a couple of times.
Cassidy
For reals conversation from the past:
Friend: You have to boot up in safe mood and blahty, blahty, technobabble, jargon, I have no clue what that means.
Me: Seriously? I have to put my fucking computer on safe? Are we talking about the same thing here?
Soonergrunt
@Cassidy: “Apple sucks.”
I’m so proud! (sniff)
Roy G.
To be fair, the GOP did have their own technology wiz to help get out the R votes – after the ballots were cast. His name was Mike Connell. Unfortunately, he was killed in a plane crash at the end of Bush’s second term, before he could spread his knowledge – under subpoena.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Connell
Mike in NC
Has anybody tossed in Newt’s favorite term?
“Paradigm”, bitchez!
catclub
@Roy G.: Wow. Suggestive.
I thought it would be the guy caught in the New Hampshire phone jamming. Maybe is the same guy.
danimal
Don’t understand the tech stuff much, but I recognized the poem used up front well enough.
300baud
Tom, the Democrats may actually have a lasting edge.
If you look at what the Obama campaign did, it was very much a bottom-up, iterative strategy. They built a great team. They released early and often so they could learn along the way. To work like that requires that higher-ups have a sense of humility and a willingness to be honest that their vision is incomplete.
The Romney campaign, on the other hand, had an arrogant, top-down plan that nobody bothered to test until the day of. They thought a bunch of consultants would just make it happen because you paid them well.
Given the Republican party’s long-running push to drive out anybody who isn’t a reactionary ideologue, I’m not sure they have anybody who can even recognize the problem, let alone get them to accept an approach that isn’t in line with their top-down, daddy-with-the-MBA-knows-best, neo-feudal thinking.
With that kind of organizational bias, I think the very best they can do is to replicate the tools the Democrats had one election back. And that best is hard; more likely they’ll produce a Frankenstein version. But an Obama-style tech organization can innovate much more quickly, producing new tools (and better-polished old ones) at a rate a top-down organization can’t match.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Cassidy: Seriously, anytime something electronic boots up and does what I want it to do, it’s magical to me.
Likewise, and this is after an advanced degree in Computer Science and 35 years since I wrote my first program. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re also pretty well schooled; the more you know about machines, the more miraculous it seems when they work.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike in NC:
Paradigm used to be a useful word. Then Newt got a hold of it and fucked it up. Which is what Newt does with everything. Just look at the helmet-haired Callista, for example.
Xecky Gilchrist
@aimai: The other time I thought of this was during the Repub 2012 primaries when it kept being more and more likely, per shrill wingnut magical-thinkers, that an as-yet-unknown candidate would ride out of nowhere and replace Romney, to go on and win the election handily.
I’m not sure they aren’t still holding their breath for that.
Cassidy
@Xecky Gilchrist: Oh no. I plug things in, turn them on and hope they work. I’m competent enough to not break my stuff, but I have zero knowledge on programming or OS’s or anything like that. I get the concepts, but I really am a Neanderthal re: technology.
But I find conversationss like this interesting because if I’m sitting around with other medics or EMT’s, we’ll do the same thing. It’s the same exact type of conversation except we’re not talking about computers. Instead we’re talking about hemmorhage and triage and tourniquets and organ failure/ shock, etc., etc., etc. I think this kind of inner circle banter is interesting.
ETA: And I’m a horrible typist.
E-ETA: The same goes for cars. I “get” how they work, but I have a regular mechanic for a reason. I know enough to know when something bad or not right is happenning, but I couldn’t tell you what it is.
? Martin
This NYTimes piece should be linked for those who haven’t read it.
Relevent, I think:
It’s not just that Republicans love to be grifted. Democrats get caught there all the time as well. But Republicans have espoused grifting as virtuous. Doing whats best for the party is a form of Marxism, so profit rules everything with them. And it’s really damn hard to build anything under those set of rules unless you have money up front – and you never have money up front in politics.
But it’s worth a read. Presents more questions than answers, but it also highlights just how insular and lost the GOP really is.
Villago Delenda Est
@300baud:
Well, there you go. The last quality that Rmoney could ever have is “humility”, and in nano-sized quantities.
ruemara
@Soonergrunt: Shut up, you two weenies.
I don’t think we need to worry about the GOP gaining technological superiority any time soon. They’re not a party that attracts the mental flexibility, innovative crowd.
Also, command line has some serious elegance-if you speak the language-whereas a well-designed GUI gives a very easy work interface for complicated program structure. other than that, I forgot all the COBOL I ever learned and I can’t stay focused enough to add the Java except in my cup.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Cassidy: Oh, OK. My dear old dad is an M.D. and has much the same view of the human body as I do of computers – amazing that that pile of kludgery works.
I’m right there with you wrt cars.
danah gaz
Most of the right-winger techies I’ve known have been glibertarians. They’re also often MRA wannabes as well, which tends to make I.T. rather unpleasant if you don’t happen to be one of them.
I’m not sure about real engineering. I am only commenting on software techies.
Villago Delenda Est
@? Martin:
They’re Ferengi-Pakled hybrids.
Greedy and clueless.
Shinobi
Moving forward, please use the more current phrase “synergistic.”
Cassidy
@Xecky Gilchrist: Oh man, if you stop and thinking about the thousands of processes that absolutely have to occur within the human body every single day and then consider how helpless we were as children and that we had to rely on other competent people to aid that….we’re all lucky to be alive. It’s mind blowing.
ETA: And then how easiy it is to manipulate. That’s all Pre-Hospital/ Battlefield Trauma Medicine is is manipulating the processes to maintain acceptable stability. And lately I’ve been *researching anabolic steroids and that stuff is amazing.
*Not for personal use, but as a fight fan. I wouldn’t even know wher to look.
cat
can we haz lisp vs badly designed OO languages flame war?
Having spent a week or two delving into a new OO software pattern, DCI, in clojure I totally get the lisp fans now.
Duck Typing removes the comfy blanket of compile time type safety but replaces it with the need to properly test and protect your code. 20 years of SE has taught me the hard way that unit tests and planning for failure are better SE practices then compile time type checking. It maybe easier to teach OO in Java or C++ with their type safety, but the interaction of all those types turns into a giant mess when you try to compose many different objects.
Hillary Rettig
@Corner Stone: interesting point. another is that the Republican lizard brain is hopelessly hierarchical and command-and-control oriented, which means it’s in direct conflict with the most effective distributed systems and development processes.
it’s no accident that Romney, who has nothing but contempt for workers, used an it system and process that was severely centralized and controlled. (no real training, no beta testing, no real data for vols to work with until the night before, etc.)
Romney is an ass and an incompetent, but even a smarter Republican will have trouble overcoming this barrier.
Lurking Canadian
@Xecky Gilchrist: A lot of things have to go right just for that first light to blink.
And I still like “synergy”. The language needs a word that means “by putting this group together, we will create a collective that has capabilities no individual member of the collective had at the beginning”. That cretinous MbAs overrides the word until it became a satire of itself should not affect the cromulence of a term.
And holy shit, autocorrect thinks “cromulence” is really a word.
Captain Goto
@Soonergrunt: I saw what you did there.
Cassidy
@Lurking Canadian:
I remember when that simply called teamwork.
@Captain Goto: I did not.
Todd
Tech issues are objective, not subjective. The GOP turnout model requires sales of great subjectivity, and they’re now subject to the iron laws of diminishing returns.
Corner Stone
@Lurking Canadian:
It’s a perfectly cromulent word.
Corner Stone
@Captain Goto: Well, Goto, I for one sure as hell hope so.
ruemara
I just realized my organization hired someone to increase our technology synergy. And he sounds like this RNC consultant. Oh dear.
roc
FWIW: the GOP-leaning tech people are the same ones who loathe other people. The odds of them creating effective tools to efficiently connect grass-roots individuals is close to zero. They aren’t wired for it. And, in broad terms, their base isn’t particularly tech-connected either.
What they *are* wired for, however, is creating massive databases of dirt, dirty tricks, misinformation strategies, creating sock-puppets to sway online dialogue and seed memes, creating tools to allow a handful of operatives to more-efficiently control said sock-puppets, etc.
And that’s all perfectly aligned with GOP strategy.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@RSA: I’ve convinced my middle child to learn Lisp with me. Ok, the Land of Lisp website convince him because it contained a cartoon, but he’s got some natural skill at programming and the hook on the book is that you get to write some text games while learning the language.
While doing that I am concurrently learning Haskell.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Lisp? Perl?! Ha! Everyone knows that the One True Language is INTERCAL!
brantl
No, actually, there aren’t.Not anymore. Not even smart enough to wince when reality bites them on the ass.
AfGuy
@Cassidy: I tend to think of DNA as the most massive config or registry file ever conceived. With infinitely more caveats for messing with it that you ever would for manually screwing with a program config file or registry.
The scientists that are fascinated with the Human Genome Project (and terrified of messing with genes without knowing what affects what) are the brighter ones.
The ones most eager to start genetically modifying life for fun and profit (mostly profit), without think too far ahead, are the ones that scare me.
D Mohr
I am embarrassed by my ignorance, but I do not understand the reference in the poem to “)”. Can someone help?
RSA
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I think I see what you did there.
I haven’t come across the Land of Lisp before. (And I thought I was still relatively tuned in. Guess not.) Looks interesting…
Jeffery Bahr
@Petorado: I know that I do not have your superior intellect and education. But could it be that once again, you are angry at something else, and are looking to take it out on me?
Joe Buck
The Republicans cannot rival the Democrats on the technology front until they are willing to accept what the data are telling them about what’s what instead of insisting on believing what their guts tell them. As Colbert would say, as long as Republicans prefer truthiness, reality will continue to have a well-known liberal bias.
MarkusOfarkus
Guys. Sorry. There is a big difference between “cloud” and traditional hosting or “other people’s servers” or even just plain “virtualization”.
I’m not saying there isn’t a lot of hype. And I completely *agree* you still need to employ admins, devops, DBAs, developers etc. Of course you do.
So like many other things, cloud is over hyped by many and then over laughed at by others. To just call it hosting+marketing is really wrong though. Standard hosting did not historically provide fully self-serve provisioning with an API. Being able to deploy, tear down, and scale services on the fly (programmatically) is not something “colo” or traditional hosting is very good at.
Mike G
They should should pur RMoney in charge of their IT project. A blowhard arrogant MBA who thinks he is Teh Management Awesome, knows everything and listens to nobody is just what the country needs to ensure their project enriches cronies while being completely ineffective.
Villago Delenda Est
@AfGuy:
Mad scientists of Monsanto, we’re looking at you, dipshits.
Jebediah
@Soonergrunt:
VI or die!
Ramalama
Don’t want to burst your rant bubble but when I worked at MIT there was an actual requirement for Principle Investigators who wanted money from the US govt (via NSF) to describe some kind of synergistic detail to their collaboration or outreach or whatnot. I’m not going to look it up because I spent entirely too much time on proposals to the NSF, but safe to say that the government might still be using the term synergy when dolling out the funds.
P.S. My mother who lives in the middle of the country worked with 2 people who thought that Stephen Colbert provided a serious talk show for conservatives.
Another Halocene Human
@ET: It’s overused because like the mythical healthcare panacea, the word is an aspiration towards a business methods perpetual motion machine.
You can’t just cobble businesses together and magically make more money than you did before. Either there’s some serious hard work/R&D involved, or, more typically, anti-competitive practices.
cat
@AfGuy:
DNA is more like a giant quantum assembly line then a registry or a config. The context the DNA strand is in dictates what happens, it doesn’t dictate the context.
Spike
s/tech/Paul Ryan/
bcinaz
GOPers may master technology, however, they are the cargo cult of democracy and ideas. They cling to all the old cliches that have never been supported by data, facts, evidence or results.
How many different ways can society prove that tax cuts don’t create jobs and don’t pay for themselves?
Bill Arnold
@jrg:
Thanks for that link (about the AWS services used). Very interesting.
One thing I noticed after the election was that AWS spot instance prices spiked up (to a few dollars per hour) the day of the election (I have screencaps of the relevant parts of the history graphs, which have subsequently expired, for m1.large spot instances). Never did see an explanation for that. Naively one might assume either extra heavy usage by the OFA team or denial of service by anti-OFA people or both, but maybe it was somebody like nate silver or sam wang.
Bill Arnold
@Omnes Omnibus:
Reasonably sure (not 100 percent) that “the cloud” started as a piece of PowerPoint clipart often used to represent “the internet”.
MikeBoyScout
What’s all this SmallTalk coming from Perl necklace wearing Lispers?
Your C falls flat when all you do is declare it double plus good.
Oooh, let’s create a language out of day old coffee grinds!
You want to hack in the “cloud”? Go write me an app in APL and maintain and enhance it for 30 years, then come back and talk your synergistic frameworks.
RSA
@Ramalama:
You’re remembering this section in the biographical sketches of the senior personnel for a proposal:
The “broader impact” part also needs to be part of the proposal…
Ramalama
@RSA: Ah yes there it is. Well, at least I had one word right! I guess referring to something as ‘whatnot’ is not very descriptive.