The World Is Overrun by the Young

Just saw Josh Marshall on the TPM RSS feed misspell Nikita Khrushchev's name twice. Not that I miss the Cold War, you understand.

Bureaucrat Brokaw

Tom Brokaw reveals his inner bureaucrat in today's NYTimes.

When I write "bureaucrat", I'm referring to the idea that reason and rationality are the supreme considerations, that order is important and history is not.

Brokaw points out the abundance of county and local governmental bodies in various states. He points to the abundance of higher educational institutions in the Dakotas. He suggests, as I think Gov. Corzine of NJ did a while back and a panel reviewing NY local government did, if we rationalized and consolidated functions we would save money.

No doubt it would, and no doubt we won't. Schools, governments, and similar bodies tend to die only when there's no bodies left to populate them or when a superior paradigm comes along. (I added the last phrase as a hat tip to my father, who was part of the "central school" movement in NY back in the 1920's. The movement got rid of the one-room schools by consigning pupils to bus rides to the "central school".

Words to Live By

"In other words, why procrastinate when you can perendinate? " From A.Word.A.Day from wordsmith.org.

FSA's Old Programs

This article about the possible conversion of VA health care programs from MUMPS to Java (based on success in similar conversions of legacy programs) raises the question:

Is there anyone out there who would offer to convert COBOL programs to Java for FSA?

License Plates in France

Dirk Beauregard blogs about license plates, the numbering system used in France and the new one used in the EU. Seems the French will now have lifetime license numbers, just as we can have lifetime phone numbers. The universally bureaucratic society creeps in on little cat feet.

Facebook: The Bureaucracy and I Have the Same Problem

Which is figuring out how to use the damn thing. See this article. (Actually, if I were in FSA, I'd try using it for internal communications, particularly field to DC. )

A Phrase I Never Thought to Hear

"boomer work ethic" --from a NY Times article on a financial company which hired boomers as temporary employees to answer phones complaining about their accounts.

I guess I'm brainwashed, but I never saw the boomers as conscientious employees, more like Sonny I guess.

Our Weak Government

I keep finding proof of our government's weakness. Here's another example--SSA is reliant on the states to process disability

The nation’s top Social Security official says benefits for tens of thousands of people with severe disabilities are being delayed by furloughs and layoffs of state employees around the country....

Claims are evaluated by state employees, but the federal government reimburses states for the salaries of those employees and pays the full cost of benefits for people found to be disabled.

“We pay the full freight,” Mr. Astrue said. “States do not save any money when they furlough or lay off these employees. They only delay payments to disabled citizens who rely on the monthly benefits.”

The point being, if you have to depend on people who don't report to you, your power is limited.

FSA and Stimulus Dollars II

FSA still has no plans or reports up on the USDA website. I guess they're still waiting for some political leadership to be appointed. The USDA spreadsheet does show some data for FSA programs.. It's interesting that, if you come to the USDA site from recovery.gov, you get a different page than you do if you click on the "Agency Plans and Reports" link from the USDA home site.

A note: the recovery.org site seems to be beating the government bureaucrats to display data on the stimulus package.

Did Cinderella Live Happily in Glass Slippers?

The obligatory post on Susan Boyle.