Wisdom and Experience and Backwards in High Heels

What is wisdom? I'm referring of course to Judge Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment.

But what makes for wisdom? Is the person with the wider variety of experiences more likely to be wise than the bureaucrat who sticks to the same cubicle for all his life? I suspect most of us would say: "yes". One of the common themes of fiction and drama is: "seize the day"--search out the new and different. Mostly the logic is it's the road to a richer and fuller life, self-realization and all that. But some of the time the corollary is that varied experiences is wiser, and leads to wisdom. (The journey of self-discovery, as in Harry Potter's journey.)

So maybe I'm a wise old man--wise because old, not particularly because of diverse work experiences. Or maybe not--maybe I've just keep relearning the same thing over and over. I'd tentatively agree that, all things being equal, living longer and more widely leads to wisdom And, therefore, Sotomayor has a better opportunity to be wise than her close counterpart, Justice Alito, simply because a woman in a man's world has more varied experience than a man in a man's world.

Seems to me there is another issue than the basis of wisdom: does wisdom always lead to the same answer--Justice O'Connor's original statement seemed to say it did: a wise man and a wise woman would reach the same decision. But I don't think so--there are many decisions where only history will say whether they're wise, and many others where even history doesn't say.

Should I Sell Chinese Stocks

I've a little money in a Chinese ETF. Some scientists say I should get out in by July 17, because it's a bubble that will bust. See this post for more detail. (Essentially--yes there's a bubble but there's no rationale for the predicted period of the bust.) Since I'm lazy, I don't plan to sell, just ride it up and down and I hope back up. :-)

Forms

The Times has an article on federal forms. The writer focuses on the GSA approval process for standard and optional forms used across agency lines, but throws in the OMB estimate of reporting burden. I commented there to the effect the government needs redoing.

In the old days, GSA could work towards efficiency by identifying forms that were used in multiple agencies and then creating a standard one. That doesn't work today, because more and more of government is moving to the web. But there's no strong hand keeping people from reinventing the wheel.

Not Using the Internet

Got an email pointing out this article in Nextgov. The hook is a McKinsey report on Government 2.0, and includes this:

"But a decade later, e-government services have not delivered on promises, according to the report, which pointed to a government agency that invested millions of dollars to develop a service to enable citizens to manage accounts with the government online, but achieved an adoption rate of less than 5 percent. The agency was not named."

That could be FSA. [Updated--though if you read the report it sounds as if it's a non-U.S. agency, but the report is not clear.]

If it is, I'd argue these reasons work against success, which might well apply to other agencies:

1. The idea that moving online endangers jobs. That certainly undercuts one's motivation (did in my case, anyway).
2. Mistakes in version 1.0.-- Harshaw's law: "We never do things right the first time."
3. Program people and IT people didn't communicate.
4. Lack of a broad enough vision at high enough levels.
   

Also from the article:

"The report recommends that agencies elevate the governance model for e-government initiatives so that lines-of-business executives are held accountable for users adopting the service, the costs of the online tools and for establishing teams to support development and management."

Problem is, the board of directors for FSA is Congress, and they don't know much. (BTW, watched Hal Holbrook's "Mark Twain Tonight" on DVD last night--there was a man who really didn't think much of Congress.)

Manual Labor

Musings from a Stonehead has a nice post, and discussion, of how to build fence with style. Stonehead does more manual labor than the average farmer today (compare waistlines if you doubt it), builds fences in a style to which I'm not accustomed, and does it all wearing a clean white shirt. It's almost enough to make me doubt the veracity of the site. Of course, I'm more like "Pigpen" in Peanuts.

Travis McGee

John D. MacDonald started in New York (Syracuse U.), but ended in Florida. I loved his novels, reading everyone I could find. Found a couple in a bookstore in Hawaii when the Continental plane landed to refuel. Finished them before we touched down in Saigon.

The LATimes has a piece on the possibilities his Travis McGee character will finally hit the movies. (Though Wikipedia is more comprehensive.) From the piece:

One abiding concern for McGee -- a dropout from society who seems more libertarian than liberal despite the '60s and '70s settings -- was the environment. Years before a full-fledged environmental movement, he was describing Florida's Mangrove Islands as "one of the few strange places left which man has not been able to mess up." In 1973, McGee talked about "instant Florida, tacky and stifling and full of ugly and spurious energies. They had every chain food-service outfit known to man, interspersed with used-car lots and furniture stores."

Worst Pun I've Seen Recently

At Walt Jeffries Sugar Mountain farm.

AC and Swimming

The local swimming pool is not much used, not compared to usage 33 years ago when I moved here. I speculate AC is to blame. When I was a boy, air conditioning was not prevalent. In the summer the best and cheapest way to cool off was to swim. That established a pattern, a habit which carried forward.

Compare that to now: everyone who lives in a house built in the last 40 years which is south of the Canadian border has air conditioning, and many others as well. So swimming has lost ground, fewer kids swim, and fewer swimmers persist into adulthood. It's harder to get lifeguards, insurance is more costly, and recreation is more organized.

A Salute to COBOL

Federal Computer Week has an article on the persistence of COBOL. Seems FSA isn't the only agency stuck in that world. (I met my wife when we both took a COBOL class way back when, so I have fond memories of the language. )

"because Cobol uses programming terminology that is close to the way people use regular English, it’s still considered the best language for capturing an organization’s business rules. Other languages use fairly arcane terminology that make it hard to capture those processes..."

"The Social Security Administration is wrapping essential Cobol applications in Extensible Markup Language envelopes and publishing them as service-oriented architecture services. It will retain about 20 percent of the 36 million lines of Cobol code it uses...."

Problem is, when you accept COBOL and the business rules it embodies, you accept the past. As a liberal, I have to think the future will require different business rules. And if neither the programmer nor the business type understand the rules in the IT system, you're, as we used to say, "cruising for a bruisin' ".

More on Caruso

Government Executive has a piece on Doug Caruso's replacement, which doesn't say much. Possibly Caruso didn't realize how little autonomy he would have, possibly there was a big disagreement on appointments of State executive directors. Who knows? Vilsack moved quickly to make it a one-day story by appointing a replacement. In the old days, it would have been a Southerner, because tobacco and cotton was that important, but not now.