"Grunt Work" and Organizing

Read a post this morning through my RSS feed from LawyersGunsMoney, a  site of mostly liberal college professors mostly, and mostly a bit left of me, but interesting just the same.  The post was entitled "Don't Diddle, Organize", being a call for leftists to get out and organize.  The writer included what seemed to be a snide dis of "grunt work" and a clear dis of the Democratic party.  Both riled me, so I was resolved to post a fiery comment.  Went onto the site just now, and found a lot of comments on the post, most making the same points I would have made--Democrats need to rebuild the party at the local and state level by doing the "grunt work" of organizing, not by devoting all energy to single, ad hoc causes which provide a platform for the talkers but lack the doers who make an organization formidable.

The Agricultural Revolution as Insurance

I forget whether I've mentioned listening to Harari's Sapiens, as an audiobook (Mr. Bezos is taking over the world).  It's slow going, not because it's not interesting or well-written, but because I'm only listening when I use my exercise bike, and these days I'm mostly able to get exercise in the garden or by walking. 

Anyway, he's discussing the agricultural revolution, adopting the stance of Jared Diamond and others that it was bad for individuals, because hunter-gatherers had less work to get their food than did the early farmers.  While agriculture meant a given area of land could support more people, which was good for the species, it meant harder work and misery for the individuals.  His explanation for the revolution is mostly materialistic, a gradual accumulation of changes resulting in domesticated grains and animals, each change seeming an advantage but the overall result was poor.  An alternative explanation is possibly religious, citing an example of great stone columns erected by a hunter-gatherer culture in the same area where einkorn wheat was domesticate.

One thing I think Harari misses is the influence of climate and the seasons.  One of the outstanding features of our staple grain crops is storability.  There are food items a hunter-gatherer can store: acorns, dried fish, dried grapes, etc., but in most cases these are limited.  Grains can be stored indefinitely.  While Harari emphasizes the variety of foods hunter-gatherers could obtain, I'm not convinced.  Checking the climate for Jericho, a place he mentions, there's big seasonal changes: a cold wet season and a hot dry season.  What that means to me (operating on logic with no knowledge of the facts of the area) is that the life of a hunter-gatherer is good half the year, not the other half.  So growing and storing grain for the dry season would be rewarding.  A store of wheat was insurance against the risk of starving during the hot, dry season.

Culture Change and Name Change

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution writes on Ban the Box (i.e previous convictions on job applications).  The suggestion is that employers who don't get the specific information may revert to disqualifying black applicants based on a possible greater likelihood of past convictions. He cites academic research (see the abstract below the page break).

What hit me was the method the researchers used to tell black and white applicants apart--names.

Now back in the day "black names" (or rather "Negro names") were stereotypically "Washington", "Franklin", "Lincoln", etc., meaning there really wasn't a distinguishable difference.  Which brings me back to Cassius Clay, who famously changed his name. He, along with Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm Little, was part of the early trend of blacks dropping their "slave name" in favor of a more distinctive name, a trend existing alongside the Black Pride and Black Power movements.  These days it seems there's less dropping of surnames, but lot more distinctive given names.  It's ironic that a change which affirms identity has become a means for people to discriminate against that identity.

Gun Control and Civil Sanctions

Some, like Conor Friedersdorf and Kevin Williamson, have problems with the no-fly list, saying it penalizes people without any legal process or chance of redress.  There's also the FBI terrorist watch list, which apparently overlaps no-fly but is different. In a different area, we have the sex offender lists. IMO all three lists deprive people of abilities they'd normally have. The right says that denying guns to people on such list is denying them their Second Amendment, Constitutional right, which is wrong.

I think Friedersdorf and Williamson have a point: there should be a legal process for review and possible challenge when people lose, possibly for the duration of their life, some abilities.   I think that's true even for sex offenders, who have already gone through a legal process. People can grow and change, people can be convicted in error.

The Senate is to vote on the issue in this coming week--several proposals, none of which are likely to pass.  I've not studied the issue, but I think, provided there's a review process at some point, it's reasonable to deny guns to those on those lists.

And having said that, I don't think such a restriction would do much to avert mass shootings.  Even Mateen would have passed that test, since he wasn't on the FBI list when he bought his guns. 

I like the New York gun laws, including the requirement for friends to sign onto the application for a permit, but even with those laws Jiverly Antares Wong killed 13 people just a few miles south of where I grew up.

Such a Fine Day for Flash to Ruin

A little humor from the New Yorker, having just attempted to update my Adobe Flash.

Forms

National Archives has a document of the day, and this was for the 16th. As a bureaucrat I'm always interested in forms. What struck me about this was the opening--the President is telling the U.S. Marshal to arrest John Dillinger. That's a carryover from the days when the monarch gave orders to his officers, a carryover surviving into the 20th century. The Bureau of Land Management has the document confirming the sale of 80 acres of Illinois land to my great grandfather, a document signed by the President. Seems amazing to think they'd ship a document all the way to Washington for his signature, but they did. Such is the power of history and custom over the minds of men.  

Surprising Father Facts

"Republican and Democratic dads have the same number of children, an average of 2.4, and on average they start their families at the same age — 28. They are also equally likely to be employed. In other words, the demographic data tells a story of very similar fathers in the two parties."

From this Post article describing a study of fathers and their attitudes and party affiliations.  Otherwise the differences between the groups are about what you'd expect, Republicans more authoritarian, Democrats more self-accusing--in other words the studs versus the wimps.

Coffee Drinkers Are Concentrated, Gun Dealers Are Not

That's the lesson I took away from this Flowing Data post 
mapping Starbucks and other common chains against gun dealers.  The key is the comparison is based on circles with a 10-mile radius. If the circle has more Starbucks stores than gun dealers, it's one color, otherwise another.  

Why Don't IT Contractors Fail?

Just finished reading The Confidence Game,--anyone who enjoyed The Sting and the David Mamet film House of Games (which inspired the book) will enjoy it.  The author views con artists running con games as employing human traits, the desire to believe, the desire for meaning, the reluctance to cut one's losses, etc.we all share. With that perspective, I was struck by the question in my title.

How did I get there?  It's true, I believe, that most massive IT projects, possibly especially those in government, fail; the success rate is maybe 30 percent.  With that sort of track record, why do we in government keep creating and funding the projects and why can IT contractors get contracts to run them?  Surely if Elon Musk's space venture only got into orbit 30 percent of the time, he'd fail to attract venture capital.  But as far as I can tell (not very far), no big IT contractor has gone out of business because they can't get any more contracts.  So why?

Maybe they're running a con game?  After all that in the beginning there's lots of enthusiasm, enough to sweep agency employees, agency officials, even OMB and Congress into supporting the project.  A big project may paradoxically be easier to sell than a small one: a big project has meaning, it offers to change many things, to solve lots of problems, etc. etc. For IT projects it's likely that management and Congress don't really understand the nuts and bolts; they just know that people who should know, who seem to know, claim it can work, can succeed.   In the early stages it's easy to use the project focus to find more improvements to make, problems to solve, things to be folded into the project scope.  And once you're committed to a project, your reputation is involved, there's money been spent, meetings have been held, promises made.  And the problems surely are fixable, no need to abandon hope, just spend a little more money here, work some more hours there, move the schedule back just a little.

Finally there's a loss of confidence by those who should know, an increasing desperation, and Congress and management cut their losses, a process made much easier because there's been turnover in both areas so they aren't killing their own baby, it's some else's bastard child.  That can in turn make it easier for those who know (who haven't retired or moved to higher paying private jobs) to blame the big shots for not keeping the faith.

Meanwhile the IT contractors can move on to run another con.

Note: I don't necessarily think IT contractors are knowingly con artists; they may be conning themselves as much as their customers and they do have the occasional success.

Can See Remote Planets But Not Milky Way

Kevin Drum writes he's never seen the Milky Way.  Meanwhile two scientists are revisiting the Drake Equation (a way to think about the probability of other intelligent life in the universe) based on the discovery of thousands of planets.