Spero Consulting

Archive for October, 2009

Or, It’s Hard to Win an Argu­ment against Fools!

For a vari­ety of rea­sons, we haven’t posted much lately. That is par­tially due to the fact that we have been extremely busy with both revenue-​generating activ­i­ties and non-​profit, vol­un­teer activities.

One of those activ­i­ties involves mit­i­gat­ing the effects of a decent-​sized mess cre­ated by oth­ers. (What other kind of mess is there, we joke?)

While pon­der­ing the effects of that effort, we thought of an inter­est­ing apho­rism; how­ever, as yet, we’re not sure if our cur­rent phras­ing is as pithy as we’d like. This one’s along the lines that “noth­ing is fool­proof because fools are so ingen­u­ous.” (We first felt the sting of that one many years ago when writ­ing Lotus 1−2−3 macros for com­mer­cial bankers. “How could they do that to my beau­ti­ful pro­gram!” we would fre­quently whine – with just cause.)

Now, our recent efforts made us real­ize that: ignor­ing good luck, it takes less wit (and guile and clev­er­ness) to defeat the efforts of a wor­thy oppo­nents than it does to defeat the con­certed efforts of (a group of) unwor­thy ones.

Of course, we’re using the word ‘oppo­nent’ to sig­nify some­one with an dif­fer­ent pre­ferred out­comes (than one’s own) but not nec­es­sar­ily a sworn enemy for life. We have in mind col­leagues or co-​workers or co-​volunteers. One is most likely to observe such an out­come in a civil sit­u­a­tion, but for what we have in mind, the phrase “civil dis­course” gives too much credit to the other side.

We think it’s true because it is eas­ier to argue against a rea­son­able or thought­ful person’s posi­tion than it is to rebut the impulses and non sequiturs of shal­low, incon­sid­er­ate folks. The lat­ter are no-​win sit­u­a­tions. How does one argue against impulses, non sequiturs, or well-​known fal­lac­ies held dear as truth? Ah, if we knew that we’d attempt to share it with like-​minded Sen­a­tors and Con­gress­man as they try to pre­vent nation­al­iza­tion of health care. Given that, maybe one corol­lary should be: it takes less wit (and guile and clev­er­ness) to defeat the efforts of a wor­thy, intel­li­gent oppo­nent than it does to defeat a gov­ern­ment bureau­cracy.

Epi­logue: by the way, we started think­ing along these lines when we were explain­ing a sit­u­a­tion to a rea­son­able friend. We’re were relay­ing to him a con­ver­sa­tion with another per­son, in which we attempted to per­suade that party to change their deci­sion, which had quite messy impli­ca­tions. As we explained to our friend, our posi­tion was well-​reasoned, and our adversary’s posi­tion was not. If the dis­cus­sion were about the best defense to use in a par­tic­u­lar bas­ket­ball game, the other person’s posi­tion would be equiv­a­lent to, “we’re going to play zone defense today because it’s going to rain tomorrow.”

Our friend, being a bright, rea­son­able per­son – if a bit naïve – agreed with us and remarked that, “Well, what you said makes sense. So, they lis­tened to you and changed their mind, right?” We remarked that, sadly, no. Our friend’s con­clu­sion that we were suc­cess­ful was wrong, and our expla­na­tion to him was depress­ingly sim­ple: with­out our help, the third party had made a deci­sion based upon irrel­e­vant facts and had ignored rel­e­vant impli­ca­tions; so, why would they bend to rea­son when it was explained to them? They wouldn’t and they didn’t. Yeah, as the sub­ti­tle reads, it’s hard to win an argu­ment against fools.

P.S. We’re not writ­ing about folks with a deep under­stand­ing of game the­ory or what­ever, who are try­ing to act stu­pid or behave irra­tionally as a strat­egy. Some­times it’s use­ful and wealth-​maximizing to play dumb, but that’s a dif­fer­ent story for another day.

*Make that all GMs.

For sev­eral months, Chevro­let has been run­ning a com­mer­cial that com­pares it auto­mo­biles with sim­i­lar ones from Honda.

In it, Howie Long, the for­mer NFL star, com­pares three types of vehi­cles. Near the end of the ad, Mr. Long men­tions that Honda does make some­thing with which Chevy just can’t compete.…and the cam­eras pans to a Honda lawn mower. The viewer is sup­posed to laugh.

Now, we’ve used the same Honda mower for nearly as long as we’ve owned a Sub­ur­ban, and we only wish – if only, if only – that the Sub­ur­ban were half as reli­able as the Honda.

So far, the Honda mower has needed to be repaired once: this past sum­mer, after many, many years of ser­vice, the main gas­ket broke and engine leaked oil.

What of the Suburban’s unre­li­a­bil­ity? Let us count the ways. The Suburban’s folder in the file cab­i­net is over an inch thick. Here are a few of the break­downs and repairs that we can remember:

• Auto­matic trans­mis­sion? Why, yes, of course!
• Air con­di­tion­ing compressor(s)? Yes, both the front and rear.
• Elec­tri­cal sys­tem? Yes.
• Cat­alytic con­verter? Yep.
• Muf­fler! Uh huh.
• Rust? Affir­ma­tive – in a few spots no less.
• Wheel cylin­der? That too.
• Wind­shield wiper motor and con­trol? Yeah.
• Back door lock? Oui.
• Starter? Si.

We real­ize that the Sub­ur­ban does more and has more parts than the Honda lawn mower, but our expe­ri­ence with a Honda Odyssey isn’t very dif­fer­ent than the mower: no real prob­lems in nearly three years of use. More­over, the Sub­ur­ban did cost about 75 times as much as the mower.

So, while Chevro­let and its pitch­man may laugh and smirk at Honda’s mow­ers, we wish their vehi­cles could per­form as well. In fact, we’d set­tle for half as well.

The Smil­ing Dog

Usu­ally, if we men­tion a per­sonal expe­ri­ence, we try to link it to a broader point. Today, how­ever, we write for no other rea­son than to eulo­gize Bart, Bart, the Basenji part: our loyal non-​Basenji for the past fourteen-​and-​one-​half years.

After a brief, but sharp decline, Bart qui­etly passed-​away on Monday.

He did it with the same meek­ness and gen­tle­ness of spirit in which he lived his life with us. He waited for Jill to wake in the mid-​afternoon – she has the flu – and carry him into the grass in his beloved back­yard. He stood on all fours, fell to his right (near his favorite Alberta Spruce tar­get) and was gone.

Bart was at least fif­teen, which is a nice, long life for a dog. So, no tears were shed for what might have been – only for the lost com­pan­ion­ship. He had fourteen-​and-​half years with us, and he was pos­si­bly the luck­i­est dog that ever lived. He wasn’t lucky because he mirac­u­lously sur­vived an acci­den­tal death or any­thing dra­matic or trau­matic. No, he was lucky because he fell into it. Into what? pos­si­bly the sweet­est dog life there ever was: a large pack to play with, more human admir­ers than we’ll ever had, and dot­ing owners.

A half-​year before the old­est princess was born, Jill was doing breed res­cue work in St. Louis with B.R.A.T. or Basenji Res­cue and Trans­port. Our pack stood at five: four sleek Basen­jis in the prime of life and one very hairy/​furry, half-​Chow/​half-​New Found­land, who was aptly named, “Bear,” and who had an incred­i­bly knack for snatch­ing house flies in mid-​air.

Shortly after return­ing home from my Father’s funeral in the ‘burgh, Jill received a call from the St. Louis city pound that the dog-​catcher had cap­tured a Basenji: highly unlikely but pos­si­ble. She drove to the pound that sits in the shadow of the giant Bud­weiser plant in south city and decided that he wasn’t quite a Basenji, but might be part Basenji; so, we’d try to find a home for him if no one claimed him.

Read the rest of this entry »

Apro­pos of noth­ing, we note that for each of the past two after­noons we observed a rac­coon either stand­ing beside a busy sub­ur­ban road (yes­ter­day) or slowly cross­ing the road (today). Pre­sum­ably, it’s the same coon. At that loca­tion, there are no woods on either side of the road; so, the behav­ior seems a tad bit odd.

So, we won­dered: what are the odds that said rac­coon is not rabid?

We’d argue that they’re about the same as the gov­ern­ment real­iz­ing addi­tional tax rev­enue from employ­ees who received raises from their employ­ers because the employ­ers real­ized health-​care cost sav­ing under Sen­a­tor Baucus’s bill (and gen­er­ously gave all of the sav­ings to their work­force). As we under­stand it, the Con­gres­sional Bud­get Office (CBO) pro­jected bil­lions in new tax rev­enue exactly for that reason.

Now, we ask: exactly how many firms have com­mit­ted to increase salaries once absolved of pay­ing health care costs?

We would haz­ard to guess that the num­ber is no higher than the num­ber of firms man­aged by rabid rac­coons. (In the off chance that we’re describ­ing your firm and your CEO is lost, then you may find him between Trees­dale and Pine-​Richland High School on War­ren­dale Road). Our advice: take thick gloves and a cage if you want him at the next staff meet­ing, but even then, don’t count on a raise.)

There is much debate about the effec­tive­ness of the var­i­ous fis­cal stim­u­lus plans, par­tic­u­larly Pres­i­dent Obama’s first $787,000,000,000 plan that was enacted a mere three weeks after his inau­gu­ra­tion. Many crit­ics claim that bad – overly-​optimistic – unem­ploy­ment pro­jec­tions are evi­dence that the addi­tional deficit spend­ing was inef­fec­tive, while pro­po­nents of the plan argue that the cur­rent unem­ploy­ment rate would be that much higher with­out the spend­ing and that bad pro­jec­tions are just evi­dence of, well, bad pro­jec­tions and every one’s inabil­ity to pre­dict the future.

While we are sym­pa­thetic to the for­mer, nei­ther hypoth­e­sis is fal­si­fi­able because we can’t observe what would have hap­pened with­out the plan.

We are com­pletely opposed to such spend­ing for both moral and eco­nomic rea­sons. We can’t imag­ine how steal­ing from Peter (or Andy) and his chil­dren and his children’s chil­dren – in the form of higher taxes – to pay Paul (or a nearly bank­rupt city or state gov­ern­ment) cre­ates any value, espe­cially given low esti­mates – sub­stan­tially less than 1.0 – of the mul­ti­plier. Secondly, given the enor­mous size of the gov­ern­ment and the deficits prior to the Bush’s and Obama’s “stim­u­lus” pack­ages, it is dif­fi­cult to believe that many of the newly-​funded projects cre­ate any value on their own, i.e., are worth­while doing for their own sake. So, we doubt that such spend­ing is an effi­cient way to con­sume cur­rent and future resources.

We’d pre­fer less gov­ern­ment in an effort to cre­ate more entre­pre­neurs who are will­ing to bear the risk and the costs – many which relate to gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion and taxes – of going it alone, but we admit to being a dreamer.

It is likely that many read­ers have seen the graph pre­pared by the admin­is­tra­tion that showed pro­jected unem­ploy­ment with and with­out the addi­tional deficit spend­ing. Accord­ing to the graph, by this time of the year, unem­ploy­ment was sup­posed to be no more than eight per­cent (8%) with the stim­u­lus pack­age imple­mented ver­sus a max­i­mum rate at the end of the year of about nine per­cent (9%) with­out it. The gap between the two was pro­jected to increase and stay above one per­cent until the end of 2011.

How­ever, with the addi­tional spend­ing, the unem­ploy­ment rate now stands at nearly ten per­cent (10%).

Dur­ing the past sev­eral weeks, we have read or seen com­men­ta­tors use that evi­dence along with bad logic to crit­i­cize of the stim­u­lus plan, and we’re writ­ing to crit­i­cize those folks. The ends don’t jus­tify the(ir illog­i­cal) means.

Like us, those crit­ics seem to be inher­ently against such spend­ing, but they com­plain that the stim­u­lus plan is a fail­ure because the money isn’t being spent fast enough to do any good. Implicit in that argu­ment is the assump­tion that stim­u­lus plans are effec­tive eco­nomic devices – as long as they are exe­cuted prop­erly, i.e., quickly. In other words, their com­plaint con­cedes the argu­ment that such deficit spend­ing is effi­cient and use­ful. (They don’t seem to be mak­ing the more sub­tle argu­ment, that the­o­ret­i­cally – in an ideal world – such spend­ing would be use­ful, but in the real worlds, gov­ern­ment could never be trusted to do it properly.)

Kind of like com­plain­ing that the food was bad AND the por­tions were too small at the restaurant.

Taken at their word, the only rea­son­able con­clu­sion to draw is to encour­age the gov­ern­ment to spend the bor­rowed money faster, which implies even less thought than usual when allo­cat­ing pork ‚which then implies the fund­ing of projects that are even more dubi­ous than, say, John Murtha’s Air­port for No One.

So, if the spend­ing is waste­ful, why argue that it isn’t being spent fast enough? Rather say: don’t spend it at all! Or, argue about the low-​to-​non-​existent ben­e­fit of (already) spend­ing an addi­tional $200,000,000,000 or so on top of the other deficit spend­ing, includ­ing the Bush “stim­u­lus,” which was enacted in early 2008 – if our mem­ory is cor­rect. Shouldn’t that spend­ing have rip­pled through the econ­omy many times by now? Are we the only per­son to have missed those waves?

Our largest web project to date is now live at ArcofWPA​.org.

It con­sists of six inde­pen­dent sites for Aad­van­tage, Inc.; its four sub­sidiaries; and a shared on-​line trans­ac­tion cen­ter (for dona­tions and purchases).

Each site uses the same con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem, but the sep­a­rate instal­la­tions improve secu­rity, espe­cially when one site is a web store and another site includes a com­mu­nity chat room for fam­i­lies and parents.

The store is a sim­ple, easy-​to-​administer shop­ping cart inte­grated into the con­tent man­age­ment system.

All of the sites share a com­mon theme that gives a casual, hope­ful, and invit­ing appear­ance. The back­ground, which resem­bles denim and gives it a casual feel, is actu­ally the repli­ca­tion of a sin­gle hor­i­zon­tal line from a photo of a per­fect, blue sky. (As it turns out, there are a lot of col­ors in a per­fect, blue sky.) The light behind the tag line of ‘help­ing oth­ers help them­selves,’ is a dis­tor­tion of the sun from the same photograph.

Those fea­tures com­bine with the bright, solid, metal­lic header logo. It floats above the back­ground and con­tent box and illus­trates that Arc/​Aadvantage is here, avail­able, and ready to help.

Other func­tions include time-​saving fea­tures, like on-​line job appli­ca­tions and cal­en­dars – all designed to improve orga­ni­za­tional effi­ciency and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. (At a dif­fer­ent site, we know some­one who goes their organization’s web site to enter reg­is­tra­tions and appli­ca­tions that are still sub­mit­ted on paper.)

Finally, we’re using the same open-​source web appli­ca­tions and incred­i­bly inex­pen­sive form builders and data­base pro­grams to build man­age­ment infor­ma­tion sys­tems. Obtain­ing the state-​of-​the-​art, whether for pub­lic web sites or pri­vate infor­ma­tion sys­tems, has never been cheaper or more within the reach of small and medium-​sized firms.

Con­tact us for more infor­ma­tion or to gain access to our design cen­ter.

Last night, we caught a glimpse of one of the evening talk shows where some­one com­plained to the host that no Sen­a­tor or Con­gress­man has the time to read and under­stand pro­posed amend­ments and bills that are often longer than one thou­sand pages.

It’s a valid com­plaint, and reminded us to write a sec­ond time about our pro­posed solu­tion to bureau­cracy. We first wrote about it last Decem­ber 24, but it turns out that inter­est and read­er­ship isn’t very heavy on Christ­mas Eve. (Hey, we write when we can.)

The com­plaint about long bill length and short delib­er­a­tion time isn’t new, but it seems to have been made more fre­quently dur­ing the past few weeks and months when mas­sive changes (gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tions) have been pro­posed. In par­tic­u­lar, Repub­li­cans leg­is­la­tors (and cit­i­zens, too) have demanded addi­tional time to read the details and intri­ca­cies of bills that they are expected to vote on involv­ing top­ics like health care and the envi­ron­ment. Many of the Tea Party and Town Hall protests dur­ing this past sum­mer arose because of this rush-​to-​passage.

We are com­pletely sym­pa­thetic to their com­plaints. Our motto–thought before cal­cu­la­tion–and our Hip­po­cratic mantra–first, do no harm–point to our cau­tious nature, but it’s really our utter dis­dain for the very dam­ag­ing unin­tended con­se­quences of big gov­ern­ment that induce us to remind read­ers of our solu­tion to gov­ern­ment bureaucracy.

We first wrote about it here: Our Solu­tion to Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment Bureau­cracy.

We real­ize that unless the fed­eral gov­ern­ment suf­fers a deeper cri­sis, there is lit­tle hope that our idea will be imple­mented. That’s because our solu­tion is dra­con­ian and would destroy the leg­isla­tive bureau­cracy that has arisen and grown dur­ing that past sev­eral decades. For exam­ple, the bud­get to oper­ate Con­gress is over $4.4 bil­lion per year, and more than 20,000 folks work are employed in var­i­ous leg­isla­tive offices. Sen­a­tors have bud­gets of sev­eral mil­lion dol­lars apiece.

That being said, we think our solu­tion would be far more effec­tive than term lim­its and requires no change in any­thing other than the fed­eral bud­get. It would have the imme­di­ate effect of elim­i­nat­ing the leg­isla­tive bureau­cracy and would seri­ously crip­ple the lob­by­ing indus­try that many cit­i­zens on both ends of the polit­i­cal spec­trum dis­like. More impor­tantly, it would have the long-​term effect of reduc­ing exec­u­tive branch bureau­cracy because Con­gress­men and com­mit­tees could no longer del­e­gate over­sight to staff work­ers; so, they would have to be more thought­ful when writ­ing and pass­ing bills.

Limit leg­isla­tive staffs to three peo­ple. (If we were a gov­ern­ment or cor­po­rate bureau­crat, we would have writ­ten three “FTEs” for “full-​time equiv­a­lents.”) In a fit a gen­eros­ity, we’ll per­mit large com­mit­tees to have one sec­re­tary but no other employees.

We rec­om­mend two office work­ers in D.C. and one worker in a sin­gle home office, and we don’t dis­tin­guish between rep­re­sen­ta­tives and sen­a­tors. That seems about right to us.

The job would be much less glam­orous and regal, and at the mar­gin that might reduce the num­ber of dbs that run for office. More­over, leg­is­la­tors would actu­ally seem like the pub­lic ser­vants they are sup­posed to be.

More impor­tantly, leg­is­la­tors could no longer rely on staff mem­bers to pre­pare reports and write speeches and tell them what to say. They would have to “do their own home­work” so-​to-​speak, and at the mar­gin, that means that they would either: (1) have to be bet­ter stu­dents or (2) be more poignantly exposed as igno­ra­muses or (3) learn to speak less. In our mind, those are all pos­i­tive outcomes.

Over­all, we see no way that 1,000 page bills could be pro­posed with small leg­isla­tive staffs, and in our mind, that is a very good thing (and that would greatly reduce the size of the exec­u­tive branch.)

For those who think that exec­u­tive branch bureau­cracy would sub­sti­tute for the elim­i­nated leg­isla­tive branch bureau­cracy, we argue the oppo­site. Con­gress was will­ing to expand the exec­u­tive branch pro­vided it was able to expand its own over­sight capa­bil­i­ties and retain its power. If that over­sight were elim­i­nated, we think Con­gress would starve the exec­u­tive branch by sub­stan­tially reduc­ing the size of the gov­ern­ment. That would be partly due to the fact that con­stituents could no longer be assured that they could get “their fair share” of the bud­get and more of them might then pre­fer to send fewer tax dol­lars to Washington.

Finally, there would be far fewer leaks and far fewer staff mem­bers and press sec­re­taries with whom reporters could speak. That should reduce the num­ber of reporters, and that doesn’t sound like a bad thing to us.

We will con­tinue to think about the issue and will likely update this post dur­ing the next sev­eral days, but wouldn’t it be lovely if next year can­di­dates for the 435 house seats and 33-​or-​so sen­ate seats were forced to take a pledge about lim­it­ing staff size?

By the way, the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion and the 27 Amend­ments com­bined con­sume less than 20 pages (at 12 point, Times Roman, left-​justified, with decent mar­gins in OpenOf­fice Writer).