Best Posts in Thread: Freedom ranking for US falls

Give a certain amount of time for a project and the project will grow to fill that time.

Give a project a budget and the costs of the project will swell to fill that budget.

In both cases, the resource usage will often exceed that which has been budgeted.

Create a beauracracy and give it a task, then it will keep building on that mission, pushing the rules to the max and drumming up new ways to carry out the task.

The U.S. government is no different in this regard than any other government or organization. The reason why this problem seems worse in the U.S. than it does anywhere else is because the U.S. has more resources both in money and manpower.

Even when I sit down to work on a project solo, I have to fight some of the same problems. I can get distracted all day by doing "busy-work" which doesn't contribute to getting paid. That's spending too much time checking email, wasting time screwing with new tools when my existing tools work good enough and anything else which I can procrastinate on rather than actually doing the work.

Directing my focus to getting paid is actually really hard. It requires a lot of will power and an eye for locating the signal among the noise. What is it that is the next most important item for getting paid? Locating that item in a complex project isn't always easy.

But I have to get through this or I don't eat. Because I practice this daily as a lean freelancer, I understand this. I know how to operate lean, keep my nose on the trail and to get the product shipped to the client.

Imagine an entire organization of distracted people. Imagine that the leader is distracted, creates organization busy-work and then shoves that down through the rest of the structure. Imagine that few of these people have ever learned how to grab that focus to get things done. Imagine they don't have to worry about eating because they have a massive budget and little to no competition.

The story of SpaceX is a great one for contrasting what's possible with a lean operation vs. a status quo with little competition and bloated budgets. Elon Musk has gone through the pain of starting businesses from scratch. He understands how to get by on very little and to ship a product. When he was quoted rediculous prices and timeframes to get parts from suppliers, he created his instead. He knows that to compete with the entrenched incumbents, he can't be just a little bit better, he has to be far better.

The issues you guys are referring to are the same forces playing out. If the U.S. government looks jacked up compared to X government, it's because the U.S. government has more resources. When the NSA sh*t hit the fan, the leaders of other countries were openly critical, yet privately they wished they had the resources to do the same things.

Two countries doing the same thing will be just as jacked up. The answer is to break up the big government into smaller pieces. Just like the answer to "too big to fail" banks is to break them up. This is the same reason that Ebay recently spun off Paypal, which is to regain that focus.

We can endlessly b*tch and cherry-pick examples. That gets old though. Why not actually discuss why these problems exist and possible solutions? It's a much more creative and productive process.

By the way, the U.S. government does get at least one thing right. We have 50 different states which get a lot of freedom to govern as they choose. To complain that they make mistakes is silly. Of course they will make mistakes. Failure is necessary in reaching success. Failure contains information which is needed to achieve positive results. The 50 states are free to run 50 different experiments from which each of them can learn from.

 

the above quote of Wrye's should be the quote of the month.
However it begs the question, why are we fighting on all fronts except our own.
Why do we as allies rush into other people's wars.
I have said before if the Governments of this World spent the equivalent amounts of money and effort in the name of peace what a better society this world would be to live in, instead of trying to find bolt holes to hide in.

 

Well Guys & Gals, So many friends from across the Pond But.... I have to Admit this is definatley another time again I have to Admit and say I am SO Glad I am British

Love you all but sometimes I really do not understand all this talk, time we just settled down and started to live in Peace. Lets face it, This is what all the OTHER Wars were suppose to be about.