Curmudgeons Unite!

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Curmudgeons Unite!

jon zingale
It is unfair perhaps for me to comment. I don't
imagine having a horse in the race. However,
I would like to draw attention to the idea of critical
application software and its place in our culture since
the Apollo missions. Applications with respect to
military drones, nuclear power plants, hospital equipment,
telecommunications, and the like. Perhaps, we as our own
special breed of democratic society do not hold elections
to be of the same criticality. Perhaps, we as a culture do
not hold sanctity in elections to be necessary. Is this possible?

Jonathan Zingale

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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

Marcus G. Daniels

Jon writes:

 

However, I would like to draw attention to the idea of critical

application software and its place in our culture since

the Apollo missions. Applications with respect to

military drones, nuclear power plants, hospital equipment,

telecommunications, and the like. Perhaps, we as our own

special breed of democratic society do not hold elections

to be of the same criticality. Perhaps, we as a culture do

not hold sanctity in elections to be necessary. Is this possible?

 

People seem to have high expectations of hospital equipment but at the same time often become obese or alcoholic.  When a health crisis occurs, why should a lack of planning constitute an emergency for others?   Our special breed of democratic society seems to suffer a collective case of obesity.  Probably nothing will happen until there is heart attack.

 

Marcus


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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

jon zingale
In reply to this post by jon zingale
My intention in drawing attention to critical application
development is an attempt to deepen the discussion
around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around
app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears
to be the vulnerability which exists today because
programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who
never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church
meeting passes without a discussion of the precision
engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones.

Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame
are the so-called-on-wikipedia FBI-Apple encryption dispute
and the Target corp data breach of 2013. In the first case,
the federal government is confronted by the reality that a
phone manufacturer can in fact make cryptographically
challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this
powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures
which arrive at their target destinations almost without
fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of justified
indignation when the cat photo takes more than a second
to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we can
have nice things.

In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system
of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next,
a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing
here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that
Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we
speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable
we feel because Target corp is a critical institution.

Jon



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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

Marcus G. Daniels

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/opinion/western-society-decadence.html

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Jon Zingale <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Friday, February 7, 2020 at 11:55 AM
To: "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

 

My intention in drawing attention to critical application

development is an attempt to deepen the discussion

around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around

app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears

to be the vulnerability which exists today because

programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who

never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church

meeting passes without a discussion of the precision

engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones.

 

Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame

are the so-called-on-wikipedia FBI-Apple encryption dispute

and the Target corp data breach of 2013. In the first case,

the federal government is confronted by the reality that a

phone manufacturer can in fact make cryptographically

challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this

powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures

which arrive at their target destinations almost without

fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of justified

indignation when the cat photo takes more than a second

to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we can

have nice things.

 

In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system

of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next,

a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing

here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that

Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we

speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable

we feel because Target corp is a critical institution.

 

Jon

 

 


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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

thompnickson2
In reply to this post by jon zingale

Jon,

 

Two things:

 

I really LIKE what you are doing, here.

 

..but.I don’t quite get it, yet.  I think it’s closely related to my take on the IOWA thing, which was that the phenomenon of interest was our out rage that the democratic process hadn’t been so rigged that we could have the results before we put out the dog and brung in the cat (or was it put out the cat, and brung in the dog; even when I had cats and dogs, I never knew which), and gave the babies one more tuck before we ourselves went to bed.  The funniest thing I ever heard was the 538 blog trying to use up the half hour they had booked with their audience.  Instead of saying, “Sorry, folks, we got nothing; go to bed early and get a good night’s sleep, for once,” they tried to turn the fact that they had nothing into a political event warranting their prescribed time slot.  I was almost as humiliating as when Rachel Maddow tried to turn a fragment of one of Trump’s tax returns into a 43 minute saga.  If ever there were a case of the media tail wagging the political dog, this would be it. 

 

Don’t get me wrong.  I love these people.  Am addicted to them.  But it’s when your friends do stupid things that it REALLY hurts.

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Friday, February 7, 2020 12:55 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

 

My intention in drawing attention to critical application

development is an attempt to deepen the discussion

around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around

app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears

to be the vulnerability which exists today because

programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who

never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church

meeting passes without a discussion of the precision

engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones.

 

Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame

are the so-called-on-wikipedia FBI-Apple encryption dispute

and the Target corp data breach of 2013. In the first case,

the federal government is confronted by the reality that a

phone manufacturer can in fact make cryptographically

challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this

powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures

which arrive at their target destinations almost without

fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of justified

indignation when the cat photo takes more than a second

to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we can

have nice things.

 

In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system

of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next,

a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing

here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that

Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we

speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable

we feel because Target corp is a critical institution.

 

Jon

 

 


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

Prof David West
In reply to this post by jon zingale
Jon,

As an observer of software "engineering" since its inception in 1968 (my first job as a programmer was that fall, and that spring/summer is when the NATO conference first coined the phrase), I can and will (braggadocio here) state that most software CANNOT be engineered, precision or otherwise, and all that we have learned in the past 52 years in both computer science and software engineering is essentially irrelevant to the production of application level software.

The protocols that ensure cat photos are scattered into packets traversing vast segments of the Internet to be reassembled and presented on you phone in real time, is an example of the minority of software that can be engineered. The vote counting app could not have been.

The difference is that the first replicates, in software, a deterministic machine with limited variables, all of which can be known and quantified, limited relations among variables, all of which can be known and stated; and the second one is a complex system where variables and relations are highly dynamic, idiosyncratic, and, often, quite literally unknowable.

I just completed a sixty-page essay on this subject "Why Programming is Hard and Software Development is (Mostly) Impossible" that addresses this issue. If you would like to read, let me know and I will send you a link or the paper.

Making things worse is the superstructure around software development — all the methodologies, all the frameworks, all the management levels, all the practices that supposedly guide/govern the process of developing software.

Icing on the cake, is attitude. Those that contract for software EXPECT that the project will fail and/or that what they get will be a pale imitation of what they wanted, full of bugs and inconsistencies. The development team also EXPECTS the project to fail, for different reasons, but fail nevertheless.

And roughly 90-percent of the time both sides have their expectations realized. (60-65 % of projects started are abandoned without any delivery, the other 20-25 percent are those pale imitations over budget and taking twice the time.)

One more factor - the game is rigged. Those that might actually be able to deliver reasonable software applications are not allowed to play in the game. Acronym and Shadow came into existence because people in Hillary Clinton's campaign thought they saw a way to make money and used their connections to get established and make contracts. The "bid" process was laughable, the specs being written such that no one but Shadow could comply and in a time frame that Microsoft, et. al. were not able to respond adequately.

Half a billion dollars were spent on the Obamacare website and another half-billion to get it to work after the initial failure. A startup team of Web-developers built the site with full functionality, including calculating subsidies (supposedly the hard part) in a week. Their site was demoed on Sixty Minutes. But they would never have been allowed to bid on the original project because they did not meet Federal procurement guidelines which were rigged to very large companies  most of whom have a remarkably long history of spectacular failures on past projects.

Frothing at the mouth so much, am at risk of dehydration.

dave


On Fri, Feb 7, 2020, at 8:54 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
My intention in drawing attention to critical application
development is an attempt to deepen the discussion
around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around
app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears
to be the vulnerability which exists today because
programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who
never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church
meeting passes without a discussion of the precision
engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones.

Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame
are the so-called-on-wikipedia FBI-Apple encryption dispute
and the Target corp data breach of 2013. In the first case,
the federal government is confronted by the reality that a
phone manufacturer can in fact make cryptographically
challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this
powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures
which arrive at their target destinations almost without
fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of justified
indignation when the cat photo takes more than a second
to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we can
have nice things.

In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system
of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next,
a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing
here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that
Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we
speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable
we feel because Target corp is a critical institution.

Jon


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove



============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

Gary Schiltz-4
Please post a link to your paper. I for one would love to read it. 

On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 3:45 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:
Jon,

As an observer of software "engineering" since its inception in 1968 (my first job as a programmer was that fall, and that spring/summer is when the NATO conference first coined the phrase), I can and will (braggadocio here) state that most software CANNOT be engineered, precision or otherwise, and all that we have learned in the past 52 years in both computer science and software engineering is essentially irrelevant to the production of application level software.

The protocols that ensure cat photos are scattered into packets traversing vast segments of the Internet to be reassembled and presented on you phone in real time, is an example of the minority of software that can be engineered. The vote counting app could not have been.

The difference is that the first replicates, in software, a deterministic machine with limited variables, all of which can be known and quantified, limited relations among variables, all of which can be known and stated; and the second one is a complex system where variables and relations are highly dynamic, idiosyncratic, and, often, quite literally unknowable.

I just completed a sixty-page essay on this subject "Why Programming is Hard and Software Development is (Mostly) Impossible" that addresses this issue. If you would like to read, let me know and I will send you a link or the paper.

Making things worse is the superstructure around software development — all the methodologies, all the frameworks, all the management levels, all the practices that supposedly guide/govern the process of developing software.

Icing on the cake, is attitude. Those that contract for software EXPECT that the project will fail and/or that what they get will be a pale imitation of what they wanted, full of bugs and inconsistencies. The development team also EXPECTS the project to fail, for different reasons, but fail nevertheless.

And roughly 90-percent of the time both sides have their expectations realized. (60-65 % of projects started are abandoned without any delivery, the other 20-25 percent are those pale imitations over budget and taking twice the time.)

One more factor - the game is rigged. Those that might actually be able to deliver reasonable software applications are not allowed to play in the game. Acronym and Shadow came into existence because people in Hillary Clinton's campaign thought they saw a way to make money and used their connections to get established and make contracts. The "bid" process was laughable, the specs being written such that no one but Shadow could comply and in a time frame that Microsoft, et. al. were not able to respond adequately.

Half a billion dollars were spent on the Obamacare website and another half-billion to get it to work after the initial failure. A startup team of Web-developers built the site with full functionality, including calculating subsidies (supposedly the hard part) in a week. Their site was demoed on Sixty Minutes. But they would never have been allowed to bid on the original project because they did not meet Federal procurement guidelines which were rigged to very large companies  most of whom have a remarkably long history of spectacular failures on past projects.

Frothing at the mouth so much, am at risk of dehydration.

dave


On Fri, Feb 7, 2020, at 8:54 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
My intention in drawing attention to critical application
development is an attempt to deepen the discussion
around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around
app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears
to be the vulnerability which exists today because
programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who
never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church
meeting passes without a discussion of the precision
engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones.

Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame
are the so-called-on-wikipedia FBI-Apple encryption dispute
and the Target corp data breach of 2013. In the first case,
the federal government is confronted by the reality that a
phone manufacturer can in fact make cryptographically
challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this
powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures
which arrive at their target destinations almost without
fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of justified
indignation when the cat photo takes more than a second
to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we can
have nice things.

In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system
of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next,
a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing
here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that
Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we
speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable
we feel because Target corp is a critical institution.

Jon


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

Frank Wimberly-2
In reply to this post by Prof David West
I won't mention 5ESS again since I already described that software development accomplishment.

My elder daughter's husband has a job that puts him in an interesting position.  He is working on a large IT project where the customer is the US Department of Labor.  His employer is a subcontractor which has been hired by the contractor.  The subcontractor is a team which specializes in agile development.  The contractor has to ensure compliance with Government standards.  SIL's job is to provide the interface between the two.  He enjoys this because it requires people skills.  The contractor recently requested that the subcontractor give him a 40% raise.  He already made a lot by my standards.  I sent him one of your essays a few months ago, Dave.  He thought it was interesting.

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sat, Feb 8, 2020, 1:44 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:
Jon,

As an observer of software "engineering" since its inception in 1968 (my first job as a programmer was that fall, and that spring/summer is when the NATO conference first coined the phrase), I can and will (braggadocio here) state that most software CANNOT be engineered, precision or otherwise, and all that we have learned in the past 52 years in both computer science and software engineering is essentially irrelevant to the production of application level software.

The protocols that ensure cat photos are scattered into packets traversing vast segments of the Internet to be reassembled and presented on you phone in real time, is an example of the minority of software that can be engineered. The vote counting app could not have been.

The difference is that the first replicates, in software, a deterministic machine with limited variables, all of which can be known and quantified, limited relations among variables, all of which can be known and stated; and the second one is a complex system where variables and relations are highly dynamic, idiosyncratic, and, often, quite literally unknowable.

I just completed a sixty-page essay on this subject "Why Programming is Hard and Software Development is (Mostly) Impossible" that addresses this issue. If you would like to read, let me know and I will send you a link or the paper.

Making things worse is the superstructure around software development — all the methodologies, all the frameworks, all the management levels, all the practices that supposedly guide/govern the process of developing software.

Icing on the cake, is attitude. Those that contract for software EXPECT that the project will fail and/or that what they get will be a pale imitation of what they wanted, full of bugs and inconsistencies. The development team also EXPECTS the project to fail, for different reasons, but fail nevertheless.

And roughly 90-percent of the time both sides have their expectations realized. (60-65 % of projects started are abandoned without any delivery, the other 20-25 percent are those pale imitations over budget and taking twice the time.)

One more factor - the game is rigged. Those that might actually be able to deliver reasonable software applications are not allowed to play in the game. Acronym and Shadow came into existence because people in Hillary Clinton's campaign thought they saw a way to make money and used their connections to get established and make contracts. The "bid" process was laughable, the specs being written such that no one but Shadow could comply and in a time frame that Microsoft, et. al. were not able to respond adequately.

Half a billion dollars were spent on the Obamacare website and another half-billion to get it to work after the initial failure. A startup team of Web-developers built the site with full functionality, including calculating subsidies (supposedly the hard part) in a week. Their site was demoed on Sixty Minutes. But they would never have been allowed to bid on the original project because they did not meet Federal procurement guidelines which were rigged to very large companies  most of whom have a remarkably long history of spectacular failures on past projects.

Frothing at the mouth so much, am at risk of dehydration.

dave


On Fri, Feb 7, 2020, at 8:54 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
My intention in drawing attention to critical application
development is an attempt to deepen the discussion
around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around
app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears
to be the vulnerability which exists today because
programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who
never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church
meeting passes without a discussion of the precision
engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones.

Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame
are the so-called-on-wikipedia FBI-Apple encryption dispute
and the Target corp data breach of 2013. In the first case,
the federal government is confronted by the reality that a
phone manufacturer can in fact make cryptographically
challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this
powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures
which arrive at their target destinations almost without
fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of justified
indignation when the cat photo takes more than a second
to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we can
have nice things.

In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system
of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next,
a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing
here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that
Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we
speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable
we feel because Target corp is a critical institution.

Jon


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

Prof David West
In reply to this post by Gary Schiltz-4
Gary, others interested



davew

On Sat, Feb 8, 2020, at 2:40 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote:
Please post a link to your paper. I for one would love to read it. 

On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 3:45 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Jon,

As an observer of software "engineering" since its inception in 1968 (my first job as a programmer was that fall, and that spring/summer is when the NATO conference first coined the phrase), I can and will (braggadocio here) state that most software CANNOT be engineered, precision or otherwise, and all that we have learned in the past 52 years in both computer science and software engineering is essentially irrelevant to the production of application level software.

The protocols that ensure cat photos are scattered into packets traversing vast segments of the Internet to be reassembled and presented on you phone in real time, is an example of the minority of software that can be engineered. The vote counting app could not have been.

The difference is that the first replicates, in software, a deterministic machine with limited variables, all of which can be known and quantified, limited relations among variables, all of which can be known and stated; and the second one is a complex system where variables and relations are highly dynamic, idiosyncratic, and, often, quite literally unknowable.

I just completed a sixty-page essay on this subject "Why Programming is Hard and Software Development is (Mostly) Impossible" that addresses this issue. If you would like to read, let me know and I will send you a link or the paper.

Making things worse is the superstructure around software development — all the methodologies, all the frameworks, all the management levels, all the practices that supposedly guide/govern the process of developing software.

Icing on the cake, is attitude. Those that contract for software EXPECT that the project will fail and/or that what they get will be a pale imitation of what they wanted, full of bugs and inconsistencies. The development team also EXPECTS the project to fail, for different reasons, but fail nevertheless.

And roughly 90-percent of the time both sides have their expectations realized. (60-65 % of projects started are abandoned without any delivery, the other 20-25 percent are those pale imitations over budget and taking twice the time.)

One more factor - the game is rigged. Those that might actually be able to deliver reasonable software applications are not allowed to play in the game. Acronym and Shadow came into existence because people in Hillary Clinton's campaign thought they saw a way to make money and used their connections to get established and make contracts. The "bid" process was laughable, the specs being written such that no one but Shadow could comply and in a time frame that Microsoft, et. al. were not able to respond adequately.

Half a billion dollars were spent on the Obamacare website and another half-billion to get it to work after the initial failure. A startup team of Web-developers built the site with full functionality, including calculating subsidies (supposedly the hard part) in a week. Their site was demoed on Sixty Minutes. But they would never have been allowed to bid on the original project because they did not meet Federal procurement guidelines which were rigged to very large companies  most of whom have a remarkably long history of spectacular failures on past projects.

Frothing at the mouth so much, am at risk of dehydration.

dave


On Fri, Feb 7, 2020, at 8:54 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
My intention in drawing attention to critical application
development is an attempt to deepen the discussion
around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around
app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears
to be the vulnerability which exists today because
programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who
never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church
meeting passes without a discussion of the precision
engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones.

Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame
are the so-called-on-wikipedia FBI-Apple encryption dispute
and the Target corp data breach of 2013. In the first case,
the federal government is confronted by the reality that a
phone manufacturer can in fact make cryptographically
challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this
powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures
which arrive at their target destinations almost without
fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of justified
indignation when the cat photo takes more than a second
to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we can
have nice things.

In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system
of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next,
a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing
here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that
Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we
speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable
we feel because Target corp is a critical institution.

Jon


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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

thompnickson2
In reply to this post by Gary Schiltz-4

Here!  Here!  The Paper, the Paper!!!

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz
Sent: Saturday, February 8, 2020 6:41 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

 

Please post a link to your paper. I for one would love to read it. 

 

On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 3:45 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Jon,

 

As an observer of software "engineering" since its inception in 1968 (my first job as a programmer was that fall, and that spring/summer is when the NATO conference first coined the phrase), I can and will (braggadocio here) state that most software CANNOT be engineered, precision or otherwise, and all that we have learned in the past 52 years in both computer science and software engineering is essentially irrelevant to the production of application level software.

 

The protocols that ensure cat photos are scattered into packets traversing vast segments of the Internet to be reassembled and presented on you phone in real time, is an example of the minority of software that can be engineered. The vote counting app could not have been.

 

The difference is that the first replicates, in software, a deterministic machine with limited variables, all of which can be known and quantified, limited relations among variables, all of which can be known and stated; and the second one is a complex system where variables and relations are highly dynamic, idiosyncratic, and, often, quite literally unknowable.

 

I just completed a sixty-page essay on this subject "Why Programming is Hard and Software Development is (Mostly) Impossible" that addresses this issue. If you would like to read, let me know and I will send you a link or the paper.

 

Making things worse is the superstructure around software development — all the methodologies, all the frameworks, all the management levels, all the practices that supposedly guide/govern the process of developing software.

 

Icing on the cake, is attitude. Those that contract for software EXPECT that the project will fail and/or that what they get will be a pale imitation of what they wanted, full of bugs and inconsistencies. The development team also EXPECTS the project to fail, for different reasons, but fail nevertheless.

 

And roughly 90-percent of the time both sides have their expectations realized. (60-65 % of projects started are abandoned without any delivery, the other 20-25 percent are those pale imitations over budget and taking twice the time.)

 

One more factor - the game is rigged. Those that might actually be able to deliver reasonable software applications are not allowed to play in the game. Acronym and Shadow came into existence because people in Hillary Clinton's campaign thought they saw a way to make money and used their connections to get established and make contracts. The "bid" process was laughable, the specs being written such that no one but Shadow could comply and in a time frame that Microsoft, et. al. were not able to respond adequately.

 

Half a billion dollars were spent on the Obamacare website and another half-billion to get it to work after the initial failure. A startup team of Web-developers built the site with full functionality, including calculating subsidies (supposedly the hard part) in a week. Their site was demoed on Sixty Minutes. But they would never have been allowed to bid on the original project because they did not meet Federal procurement guidelines which were rigged to very large companies  most of whom have a remarkably long history of spectacular failures on past projects.

 

Frothing at the mouth so much, am at risk of dehydration.

 

dave

 

 

On Fri, Feb 7, 2020, at 8:54 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:

My intention in drawing attention to critical application

development is an attempt to deepen the discussion

around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around

app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears

to be the vulnerability which exists today because

programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who

never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church

meeting passes without a discussion of the precision

engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones.

 

Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame

are the so-called-on-wikipedia FBI-Apple encryption dispute

and the Target corp data breach of 2013. In the first case,

the federal government is confronted by the reality that a

phone manufacturer can in fact make cryptographically

challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this

powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures

which arrive at their target destinations almost without

fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of justified

indignation when the cat photo takes more than a second

to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we can

have nice things.

 

In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system

of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next,

a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing

here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that

Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we

speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable

we feel because Target corp is a critical institution.

 

Jon

 

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

 

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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

jon zingale
In reply to this post by jon zingale
Dave,

While I agree that there are likely to be many systemic reasons
for this electoral failure, I am unwilling to go so far as to claim
that the design of a critical application voting app belongs to the
class of impossible tasks.

Maybe a little flippantly and without dragging this entire post
into design details, the voting app needs little more than a
Facebook like-button, a Redis server, authentication and
a light-weight rest api. If the idea were to be taken seriously,
such an app could be written starting now for an election in
four years. It could be tested and verified by a trusted agency,
like the NSA. The process of building a voting app could be
taken seriously and accomplished.

A pressing issue for me remains. There appears to be forming
a public rhetoric around failure. A rhetoric which can be
summarized as: failure legitimizes institutions. Through our
grieving and eulogizing over a data breach at Target corp, 
we legitimize Target as a critical institution. After two
Boeing 737 jet crashes, the collective expressions of
helplessness and loss legitimize Boeing as a critical institution.
Now, and possibly most controversially, we have the failure
of electoral and democratic process. This possibly-emergent
coping strategy additionally appears to mirror strategies
outlined by Baudrillard in his analysis of Watergate.

With respect to these newly minted critical institutions,
the public participates in a type of Stockholm syndrome.
We continue to support and rely on them. We continue to
form rhetoric about the impossibility of doing otherwise,
rather than calling these institutions out for what they
are, namely failing to adequately serve their functions.

Jon

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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

Marcus G. Daniels

Jon writes:

 

A rhetoric which can be summarized as: failure legitimizes institutions.”

 

“We continue to form rhetoric about the impossibility of doing otherwise,

rather than calling these institutions out for what they

are, namely failing to adequately serve their functions.”

 

And one does what when the institution is both major political parties in the U.S. or the U.S. government itself?  One can choose to not shop at Target, or similar organizations that are careless about security.  But the other institutions might be disbanded as well.  We simply recognize there can be no more perfect union, and the experiment has failed.

 

Marcus

 

 

 

 


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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

thompnickson2

Well, hang on there, Marcus!  “More perfect” than what?

 

All species succumb to extinction, but that doesn’t make extinction our goal, does it?

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, February 8, 2020 5:13 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>; S. A. Johnson <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

 

Jon writes:

 

A rhetoric which can be summarized as: failure legitimizes institutions.”

 

“We continue to form rhetoric about the impossibility of doing otherwise,

rather than calling these institutions out for what they

are, namely failing to adequately serve their functions.”

 

And one does what when the institution is both major political parties in the U.S. or the U.S. government itself?  One can choose to not shop at Target, or similar organizations that are careless about security.  But the other institutions might be disbanded as well.  We simply recognize there can be no more perfect union, and the experiment has failed.

 

Marcus

 

 

 

 


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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

Russell Standish-2
In reply to this post by Prof David West
On Sat, Feb 08, 2020 at 09:44:20AM +0100, Prof David West wrote:
> Jon,
>
> As an observer of software "engineering" since its inception in 1968 (my first
> job as a programmer was that fall, and that spring/summer is when the NATO
> conference first coined the phrase), I can and will (braggadocio here) state
> that most software CANNOT be engineered, precision or otherwise, and all that
> we have learned in the past 52 years in both computer science and software
> engineering is essentially irrelevant to the production of application level
> software.

As someone who graduated from being a "programmer" to a "software
engineer" somewhere around 2008, I can testify there is a world of
difference between the two. A programmer will happily churn out
programs up to 1000 lines of code, and maybe manage a 10,000 loc
program by dint of extreme hoeroic effort. Using software engineering
techiniques, including object orientation, extensive regression
testing, continuous integration, source code management and so on, a
single programmer can easily manage a 10 Kloc program, and up to
100Kloc loc by dint of heroic effort (ie an order of magnitude more
complex). A small team of 5 coders can perhaps manage a 1Mloc codebase
(albeit probably not 10x as complex as the 100Kloc codebase in my
experience), but requires much more intrateam communication, via daily
standups etc.

For larger projects eg the Linux kernel (ca 30Mloc), it is only
feasible by being extremely modular, which cuts down on the amount of
intrateam communicaton. Noone, not even Linus, has a clear picture of
the whole.

But none of these larger projects would be possible without the
discipline of "software engineering". Whether "software engineering"
is actually "engineering" or not is a pub argument, but it clearly
works when applied pragmatically and not idealogically. If not
"engineering", we would still need a name to cover the set of
techniques that help tame complexity, and manage software development
at scale.


--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Russell Standish                    Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders     [hidden email]
                      http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

Marcus G. Daniels
In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Nick writes:

 

< “More perfect” than what? >

 

Historically, more than a federal government that acts indirectly upon states.  A government that can ensure more rights of citizens rather than less. 

 

Marcus


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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

thompnickson2

Hi, Marcus,

 

Do you have a model in mind?  A place where they do it better? 

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, February 8, 2020 6:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

 

Nick writes:

 

< “More perfect” than what? >

 

Historically, more than a federal government that acts indirectly upon states.  A government that can ensure more rights of citizens rather than less. 

 

Marcus


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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

Prof David West
In reply to this post by jon zingale
Jon,

The "artifact" — a couple of hundred lines of code executing on a smartphone — can be engineered. No question.

The "app" however is the artifact deployed in a context; a context that includes human beings.

The app+context is a complex system and you cannot "engineer" that system. You will not be able to anticipate all, or even most, of the ways that things will go wrong once your quality engineered artifact is deployed. You will not be able to anticipate and account for how something as simple as a "Facebook-like button" will be perceived by different users of the app, many of whom have never seen Facebook or its buttons.

Moreover, since you are introducing your artifact into a complex system, it will change the system. For example: the app requires you to enter a number in a field. A paper form requires you to enter a number in a field. Same thing —right? No!
Paper provides all kinds of affordances that the app will not: erasures, modifications with initials, etc. You cannot know what many of these affordances are and you certainly cannot engineer them into your artifact.

Even more interesting and perplexing, the app embodied a system change that was never evaluated: how voters will behave when they know that their sequence of actions are being reported, not just their final act. Will the behavior change" Yes! Did Shadow have any concept of how or why, or did the DNC when it created the specs for the app? No!

And did the design of the app take into account intentional bad actors? Sure, it had two-factor authentication (which more than half the users did not understand how to make work), but would the same trolls that jammed the phone lines to headquarters have affect the ability of the app to submit results? Probably not literally, but a DNS attack probably would have; not to mention all kinds of spoofing possibilities.)

Arguing that a "critical application voting app belongs to the class of impossible tasks" the way that I am supports the heart, I think, of your concern about the rhetoric of failure, but at a different level.

Rhetoric about a data breach at Target does not legitimize Target — it legitimizes the institution of "credit" and institutions like credit reporting agencies. Beyond that, the institution of social security numbers.

Rhetoric about Boeing 737 legitimizes, not an institution but a conviction — that artificial intelligence is superior to human, that autopilots are more trustworthy than human pilots.

I completely agree with you that, as a culture and society, we are totally in thrall, Stockholm Syndrome-like, to the "newly minted" and the impossibility of doing anything different.

I suspect that my perspective with regard the rhetoric, its use, and its targets are far more expansive that the concern you have articulated in this instance.

davew



On Sun, Feb 9, 2020, at 12:52 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
Dave,

While I agree that there are likely to be many systemic reasons
for this electoral failure, I am unwilling to go so far as to claim
that the design of a critical application voting app belongs to the
class of impossible tasks.

Maybe a little flippantly and without dragging this entire post
into design details, the voting app needs little more than a
Facebook like-button, a Redis server, authentication and
a light-weight rest api. If the idea were to be taken seriously,
such an app could be written starting now for an election in
four years. It could be tested and verified by a trusted agency,
like the NSA. The process of building a voting app could be
taken seriously and accomplished.

A pressing issue for me remains. There appears to be forming
a public rhetoric around failure. A rhetoric which can be
summarized as: failure legitimizes institutions. Through our
grieving and eulogizing over a data breach at Target corp, 
we legitimize Target as a critical institution. After two
Boeing 737 jet crashes, the collective expressions of
helplessness and loss legitimize Boeing as a critical institution.
Now, and possibly most controversially, we have the failure
of electoral and democratic process. This possibly-emergent
coping strategy additionally appears to mirror strategies
outlined by Baudrillard in his analysis of Watergate.

With respect to these newly minted critical institutions,
the public participates in a type of Stockholm syndrome.
We continue to support and rely on them. We continue to
form rhetoric about the impossibility of doing otherwise,
rather than calling these institutions out for what they
are, namely failing to adequately serve their functions.

Jon
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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

Prof David West
In reply to this post by Russell Standish-2
Russel,

Software Engineering has indeed enabled the construction of 100MLoc+ software constructs.

But why do we assume that such monstrosities need to be built?

davew


On Sun, Feb 9, 2020, at 2:04 AM, Russell Standish wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 08, 2020 at 09:44:20AM +0100, Prof David West wrote:
> > Jon,
> >
> > As an observer of software "engineering" since its inception in 1968 (my first
> > job as a programmer was that fall, and that spring/summer is when the NATO
> > conference first coined the phrase), I can and will (braggadocio here) state
> > that most software CANNOT be engineered, precision or otherwise, and all that
> > we have learned in the past 52 years in both computer science and software
> > engineering is essentially irrelevant to the production of application level
> > software.
>
> As someone who graduated from being a "programmer" to a "software
> engineer" somewhere around 2008, I can testify there is a world of
> difference between the two. A programmer will happily churn out
> programs up to 1000 lines of code, and maybe manage a 10,000 loc
> program by dint of extreme hoeroic effort. Using software engineering
> techiniques, including object orientation, extensive regression
> testing, continuous integration, source code management and so on, a
> single programmer can easily manage a 10 Kloc program, and up to
> 100Kloc loc by dint of heroic effort (ie an order of magnitude more
> complex). A small team of 5 coders can perhaps manage a 1Mloc codebase
> (albeit probably not 10x as complex as the 100Kloc codebase in my
> experience), but requires much more intrateam communication, via daily
> standups etc.
>
> For larger projects eg the Linux kernel (ca 30Mloc), it is only
> feasible by being extremely modular, which cuts down on the amount of
> intrateam communicaton. Noone, not even Linus, has a clear picture of
> the whole.
>
> But none of these larger projects would be possible without the
> discipline of "software engineering". Whether "software engineering"
> is actually "engineering" or not is a pub argument, but it clearly
> works when applied pragmatically and not idealogically. If not
> "engineering", we would still need a name to cover the set of
> techniques that help tame complexity, and manage software development
> at scale.
>
>
> --
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr Russell Standish                    Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
> Principal, High Performance Coders     [hidden email]
>                       http://www.hpcoders.com.au
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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>

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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

Prof David West
In reply to this post by thompnickson2
Nick.

if you are talking about my paper, here is the link I posted to Gary that you might not have seen.


davew


On Sat, Feb 8, 2020, at 6:02 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Here!  Here!  The Paper, the Paper!!!

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/


 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz
Sent: Saturday, February 8, 2020 6:41 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

 

Please post a link to your paper. I for one would love to read it. 

 

On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 3:45 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Jon,

 

As an observer of software "engineering" since its inception in 1968 (my first job as a programmer was that fall, and that spring/summer is when the NATO conference first coined the phrase), I can and will (braggadocio here) state that most software CANNOT be engineered, precision or otherwise, and all that we have learned in the past 52 years in both computer science and software engineering is essentially irrelevant to the production of application level software.

 

The protocols that ensure cat photos are scattered into packets traversing vast segments of the Internet to be reassembled and presented on you phone in real time, is an example of the minority of software that can be engineered. The vote counting app could not have been.

 

The difference is that the first replicates, in software, a deterministic machine with limited variables, all of which can be known and quantified, limited relations among variables, all of which can be known and stated; and the second one is a complex system where variables and relations are highly dynamic, idiosyncratic, and, often, quite literally unknowable.

 

I just completed a sixty-page essay on this subject "Why Programming is Hard and Software Development is (Mostly) Impossible" that addresses this issue. If you would like to read, let me know and I will send you a link or the paper.

 

Making things worse is the superstructure around software development — all the methodologies, all the frameworks, all the management levels, all the practices that supposedly guide/govern the process of developing software.

 

Icing on the cake, is attitude. Those that contract for software EXPECT that the project will fail and/or that what they get will be a pale imitation of what they wanted, full of bugs and inconsistencies. The development team also EXPECTS the project to fail, for different reasons, but fail nevertheless.

 

And roughly 90-percent of the time both sides have their expectations realized. (60-65 % of projects started are abandoned without any delivery, the other 20-25 percent are those pale imitations over budget and taking twice the time.)

 

One more factor - the game is rigged. Those that might actually be able to deliver reasonable software applications are not allowed to play in the game. Acronym and Shadow came into existence because people in Hillary Clinton's campaign thought they saw a way to make money and used their connections to get established and make contracts. The "bid" process was laughable, the specs being written such that no one but Shadow could comply and in a time frame that Microsoft, et. al. were not able to respond adequately.

 

Half a billion dollars were spent on the Obamacare website and another half-billion to get it to work after the initial failure. A startup team of Web-developers built the site with full functionality, including calculating subsidies (supposedly the hard part) in a week. Their site was demoed on Sixty Minutes. But they would never have been allowed to bid on the original project because they did not meet Federal procurement guidelines which were rigged to very large companies  most of whom have a remarkably long history of spectacular failures on past projects.

 

Frothing at the mouth so much, am at risk of dehydration.

 

dave

 

 

On Fri, Feb 7, 2020, at 8:54 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:

My intention in drawing attention to critical application

development is an attempt to deepen the discussion

around 'apps' and rhetoric. In the discussions around

app usage in the democratic primaries, the target appears

to be the vulnerability which exists today because

programmers today are a bunch of python hacks who

never read Knuth. Yet, not a single Friam mother-church

meeting passes without a discussion of the precision

engineering embodied in our Porches, Teslas, or iphones.

 

Of particular interest to me in directing this rhetorical frame

are the so-called-on-wikipedia FBI-Apple encryption dispute

and the Target corp data breach of 2013. In the first case,

the federal government is confronted by the reality that a

phone manufacturer can in fact make cryptographically

challenging hand held devices. Further we can use this

powerful technology for sending our family cat pictures

which arrive at their target destinations almost without

fail and near instantaneously. There is a sense of justified

indignation when the cat photo takes more than a second

to be delivered. The state-of-the-art is such that we can

have nice things.

 

In the second case, a data breach is exploited in the POS system

of big box corporation which sells mostly useless things. Next,

a public rhetoric emerges similar to the rhetoric I am witnessing

here with the democratic primaries. Instead of pointing out that

Target corp doesn't consider our privacy a critical concern, we

speak of how impossible it is to have privacy and how vulnerable

we feel because Target corp is a critical institution.

 

Jon

 

 

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Re: Curmudgeons Unite!

Marcus G. Daniels
In reply to this post by thompnickson2

Nick writes:

 

“Do you have a model in mind? “

 

Optimistically, the Democrats retake the executive branch and the Senate and extend the Supreme Court.  

 

If that doesn’t happen, well, it could be time to make some decisions.  As of 2017, the top 25 metropolitan areas in the US make up 50% of the US GDP compared to about 10% for non-metro areas. [1]  One way to bring Trump country to its knees, the 10%, is to do what Trump country people want, cut federal taxes.  With federal tax relief, local taxes could be raised to do the things that cities need to do.  In the Bay Area, for example, two needs among many are to build more affordable housing and to increase the safety of the energy distribution system.   Navigating potentially oppressive new federal employment law by sanctuary states might be accomplished with creative use of ITINs or state authority over death records.  The workforce is needed and it isn’t fair to not give people fair standing, including as voters.  Planning for the collapse of Social Security and Medicare will be hard, but honestly I’ve pretty much written off getting either.   In the near term scenario of fascists in charge in Washington, Democrats should still pour on the vitriol of entitlements to exacerbate the debt load, while at a state level creating other contingencies.   There will need to be real crisis to put an end to the electoral college.  I am confident Republican leadership can achieve a spectacular crisis, but it will be important to prepare for it.

 

[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/18684/us-cities-by-gdp/

[2] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/06/immigration-wages-economics/530301/


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