Matthew Yglesias » Endgame

Aug 26th, 2009 at 6:14 pm

Endgame

Everybody loves you:

— A real cost-benefit analysis of HSR.

— Eric Holder had no choice.

— Given that we know how these things go, it seems to me that Mary Landrieu deciding to hold a health care town hall probably means that she’s looking for some constituent pressure to help rationalize a “no” vote on reform.

— Leon Wieseltier hates the internet.

— IT departments should unlock people’s browsers.

— I always love Ta-Nehisi Coates’ posts on discovering white culture.

Song of the day: Rat Silo, “Everybody Loves Paul Wong” an interesting lyrical pastiche brought to my attention by the excellent CBC Radio 3 podcast.

Comments
29

29 Responses to “Endgame”

Cranky Observer Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
> — IT departments should unlock people’s browsers.

As an IT Director/CIO I ran a pretty open shop (with the approval of the company president), allowed many end user installations, and never took more than 2-3 days to analyze and either approve a complex install request or suggest an alternative (usually open source). And I absorbed in my budget the cost of virus removal, system rebuilding, additional anti-malware systems and software, etc.

But I GUARANTEE you that never, not once, did a Matthew Yglesias or a Farhad Manjoo volunteer to stay in the office around the clock for 24 hours to stamp out a virus infection, or to spend the hours and hours in front of the screen necessary to create a stable workstation build, or to attend more than one meeting of the “superuser steering committee”. Nor to put anything approaching the actual cost of service/PC on their budget as a line item. Not once. So I have to say it is pretty easy to spend someone else’s budget and manpower when your own is not on the line.

Cranky
Mike S Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Cranky,

Thats what IT guys do. Sorry – it is the job you signed up to do. Don’t complain about your career choice.

Whatever you might think about Matt’s opinions, his work ethic appears to be in the top 1% range for bloggers.

Lying – we liberals need to lie lots more. It could be good for our cause. It appears to work with die hard supporters and then convinces idiots in the middle that it must be true because we are willing to lie.
Aqua Regia Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Or get everyone to buy Macs. Totally impractical, I know, but it does solve the virus issue.
Cranky Observer Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
> Thats what IT guys do. Sorry – it is the job
> you signed up to do. Don’t complain about your
> career choice.

Actually, I was drafted into the job from engineering/operations when the business VPs fired all the old “Data Processing” managers for being too slow, unresponsive, inefficient, etc. Those you are complaining about now are in many cases the eager young beavers who charged in and took over during the early PC and “client/server” era to show the oldtimers how it should be done. Particularly how they were going to “open everything up”. Now they are are on the other side of the wheel…

And again, it is quite easy to say “suck up and get the job done” to someone else when you are simultaneously refusing to pay the corresponding service fee.

Cranky
Jeremy Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
“Or get everyone to buy Macs. Totally impractical, I know, but it does solve the virus issue.”

Util everybody has Macs, then that’s who they start targeting viruses towards.

Btw, who’s “Paul Wong”?
Anonymous Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
There are versions of Firefox which are purposefully designed so that they can be run off a USB key. (Or a folder on your desktop, if you prefer.) The same project has all sorts of other “portable apps” based on various open source programs. I’m not knowledgable enough in the dark arts of IT to know if these can be blocked, and they wouldn’t help you get around web filters, (well, technically PuTTY might, but that requires some extra talent) but they are a useful resource.
pseudonymous in nc Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Cranky: Manjoo’s piece reports the complaints of State Department employees that they’re running (I’d presume) an IE-only shop. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s an IE6 shop, too, which is a buggy, insecure piece of shit.

Now, an IE shop with all sorts of shit locked down (no ActiveX, etc.) can be borderline secure, but it’s not going to make for happy working. Federal and state-level IT can be glacial compared even to other BigCorp conservatism, but would you really proscribe Firefox on the desktop?
BFR Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Given that we know how these things go, it seems to me that Mary Landrieu deciding to hold a health care town hall probably means that she’s looking for some constituent pressure to help rationalize a “no” vote on reform.

Not sure about this. The town hall is going to be in some place called Reserve, LA. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Reserve:

“The racial makeup of the CDP was 44.17% White, 53.92% African American, 0.19% Native American, 0.32% Asian, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 0.60% from other races, and 0.78% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 1.98% of the population.”

Your conclusion might be a bit hasty.
pseudonymous in nc Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
There are versions of Firefox which are purposefully designed so that they can be run off a USB key. (Or a folder on your desktop, if you prefer.)

And there are admin settings that stop you from mounting USB drives, or running EXEs from your own personal file space. So yeah, they’re more useful for the home-with-the-parents virus eradication session than in locked down corporate shops.
krod Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 7:13 pm

Thats what IT guys do. Sorry – it is the job you signed up to do. Don’t complain about your career choice.

Funny.

One way of dealing with this attitude is to lock computers down tight and only allow a small number of applications. That way IT people get to go home for dinner. All it takes is a story to management about how this will save a ton of money.

The complaining gets filed away in /dev/null. Problem solved. I am off to go motorcross.

Most users aren’t really doing anything that requires much in the way of flexibility anyways. For them computers are toasters and pr0n dispensers.
Cranky Observer Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
> Cranky: Manjoo’s piece reports the complaints of State
> Department employees that they’re running (I’d presume) an
> IE-only shop. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s an IE6 shop,
> too, which is a buggy, insecure piece of shit.
>
> Now, an IE shop with all sorts of shit locked down (no
> ActiveX, etc.) can be borderline secure, but it’s not going
> to make for happy working.

Actually, it has a lot to do with the politics of the outsourcing contract. Outsourcing, you may remember, was supposed to simultaneously reduce costs and improve service as the obnoxious internal “IT” staff were replaced with “trained professionals” from the outsourcing contractor. I am pretty sure I know who the State Dept’s IT oursourcer is, and the situation as described actually has a lot to do with the technical and contracting politics of that specific outsourcer which has a heavy investment (in all senses of that word good and bad) in Microsoft and Microsoft software. They actually do provide a stable and secure Windows/IE platform, but at the cost of extreme lockdown. That’s one (but only one) of the reasons I personally prefer a mixed system.

By the way, I have been using Firefox since Mozilla 0.3 and I have been including it in corporate installs since Mozilla 0.7 (IIRC) so you might want to lower YOUR condescension knob down a bit from 11.

Cranky
Cranky Observer Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
> Funny.
>
> One way of dealing with this attitude is
> to lock computers down tight and only allow
> a small number of applications. That way IT
> people get to go home for dinner.

Another common tactic is to transfer them to some of the perpetual openings in midlevel IT management. The look on their faces the first time they are on the other side of the phone is priceless…

Cranky
TRIATHLON Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
(THE CHANCE FOR PEACE)

(QUESTION): And as lives continue to be lost – on all sides – with grim regularity, to pose some serious questions: is all this heartache and sacrifice worth it?

(ANSWER): This is a War Of Blood For Oil / Resources and Markets, and who is going to get the oil not the (U.K.) United Kingdom, not the (EU) European Union, Not The Russian Federation, Not The Peoples Republic of China, this is European Blood, for Empire Oil, Resources and Markets.

(QUESTION): Is this war making Afghanistan and the world a safer place?

(ANSWER): On or about (18th) September the night of the New Moon in that month the entire Global Community may have its answer, will or will that not be the date of the promised Pre-emptive Nuclear Attack upon the Shi-ite Persian Republic of Iran be made by Israel, that attack is promised by Prime Minister of Israel, Benyamin “BiBi” Netanyahu, sooner than later, and were are the products of that nuclear war going to end up in the atmosphere, and where is it going to come down how much environmental damage to World Community will it cause, how much hate “We Hate You To The Bottom Of Our Souls”!

(QUESTION): Or are those lives being lost in vain? The lives that have been lost in vain have been those killed in the Islamic World, (1400::14) Fourteen-Hundred to Fourteen, just in Gaza with (400) Four-Hundred Children, that is the very tip of the lives lost in vain.

(U.S. Empire T-Bill’s / Terrorist Bill’s)

The real question that should be asked is why does Europe continue to support the slaughter by the purchase of Empire (U.S. Empire T-Bills / Terrorists Bills), the European Community can’t simply wash its collective hands and say we didn’t know, or we didn’t support what was happening. Can European Community collectively do a better job of handing the Middle East thru peaceful methods than the Empire with its European Funded Military Machine, and the answer is YES! The European Community can not walk away blameless, when it could have turned off the funding and stopped the carnage by ending the purchase of (U.S. Empire T-Bills / Terrorist Bill’s), and war and not investing in the European Community for Peace and Prosperity in the (21st) Century.

(Dwight D. Eisenhower)

“I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days’ governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.” –Dwight D. Eisenhower

In his January 17, 1961 farewell message to the nation, Dwight Eisenhower said: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

No people on earth can be held, as a people, to an enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice. No nation’s security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective co-operation with fellow-nations. (The Chance for Peace 1953).

HERCULE TRIATHLON SAVINIEN
mickslam Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
I’ll never forget the first time I didn’t eat for 15 hours when I was a traders clerk because I was so busy at work I literally didn’t have time to eat. I was so busy I was sweating down my back from literally running from location to location while doing math in my head so I could be ready to input data by the time I got there.

Or the outtrade session called for midnight, when I had left work at 8pm.

Or the time I almost got fired for my bosses mistake by my boss.

But I had signed up for this world, so I don’t complain about it.

IT people seem to think that somehow their jobs are singularly shitty. When I hear them talk about dialing down I think you should be the one doing it. Then again, I am a person who thinks that the usual computer experience is horrible because it was designed and created by IT people who from top to bottom have little empathy or understanding how others might think about the world.
DTM Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
In the mindset of certain people, there is no real law, just power, so Holder had a choice in that sense–although I guess they would think it is Obama who really had the choice. Further, many of these people are clinging to the idea that they fundamentally have the power (they are just on a really bad streak when it comes to elections and such), so Obama should have made the choice that they have been trying to dictate.
hugo Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
I’m at Justice and we used to have Firefox and IE until we got Vista and then they took it away, so now we’re just on IE. It’s not as locked down as you might think, actually, but pretty much the opposite of fun, yeah.
Cranky Observer Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
> Then again, I am a person who thinks that
> the usual computer experience is horrible
> because it was designed and created by IT people
> who from top to bottom have little empathy or
> understanding how others might think about the world.

And I’ll remind you again, firmly, that what you consider your “IT experience” at the end of the aughts was and is being created precisely by the people who shoved the old “data processing” mainframers out of the way because they knew how to “unlock the datacenter” and do everything better. It worked really well for the first few years, until the complexities started to grow and the cost-cutting pressures got stronger and stronger. Now they have reinvented the same disciplines that the mainframes they so despised back in the 1980s used – except poorly in many cases. Be careful what you ask for it; you might get it.

15 hours at the trading desk? In the process manufacturing industry we called that light duty for people with injuries.

Cranky
pseudonymous in nc Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
By the way, I have been using Firefox since Mozilla 0.3 and I have been including it in corporate installs since Mozilla 0.7 (IIRC) so you might want to lower YOUR condescension knob down a bit from 11.

It’s not condescension if your initial response suggested you were reacting to the link and not the story. So: no need to wave your BOFH credentials at me. I was compiling the crappy Mozilla code from source during the long, dark days of the late 90s when there wasn’t a decent graphical browser other than Opera (Opera!) to be had on Linux.
Michael H Schneider Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
Now they have reinvented the same disciplines that the mainframes they so despised back in the 1980s used – except poorly in many cases.

I remember the 80s. And the 70s. I subscribed to Byte during those years and studied it cover to cover. I played with some of those machines. I remember the articles about Dumb Terminals vs Smart Terminals.

I remember the review saying that DR-DOS, from Digital Research, was much better than MS-DOS. But I remember that Microsoft had all the MIS people locked up. IBM compatability was management’s touchstone, and MS meant corporate acceptability. Centralized control of every machine was their aim then, and it seems like nothing’s changed. Jerry Pournelle’s politics may be a bit off, but he was absolutely correct in saying ‘one user, one CPU, in the control of the user.’
joe from Lowell Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Ah, the Pixies.

I remember when I heard “Velouria” for the first time.

“I just heard this amazing song! It was, like, really soft and mellow during the refrains, and then it got really loud and distorted during the chorus! I’ve never heard anything like it!”

“What…what do you mean?”
wiley Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
I think the government should develop their own operating systems and office suites and not be beholden to Microsoft. I’ve seen a few V.A. doctors lately, and they’re all struggling with their computers because the system has changed AGAIN. Why does a word processing program need to be so substantially changed with each upgrade? I can see adding features, but changing Word as much as it’s been changed is ridiculous—it’s like rearranging the keys on a typewriter. Intelligent people were having a hard time typing letters, making orders, sending orders—things businesses have been doing since paperwork was invented. Things they have been doing for many years without struggling—except when the system is upgraded.

Who makes these decisions to change the system so drastically and why?
wiley Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
I like them too, James. Love to sing with their albums. Love the lyrics and her sense of humor. Is the woman who literally felt she had a hook in her head a song writer? It takes a good sport and a strong woman to write Mania from experience, too. She isn’t an artist of the caliber of Henrix, but who is? Besides his song Manic-Depression wasn’t really about manic-depression. If she sang it, it was.
wiley Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
Sorry. Wrong thread. I’m in a hurry, lots of work to do. Thanks for all the corrections. I got this one.
Aanthony Damiani Says:
August 27th, 2009 at 1:37 am
Why should I care what Leon Wieseltier thinks about anything?
bdbd Says:
August 27th, 2009 at 9:09 am
wiley@21 — a “public option” OS?
Bob h Says:
August 27th, 2009 at 9:09 am
No matter that Landrieu’s Lousiana lies right in the heart of the diabetes, hypertension, and cancer belt, and presumably has one of the lowest rates of insurance coverage. No matter that incomes are so low there that the rest of us would probably be subsidizing policies for Louisianans. She has to find a reason to cave to the screamers.
Njorl Says:
August 27th, 2009 at 9:55 am
One of the problems I’ve run into with computer security is the attitude that it’s best to always err on the safe side. I don’t really blame IT, they get it drummed into them from above that this is the desired policy.

It is a foolish policy. When you reduce productivity, you need to hire more people. Each additional person is an additional security risk. Always choosing policies that increase IT security at the expense of productivity reduce overall security.
Jeffrey Davis Says:
August 27th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Re: Pixies

Tracing rock/pop music haplogroups is an ijuts game.
Arun Says:
August 28th, 2009 at 11:25 am
“IT departments should unlock people’s browsers.”

A reminder that the Internet and “free” have atrophied people’s brains – there are very real costs to unlocking people’s browsers and so the lock/unlock decision has to be made based on that. There is no uniform rule.

Matt Yglesias

Endgame

29 Responses to “Endgame”

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