I just saw an article about how China is getting fatter so in the spirit of international cooperation, I'm going to get some Swedish Fish.
The key is to execute a few people right at the beginning of the project, as a warning to the others...
The cellular software referred to has likely been around, in some form or another, for a while, and so the bugs have had time to be shaken out. Any fairly new system started from scratch, on the other hand, whether for baggage handling or whatever, is going to be full of bugs and its going to take time to find them and fix them. It takes ten years to write good software.
Well, by day two T5 was working fine, which of course didn't stop the general national build-nothing-anywhere-ever lobby having a massive pity party for weeks.
generally, airports are an interesting problem because they involve a lot of software-hardware interaction and also human-computer interaction. if you think how annoying printers are, or anything that requires a little microswitch to register something in its place or an NFC chip to quack once it's had a bit of wear, and scale up, you get the idea.
For example, when I travelled to San Francisco in March, the Virgin Atlantic check-in machine wouldn't believe I had an ESTA number, because the scanner OCRd my passport number incorrectly. Now, the software workflow wouldn't proceed any further due to this basically transient and random hardware furt. There was no option to "give it another try".
Also, it failed out with a meaningless out-of-cheese message, saying nothing but that it couldn't check me in. At the desk, they do know what the error is and respond by suggesting I apply for another ESTA. I managed to persuade them to pull the lever to re-run the check-in, and this time it worked.
But as a side effect, they weighed my bag and insisted I check it in. So you get a bit of human grease on an OCR sensor and it touches all kinds of other system interfaces, including bits of DHS, other bits of hardware in the baggage system, and probably security monitoring (as I had to get them to call a security manager).
The linked essay in the second paragraph has interesting remarks about how to accelerate bug detection. There are instances of success in turning on new complex systems quickly.
Well, by day two T5 was working fine, which of course didn't stop the general national build-nothing-anywhere-ever lobby having a massive pity party for weeks.
I thought it was the anti-global-warming lobby.
I thought it was the anti-global-
warming lobby.
Alex was using the British spelling.
When I flew out of Beijing, 10 years ago, I got yelled at by a soldier/cop because my sweaty palm had smudged the official stamp on my Y100 airport tax ticket, making it seem as though I hadn't paid. Also, my bag was oversized, so I had to drop it off with the oversized bag fellows, none of whom spoke English, nor looked particularly assiduous. But then my bag was there in Detroit when I arrived, with only a little maotai spilled.
As far as large organizations go, people tend to rise to their level of incompetence. It's as simple as that. For instance, when I was doing rank-and-file QA on a new accounting system conversion at the stock brokerage, my friend, a programmer, let me in on a lot of the behind-the-scenes gossip. Apparently a bunch of headaches could have been avoided, except that two of the guys in charge of big sections of the project were a sort of mutual appreciation society, and nobody doing the grunt work had enough clout to challenge them when they each told the higher-ups that the other one was doing a great job and everything was going to be great. Dobchinsky & Bobchinsky, essentially.
Also, a friend was relating to me an anecdote recently where he casually mentioned a quotation from TS Eliot in a meeting/conference call involving hundreds of project managers at a large software concern. No one had ever heard of the quote, or of TS Eliot. One person hazarded a guess that he was "a Microsoft guy". (Probably, somebody did know who TS Eliot was, and just didn't want to mark themselves out as an egghead in front of their business colleagues. Or to show up the "Microsoft guy" person.) That's large organizations for you.
2: The key is to execute a few people right at the beginning of the project, as a warning to the others...
But in America, they lynch Negroes.
All the literature I've read about the expansion of Chinese domestic aviation indicates that a) while regulators set the benchmarks, it's local government and business that actually drives the process, and b) as a result of the former, top-down control and overall strategy is actually not that great. Far as I can tell, the way to think about contemporary China is that -- in Special Economic Zones at least -- it's a political experiment as well as an economic one, where different strategies of governance are being worked out.
(It sounds like the kind of gradualism and piecemeal reform that would blow up in the face of most autocracies and may yet in China's, but OTOH China is also in a unique moment of economic and national development that isn't really comparable to what your typical autocracy has to work with, and that makes a difference. Much as I don't like Niall Ferguson I think he's right about why observers who seem to be waiting anxiously for China to blow up or break down are kidding themselves: nationalism + prosperity are powerful motivators and a powerful glue.)
One person hazarded a guess that he was "a Microsoft guy".
That is very funny.
He kind of is a Microsoft guy. Not great at cooperating outside his elaborate ideological system, influential, hard to ignore.
I am sure some 24 year old date rapists from McKinsey would be happy to put together an expensive but useless report answering lw's questions.
8.last: there can be tremendous professional advantage to having a good sense for the right amount of erudition to bring to a business meeting -- just enough to appear smart, but not so much that you get dismissed as an egghead.
Listening to Malcolm Gladwell addressing a bunch of business executives nicely illustrated that truth.
Has anyone successfully done any of the Corporate Meeting Challenges?
I don't really have meetings where I could do that. My role is turn the English into math so I'm always asking specifics.
I have seen the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, booting up their windows.
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a blue screen
That's kind of beautiful, in its own way.
I have found Chinese airport bureaucrats to be some of the friendliest and most compassionate airport bureaucrats. Once my luggage was 50k overweight, and I didn't have enough cash to pay the overweight fee, so the woman just put down that I had 25k overweight and charged me half the amount. Some years ago, an Air China employee at the Beijing Airport let me check 4 pieces of luggage for free when one appeared to big to fit in the overhead, and it turned out I had more alcohol than was allowed onboard. The airport employees even made an alcohol cardboard carrier sturdy enough to go through baggage since I didn't have any extra container to put it in. This was pre-Olympics when the Beijing Airport was a lot more dusty than it is now. Also, once I had to pick up delayed luggage but I forgot my luggage receipts, but they gave me my luggage anyways so long as I promised to fax them copies of the receipts. Being fluent in Chinese helps get better service, I have found, since most employees don't speak English, and the ones who do are often the least likely to help.
With China, I think the 'blind Autocrat' isn't a great description. There's a lot of problems with corruption and cost-cutting at the expense of quality, especially the lower down in the chain you get, and accountability mechanisms can be screwy, but I get the impression much of the top leadership is open to intelligent ideas and is actually fairly creative in solving certain problems. China's much more of a technocracy than an autocracy in certain ways. All the top brass have PhDs in engineering and the hard sciences, many from American universities, and much of China's policy is based on scientific literature. The one child policy was designed in the 1970s by a rocket scientist who started following ecological research on overpopulation and its effects. He graphed out the various population vs. food & other resource scenarios in China, and realized China was heading for a giant collapse if it didn't reign in its birthrate ASAP. Likewise, the big push for renewable energy comes from the top brass taking climate change (and the desertification of Northern China) seriously. From my experience, it seems the biggest problem is often in implementation, where you get shady contractors, and miscommunication/political clashes at different levels of government, but I get the impression the ideas and engineering is usually pretty sound.
SCAREY. I'm just cruising along in the back of a taxi headed down the interstate, and I notice the driver is starting to drift out of the lane. I'm thinking "WTF?". I look at the driver's face in the rear view mirror, and he's asleep! Eyes closed, chin on his chest!
I yelled and startled him awake. I berated him for almost killing us, and he denied having been asleep.
was designed in the 1970s by a rocket scientist who started following ecological research
Wow. What was or is his name? I had thought that buy-in from Deng Xiaoping was what made the policy happen, and he was not a technocrat, at least not by training. In any case, thanks for the interesting remarks.
20: But where do they stand on circumcision?
23: I understand they prefer circumcision with Chinese characteristics.
21: That's why I always carry a hat pin.
To lobotomize yourself before the moment of impact?
No, to threaten an excruciatingly slow and inefficient (if precise) circumcision, should he fall asleep again.
and he denied having been asleep.
Well, he would, wouldn't he?
7: Not really. I was thinking more of the bog standard mildly reactionary leader writer lobby.
The anti airport lobby wasn't very interested in T5 (I lived nearby) - they started caring again about the third runway project.
re: Corporate Meeting Challenge. That's Buzzword Bingo with lots of tiresome American brand names with no resonance to me whatsoever innit? (see also: Doug Coupland. what the fuck is a velvatwinkie again and why should I care?)
if it didn't reign in its birthrate ASAP
Natalists and Nigeria. Book it.
No, Buzzword Bingo is identifying tired buzzwords spoken by others; in Corporate Meeting Challenge, you yourself say silly things that aren't corporate idioms but sound like they almost could be, and try to keep a straight face. Yes, probably too many brand names and pop culture references.
15 - sounds like some of the meetings I hear about from C. Although it would probably be more entertaining if they were playing games.
Re appearing an egghead at such meetings: he came home the other day talking about "premia". "Do you mean premiums, like everyone else says?" I ask. His response - "well, the Classics Fellow at Magdalen says it's premia."
10.--
You may be interested in this review from May's NYRB: link. The free version has a brief summary, including the bit about how Maoism encouraged/s local experimentalism. The full review goes into more detail about how successful experiments become "local examples" and how notable failures get (maybe, eventually) noticed and punished.
lw
Susan Greenhalgh writes about the one-child policy, but here's a less academic summary of its origins from the Freakonomics people.
http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/04/the-academic-origins-of-chinas-one-child-policy/
On a related note, here is something I don't understand: given that the earth could use a few billion fewer people, why are sub-replacement growth rates a problem? I get that in the short term, you have the problem of too many old people to productive workers, but once the old people die off, I don't get why a lower population is something to be avoided rather than encouraged.
You're talking about a long term in which, by definition, we'll all be dead. I don't know that there's much controversy about the destination, but the journey looks more than a little unpleasant.
35: That transition period (where the readjustment takes place) will almost certainly be really, really, really nasty.
36: I assume she doesn't mean permanently sub-replacement.
I've seen claims that the readjustment period will be awful, but I'm not dead sure why it would have to be. Poorer than we would be in the case of steady population growth, but on the other hand richer than we would be if steady population growth turned into resource shortages.
It's all about what "we" you're talking about.
LB, Britta lays it right out there: "I get that in the short term, you have the problem of too many old people to productive workers, but once the old people die off."
Thanks for the links in 35. Interesting that the flawed Club of Rome writings were so influential.
The rich world retiree's perspective is wrong-- Europe and the US are below replacement ex-immigration.
Population growth now comes mostly from Africa and some from Asia. Here is a concise way to think about population growth:
http://lamages.blogspot.com/2011/09/accessing-and-plotting-world-bank-data.html
Basically, providing basic economic and social stability and some rudimentary women's rights and education has been sufficient to bring growth rates down so far, no additional politics necessary.
Providing basic economic and social stability and some rudimentary women's rights and education, in Africa and Asia, might involve some politics.
We could have a much larger population with much less resource use if only people would embrace arcologies.
I'm not sure the old people of America are more willing to spend money to help the young people of Yemen than they are to help the young people of the US. Unless by help, you mean death by flying robot.
32: The best variant is Flintstones Meeting Challenge, wherein one tries to get through a meeting as far as possible using only the phrases "what's your angle," "I'll buy that" and "whose baby is this?"
41: I get the contours of the problem, but not that it inevitably has to be a terrible one, rather than just a period of economic stability rather than growth.
46. Oh, I see. Sure, it would be nice if that stopped. It's not clear to me that charitable spending has actually had lasting benefits in Africa.
Perpetual population growth is important for those obsessed with GDP and profits rather than living standards; also, I suspect elites don't want their own country to lose population faster than other countries.
50: I liked Erik Loomis's line at LGM the other day (the whole post is worth a read):
I feel like statistics like GDP or housing starts (another pet peeve of mine) are the RBIs of economic statistics
And from the comments some great RFK rhetoric from a speech at the University of Kansas in 1968:
Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
51: That Loomis post is indeed good, and I ordinarily can't stand him (and actually stopped reading LGM entirely when he started there).
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I don't really know any mainstream, assimilationist, UMC gays and lesbians well enough to ask this, but: Don't you think there might be something wrong with your annual celebrations when the actual inheritors of Stonewall, the radical queers and transpeople who wake up every day and work to change society from the bottom up, are so alienated by the corporate pandering, the obscene cover charges and the bland, sold-out, stepped on recuperation of their culture that they actively boycott your parties and parades? Or maybe that's the whole point?
In the true spirit of Stonewall
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39: It's all about what "we" you're talking about.
I'll say. Someone at Balloon Juice feels that US Social Security reform will happen at the end of this year during the lame duck session.
The Bowles-Simpson draft, entitled The Moment of Truth, features major cuts to Social Security benefits (B-S Summary page), raising the retirement age two more years and significantly reducing the cost of living adjustment, while undermining the program's social insurance elements by weakening the relationship between contributions and benefits.
The entire linked post has a terribly rendered transcript of a CNBC interview with Obama Commerce Sect'y nominee Judd Gregg -- wait, Judd Gregg? wasn't he the right-wing ex-Gov. of New Hampshire? What? He's Obama's Commerce Secretary nominee? But I see he was said nominee. Now he works for Goldman Sachs.
In any event, this is a matter of some concern. Those who are doing well enough, financially, might find cutting or redesigning Social Security a small pain, but the rest would be understandably concerned.
the actual inheritors of Stonewall
What, just being gay isn't good enough? Dude, check yourself.
Well, I dunno, Andrew Sullivan is gay, but you know, he's not always someone a person is on board with, so.
55: Well, a lot of people who were just being gay in New York in 1969 didn't actually do anything political, did they? They didn't riot at Stonewall, they didn't march in the first Pride parade, they didn't work with any of the Gay Liberation organizations. Remember that many of those early Gay Liberation activists were people who were participants in the anti-war and Black Civil Rights movements, had a pretty well-developed critique of other oppressions within US society, and were fully in favor of discussion their intersectionality and making connections with other movements of oppressed peoples, at home and abroad. Now we have the privilege of watching the big mainstream gay organizations, who never saw a transgender issue they didn't want to ignore, advocating that people shop at union-busting corporations like Starbuck's, solely because of their (marketing department-inspired) support for the shibboleth of gay marriage.
Look, I am as happy as the next person that some 15 year-old kid from Chaska can ride the bus downtown today and be out for awhile before heading back to school in the fall to be bullied and marginalized. That's just great. It's not a substitute for an active, revolutionary movement of queer people who are fighting for everyone's liberation though, and pretending it is only serves the interests of the most reactionary elements in society, gay or straight.
It's quite comical looking at my Facebook feed today: Pretty much every "yay Pride!" status is from a straight person, and all my queer friends are either actively standing aside or treating it as an opportunity to get in the faces of the assimilationists via the Dyke/Trans/Queer march.
Fuck gays in the military, fuck gay marriage, fuck Bud Light.
Some cocksucker won't organize, won't join, won't come along, lets his brother pay the price... but won't he take the benefits his brothers have accrued? You fuckin' know he will.
And fuck a whole bunch of transphobic, fat-phobic, misogynist old Dan Savage. Christ, there could hardly be a worse spokesman for gay people if Pat Robertson was in charge of picking him.
I didn't know it was a Pride event day, Natilo. Man am I out of touch.
(Although one is rather moved to suggest that Stonewall's "actual inheritors" have bigger fish to fry than Dan Savage, toward whom their unremitting hostility actually is not doing them any particular favours.)
In a weird bit of circular-firing-squad logic, Dan Savage is no particular fan of Pride events, either.
Pride events are so crowded that no-one goes there anymore. I handed on my beads to someone who turned out to really want them, so it was a good day for me.
I've been trying to figure out what the Dan Savage complaint is. I don't read him, so I wouldn't know from his columns, which I wasn't prepared to wade through in sequence. I found this, a reference to "House faggots" by Savage. I imagine that's not the whole source of the problem.
Saying more or less exactly "I agree with Anne Coulter" [that the US needs to make war on the religion of Islam] and supporting the Iraq War.
65 is Savage? ALthough that sits a little oddly with his objecting to the Pride powers that be; as does the 'get rich and pretty and it gets better' critique. (Me, I get all teary at every It Gets Better I've seen, I don't know if that's a fair critique).
OTOH, there have been some Seattle-specific Pride kerfuffles, he may be against that particular committee.
53: Pride is nice because there's no other time I'm in a group that big and that queer, though our local one has gotten increasingly corporatized and it's not as if I'm not conflicted. We made a deliberate effort to take Mara last year because I think it's important for her to see diverse families and I think we'll take Nia too if she's with us full-time by then. I suppose I'm pretty boring and assimilationist in practice, since being a foster parent has taken up the time and space in my life that used to go to activism/volunteering. I hope to get a better balance later, but I can only do what I can do and believe I'm being helpful in my own small way.
It was very strange and cool to be at Pride Madrid several years ago, pre-crisis, where folks basically had all the legal protections they wanted and were just celebrating. That felt good. Around here, it's much more mixed emotionally. But I go to Pride mostly because it's a chance to see people I like whom might not see otherwise and it is affirming, perhaps because I'm shallow.
But the column linked in 67 is from 2003. I'll give the man latitude for adjusting his thinking, if he has done.
I had forgotten about the whole claiming-to-be-to-the-right-of-Ann Coulter business. Or maybe I just didn't think Savage was a very important even-the-liberal voice at the time. Definitely a stupid move.
However, note that for all its ludicrous liberal-hawk dickbaggery (and for being mistaken about supposedly "agreeing" with an Ann Coulter analysis of the Middle East which Coulter herself never made), the column in 67 is actually Savage changing his mind about the Iraq War. Via the rather weaksauce "George Bush messed up what could have been a perfectly good war" rationale, true, but more perspicacious on the whole than many another dupe of liberal-hawk dickbaggery would prove to be (including our very own dear Ogged, IIRC). So I'm not inclined to damn him entirely on that score; that he's also an apparent lumpen-atheist also doesn't endear him, but that in itself would hardly give pause to most of Stonewall's "actual inheritors."
Moreover I don't think the Iraq stuff is the Dan Savage complaint at this pont, if it ever was. It seems to be more about trying to get the label "transphobic" to stick (resulting sometimes in absurdity, like the one glitterbombing that took place as he was starting to explain to a crowd why the term "she-male" is offensive), or about picking holes in the It Gets Better campaigning (which is fair in itself, as that campaigning does have holes, but hardly grounds for regarding Savage as the ultimate in terrible gay spokesmen).
Dan Savage is the guy who said you should dump your partner if they get fat. And who was pretty fucking hawkish there for a good 2-3 years. And who has said all kinds of transphobic things.
But yeah, there's better people to castigate, for sure.
I didn't bring up the Iraq stuff to say DaSa (just realized DS wasn't going to work!) was no heir to Stonewall or whatever, just why he is not best beloved by everyone. There was also the nasty race-baiting after Prop. 8 passed in CA.
In light of 73, I see your point in 59.last: Christ, there could hardly be a worse spokesman for gay people if Pat Robertson was in charge of picking him.
Andrew Sullivan wouldn't be the ideal spokesman, either. (I'm vaguely imagining a celebrity cage-match now. Savage v. Sullivan: who can say the most arguably-defensible-but-in-fact-stupid pro-gay thing?)
Dan Savage is the guy who said you should dump your partner if they get fat.
I have nothing invested in defending Dan Savage, but that isn't what he said. If your partner is fat and you are happy with them, I'm pretty sure Savage doesn't give a shit.
Agreed with 76; I also haven't seen where he's really said all the "transphobic" things he's supposed to have said either. About his worst sins that I'm aware of were the Iraq business and the Prop 8 stuff -- both of which he later recanted, in the case of Prop 8 almost immediately -- and most of the business of anti-DaSa (hat tip to oud) sentiment seems to be in mining out-of-context quotes.
The impression it gives is almost that some people need a living symbol for the things they detest about an "assimilationist" WGM elite, and are determined to press Savage into that mould whether he actually fits or not. Seems counterproductive.
Savage runs into some problems as an extreme Type A personality whose job is to stick up for the disenfranchised. He seems to have total scorn for people who don't have enough self-confidence to tell other people to go fuck themselves. The same thing happens with some noted feminists.
76, 77: Fair enough. I'm feeling as though there's pushback against any detesting of the assimilationist (ish) WGM elite stance, though, and I'm not sure I'm cool with that. There are indeed things to object to.
69
65 surprises me.
Why? Gay people can't be hawks?
Because the sentiment that we should eradicate Islam sounds not just a bit, but a lot, like the sentiment that we should eradicate homosexuality. It's a stomping on difference because we consider it to be attacking us.
As it turns out, on a more careful reading, DaSa was not agreeing with that segment of what he attributes to Ann Coulter.
To the OP: I don't know about airport expansions, but there have been other Western aerospace projects, specifically the 787 and the F-35, that ran into serious problems because managers underestimated the technical challenges involved. In part I think this was due to economic factors: both projects were under intense pressure to cut costs, so there were strong incentives for manufacturers to make very ambitious plans at the outset, in order to win contracts, and then deal with problems later, in the middle of the project when it was too late for customers to pull out. (Whereas, I would guess that in a high-profile Chinese project, there would be more willingness to waste money, and maybe more skepticism about promises that everything is under control.)
79: I'm feeling as though there's pushback against any detesting of the assimilationist (ish) WGM elite stance, though, and I'm not sure I'm cool with that.
Well, nor should you be. For myself I can't get on board with "fuck gay marriage" -- and think anyone who doesn't perceive what a massive social sea change is at stake there simply doesn't understand how human societies work -- but I can certainly see why someone would be repulsed by the commodification of Pride, or by the viewpoint that thinks buying coffee at Starbucks is activism. And I think the T in LGBT is within its rights to want more consistent recognition, but that too many are (as has happened to other identity-politics movements over the years) far too invested in policing minutiae of linguistic expression at the expense of other objectives (cf. glitterbombing DaSa for even mentioning the word "she-male," regardless of context).
If we've reached comity on Dan Savage, here's a nice Gawker piece pointing out some other people to hate.
Argh. My coworker insisted on reading the entirety of that Brant bros. article to me during lunch this past week. I found it impossible to decide whether the writer was seekritly mocking the whole scene -- some of the language was so outlandish.
Admittedly, my coworker read it in a deliberately outlandish tone, with gestures and facial expressions and all.
Re: RFK and GDP, it's crucial to remember that GDP was designed for a specific purpose: measuring whether we're going into a depression or boom, and secondarily, facilitating international comparison although it doesn't work for that without hacking around with purchasing-power parity. Asking it to pronounce on matters of truth and beauty is like asking an air-speed indicator for relationship advice. Similarly, complaining that it doesn't is beside the point. Nobody expects to measure love in knots.
83: the 787 ran into trouble not really because of technical challenges - it's not a radically different airliner at all, we're not talking Concorde or Comet here - but because idiot managers decided that you could build an airliner with a much higher level of outsourcing than anyone had ever tried before. F-35, yes, I grant you. Supersonic stealth VTOL air superiority ground attack fighter is not an easy mix.
But I would bet that the Chinese have had their share of projects go wrong because they underestimated the technical challenges involved. The Soviets certainly did. Alex, this is your cue to explain about, frex, the Alfa SSNs.
91: And yet somehow the rhetorical point he was making was instantly recognizable to anyone who follows the way news of the nations is reported. Such a mystery!
93: Quite. We currently assume that if we maximize knots, our relationships will work themselves out. Or something.
if we maximize knots, our relationships will work themselves out.
Full speed ahead, Mr. Parker, full speed ahead!