Tech

Nancy Pelosi vs. the Internet

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Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who would like very much to reimpose the old, so-called, “Fairness Doctrine” that once censored conservative opinion on television and radio broadcasting, is scheming to impose rules barring any member of Congress from posting opinions on any internet site without first obtaining prior approval from the Democratic leadership of Congress. No blogs, twitter, online forums – nothing.

This was first reported to me by Congressman John Culberson (R-Tx) and I asked for approval to cite him and for any media links to this story. He provided the following link of regulations proposed by the Chair of the Congressional Commission on Mailing Standards (PDF) Congressman Michael Capuano (D-Mass) that was sent to Rep. Robert Brady, Chairman of the House Committee for Administration. The net effect of the regs would be to make it practically impossible for members of Congress to use social media tools to discuss official business or share video of the same with the public while creating a partisan disparity in what little approved messages might be permitted. It would be a very considerable error to assume that the House leadership intends to let dissenting Democratic members post any more freely than Republicans.

Set aside the nakedly partisan aspect of this plan for a moment – on the technological merits alone this may be the goddamn dumbest thing I’ve heard of regarding the Internet coming out of Congress in a long, long time. The dinosaurs who are uncomfortable with computers, the unwashed masses being aware of their actions and free political debate want to turn the clock back to the 1970s. Except during the 1970s no one would have dared to propose controlling what a democratically elected member of Congress could say to their constituents. Doesn’t it register in the Beltway that they are talking about public information that already belongs to the people of the United States? Senators and Congressmen should be interacting with citizens more freely, not less; the U.S. Congress needs radical transparency not greater opacity imposed by the Democratic House leadership to better hide shady dealings

It’s a brazenly Orwellian and most likely unconstitutional power grab by the Speaker of the House unlike anything dreamed of by any previous speaker – not Sam Rayburn, not Joseph Cannon. Nobody.

Nancy Pelosi has finally arrived at a historical pinnacle – as an enemy of free speech and the public’s right to know.

UPDATE:

Given that I was somewhat intemperate in tone in my post and many questions were raised by the other side regarding the document, I’m highlighting my reply to those commenters who felt aggrieved:

Briefly:

1. The old rules were indeed worse than the new proposed changes. They were also not enforced and most members of the House posted as they pleased, much like the rest of us.

2. Putting new, modestly less restrictive rules in place and actively enforcing them results in a de facto large increase in the level of restrictiveness to access social media.

3. What larger public good is served by either the old or the proposed new rules?

4. The complexity of this elaborate gatekeeping system is rife for partisan abuse and selective enforcement that would have a chilling effect on members of Congress using social media. If you think Pelosi is a saint then imagine the system in the hands of Tom DeLay. The pre-publication review is itself a significant barrier to access given the limited time Congressmen have in very busy schedules

5. The rules that seem “reasonable” regarding content and external sites are subjective and are to be interpreted by the majority at the minority’s expense. Again, consider the shoe on the other foot.

6. Changes in the rules of the House of Representatives are done only in close consultation with the Speaker, who appoints the committee chairmen, and the the majority leader and whip. The chance of Nancy Pelosi not being at the table here is about zero. That the issue is being pressed on the Senate side as well indicates that this is a coordinated leadership agenda and not minor tidying up by members themselves.

Engineers and Military Programs – Second Update

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NYT reports that many recently-graduated engineers (also programmers and mathematicians) are choosing to work for strictly-commercial firms rather than in the defense sector. Reasons given include:

1)Better pay in the commercial sector

2)A feeling that military projects take so long that anyone working on them is unlikely to keep up with current technology

3)A related perception that military projects are more bureaucratic than strictly-commercial work

4)Many more job options available for engineers than there were 10 or 20 years ago, including consulting and finance

5)Over half the engineering doctoral candidates at American universities are from abroad and hence ineligible for top security clearances

6)Trendiness…employers like Google have more cachet than those like Northrop Grumman

The article cites several big military programs that have had serious problems, attributable at least in part to poor engineering management. On the other hand, management problems in large government military and civilian programs are not new, and there are plenty of horror stories in the strictly-commercial world, too.

But if talented engineers are indeed avoiding defense work, it could lead to some serious problems down the road. I’d love to hear some discussion on this, particularly from those who work or have worked on defense projects, whether on the government side or the industry side.

UPDATE: There’s also a post on this at Neptunus Lex…promises to be an interesting discussion since it’s a blog frequented by many military and aviation people.

UPDATE 2: Thanks for all the comments so far. A couple more points I’d like to add:

1)Choosing careers & employers based on current trendiness is not always a smart strategy. In 1999, chemical & petroleum engineering weren’t at all trendy; the only forms of technology getting any media play were those which were directly computer-related. But now, chemical & petroleum talent is in short supply, with salaries to match.

In his book on the development of the 747, Joe Sutter remarks that, in his early days at Boeing (late 1940s) everyone wanted to work on jets. He was assigned to a prop-airliner development team (the Stratocruiser) and got a lot more early responsibility than he likely would have on one of the sexier projects. Similarly, when the development of the 747 was first mooted, the trendy thing was the supersonic transport. Had Sutter insisted on working in trendy areas, and been able to dragoon his management into going along with him, he would likely have never become the engineering manager for a large and successful airliner project.

2)Bill Swanson, CEO of Raytheon, tells the following story from a time he visited Nellis Air Force Base:

“I introduced myself to a pilot, and he looked me in the eye and said, “If it wasn’t for what you all do, I wouldn’t be here today.” A missile had been launched at his F-15, but we make a decoy, which he deployed. The decoy didn’t come home — but he did, to his family. I use that feeling to remind everyone that people’s lives depend on the reliability of our products.”

There are at least some people who get more satisfaction out of the kind of thing than out of helping to create a recognizable consumer product such as the iPod.

Also, for an interesting example of a failed software project, see my post on the FAA’s Advanced Automation System. This effort has been called, surely with some hyperbole, “the greatest debacle in the history of organized work.”

Getting Warm

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…a good time to spare an appreciative thought for Willis Carrier.

Enjoy it while you can.

The Democratic Party, egged on by the mainstream media and by its own “progressive” wing, has demonstrated considerable hostility toward energy production in any practical form. And activists of many types have shown great skill in using the legal and regulatory systems to delay energy-related projects…for years, and sometimes for decades.

If we have an Obama presidency and a Democratic sweep of the House and Senate, I think it is likely that in 10 years, the number of people who can afford air conditioning will be much smaller than it is at present.

Duz Web Mak Us Dumr?

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Nicholas Carr, writing in The Atlantic, suggests that the Internet is changing the way people think, and specifically interfering with the ability to concentrate:

I can feel it too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going–so far as I can tell–but it’s changing…I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.

Of course, the idea that emerging communications media change the way people think and perceive the world is not a new one. As Carr notes, Socrates expressed concern about the development of writing, fearing that people would “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful,” and, worse, that they would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Concerns were also raised when the printing press was introduced.

In the early 19th century, a journalist writing about the introduction of the telegraph marveled:

This extraordinary discovery leaves…no elsewhere…it is all here.

Heinrich Heine, living in Paris in 1843, made a similar observation about the coming of the railroads:

I feel the mountains and forests of all countries advancing towards Paris. Already, I smell the scent of German lime-trees; the North-Sea breaks on my doorstep.

Closer to our own time, we’ve seen the introduction of the photography, radio, the phonograph, and television. I’m currently reading Eric Weitz’s Weimar Germany, which has some intereresting comments about the impact of the first three of these innovations. Arnold Schoenberg, for one, was a harsh critic of radio, saying that it “accustoms the ear to an unspeakably coarse tone, and to a body of sound constituted in a soupy, blurred way, which precludes all finer differentiation.” He worried that radio gave music a “continuous tinkle” that would eventually result in a state wherein “all music has been consumed, worn out.”

Weitz quotes Joseph Roth, who lived in Berlin in the 1920s:

There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct.

Roth didn’t much like photography, either:

People who had completely ordinary eyes, all of a sudden obtain a look. The indifferent become thoughtful, the harmless full of humor, the simpleminded become goal oriented, the common strollers look like pilots, secretaries like demons, directors like Caesars.

The Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan wrote famously about the impact of television, arguing that the nature of the medium had an impact entirely separate from any content transmitted–that, for example, Jack Kennedy had won the election against Richard Nixon because TV is a “cool” medium, well-suited to Kennedy’s personality and hostile to that of Nixon. (McLuhan had earlier written about the impact of printing on perceptions and thought processes.)

So, what do you think? Has the Internet had an effect on the way you think–and particularly, on your reading and TV/film watching?

Random Thought

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Why is it that software developers, in the GUIs of common software, particularly blogging tools, put rarely used and dangerous functions (“Delete this [post/database/blog]”) immediately next to frequently used functions (“Save this [post/database/whatever]”)? This is stupid, yet one sees it not infrequently, and not only in version 1.0.

Not-so early versions of Movable Type actually had a “delete this blog” button. What was the purpose of such a function? Was it to let you destroy the evidence if the blog police were at your door? I don’t get it. It’s easy enough to delete your blog inadvertently using an FTP program; the developers shouldn’t do anything to make inadvertent deletion even easier. I always edited the MT scripts to remove that stupid button and the function it triggered.

WordPress, supposedly the latest and greatest, has a “Delete post” link next to the “Save” and “Publish” buttons. Why couldn’t they put the delete button somewhere else — say, at the bottom of the page? For every post that I’ve deleted intentionally I have come close to deleting several more posts accidentally, merely because the delete link is in a dumb place. For all of its brilliance, WordPress has the feel of a vanity project managed by a few clever developers who ignore the marketing guy who suggests that maybe it’s not such a great idea to put the delete button next to the save button.

But of course there is no marketing guy, because WordPress is an open-source project managed by a few clever developers. Maybe that’s the problem. If WP were being sold for real money, the developers might have no choice but to put more care into GUI design. And they might be able to afford to hire specialists to do it. But since it’s open-source, and users are members of a “community” rather than paying customers, what’s the incentive to spiff up the GUI? OTOH, given the competition from other (free) blogging packages, it might not be possible to sell WP.

It’s interesting that some basic GUI issues are not given much weight in the race to add software features. I don’t know if there’s a remedy for this situation.