As a taxpayer, I feel like this right now:
Oddly enough, because of the work on things military I'm currently doing to earn the farm payments and fulfill my loyal duties asan apparent sucker a citizen and pay my taxes (*koff,* ahem, *gack*), generally the more informed I am on a subject of current interest... the less I can talk about it. Heh. That makes me the Perfect Pundit!
So, I've decided to conduct an experiment, and pretend I'm a Congressperson and blather on about stuff I have only a party talking points memo-level deep grasp of... but what the hell, I have an interest, because despite their attitude about the ownership of the stuff, that's my money, Prodigal Son's Money, and, sadly Prodigal Grandson's (v0.9) money, too. And possibly Prodigal Great-Grand-Daughter's (v0.0x) money, as well.
Cassandra has a fascinating post on the topic called House of Cards.
Now, I admit I went at it last night while well into my second Castle'Rita.
I left this comment:
FlailEx
Flail Exercise. Where we kinda know where we want to be, but we don't have any real good plan for getting there. Adding to that is the fact that the legislative equivalent of Scott Adam's Dilbert "Office Lamprey" people are attaching themselves to the stimulus bill doesn't help much, either.
A FlailEx most often loses an "ell" and becomes a FailEx.
I'm thinking, why don't we play a game?
A wargame. Actually, it would probably be a series of wargames. A series that will bring in the key stakeholders, distill the collective wisdom, and run some alternatives, interactively. Especially when you mix in the Federal legislature, the Administration, key parts of the financial markets, key economic players, and the states, you have enough competing agendas that you might generate some stunning insights. Add in a game that brings in the foreign aspect, too, but that frankly would have to come after the US games.
I'm serious. It happens all the time, and a well-designed and run game can handle the politics of the whole thing, part and parcel of the outcomes.
Wargaming - it's not just for the military anymore.
Externally facilitated wargaming is happening in corporate and governmental America all the time these days, and has a respectable decades-long pedigree. There are several firms with extensive experience in the field who could handle putting them together. And for a pittance, compared to what we're prepared to spend.
Full disclosure - I'm a wargamer and have been for a long time. I happen to work for a company that does that kind of seminar wargaming - though I'm not involved in that part of the firm's business. My background in the subject comes from participating in those games while on active duty, as a DoD WMD Response player during the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici City Training that was directed during the 90's to better prepare states and large cities for mass casualty WMD events. I also have a lot of experience supporting military wargaming of alternatives in my current job.
Properly run, they are amazing tools for generating insight - precisely because they put the players, who have competing stakes and interests, as well as complementary ones, into situations and let them play themselves out, providing a feedback loop that really doesn't exist in the current paradigm being used to craft the bill.
You take in the requirements, generate a situation, and tell people to implement their ideas - and then you have the other players react to those ideas, and then you run through another turn, three will usually do it for something of this size and scope.
In a sense, it's happening already with the think tanks blizzarding people with white papers, politicians floating balloons, and the punditry jumping in on it, with the Press trying to make some sense of it. The beauty of the wargame is there are people whose job it is to collect the data and collate the threads in an organized fashion - and to facilitate the discussion and feedback loops.
Heh. Right now - my sense of the stimulus is that it will litter the landscape with things like this.
And generate lots of new infrastructure... which will have to be maintained... while we don't maintain what we have already. And that's just the eponymous "shovel-ready" stuff.
Feh. There has to be a better way.
Oddly enough, because of the work on things military I'm currently doing to earn the farm payments and fulfill my loyal duties as
So, I've decided to conduct an experiment, and pretend I'm a Congressperson and blather on about stuff I have only a party talking points memo-level deep grasp of... but what the hell, I have an interest, because despite their attitude about the ownership of the stuff, that's my money, Prodigal Son's Money, and, sadly Prodigal Grandson's (v0.9) money, too. And possibly Prodigal Great-Grand-Daughter's (v0.0x) money, as well.
Cassandra has a fascinating post on the topic called House of Cards.
Now, I admit I went at it last night while well into my second Castle'Rita.
I left this comment:
The military types among us will resonate to this image of the stimulus package development process.One of the reasons I quit commenting on the bailout and related economic trivia is that I read this post word for word, and felt trapped in a Gary Larson cartoon.
"Blah blah blah, Armorer. Blah, blah, blah blah."
Sigh.
Sadly, I suspect much the same holds true for many of the 536 people who have decided they have the wisdom to deal with the issue.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
FlailEx
Flail Exercise. Where we kinda know where we want to be, but we don't have any real good plan for getting there. Adding to that is the fact that the legislative equivalent of Scott Adam's Dilbert "Office Lamprey" people are attaching themselves to the stimulus bill doesn't help much, either.
A FlailEx most often loses an "ell" and becomes a FailEx.
I'm thinking, why don't we play a game?
A wargame. Actually, it would probably be a series of wargames. A series that will bring in the key stakeholders, distill the collective wisdom, and run some alternatives, interactively. Especially when you mix in the Federal legislature, the Administration, key parts of the financial markets, key economic players, and the states, you have enough competing agendas that you might generate some stunning insights. Add in a game that brings in the foreign aspect, too, but that frankly would have to come after the US games.
I'm serious. It happens all the time, and a well-designed and run game can handle the politics of the whole thing, part and parcel of the outcomes.
Wargaming - it's not just for the military anymore.
Externally facilitated wargaming is happening in corporate and governmental America all the time these days, and has a respectable decades-long pedigree. There are several firms with extensive experience in the field who could handle putting them together. And for a pittance, compared to what we're prepared to spend.
Full disclosure - I'm a wargamer and have been for a long time. I happen to work for a company that does that kind of seminar wargaming - though I'm not involved in that part of the firm's business. My background in the subject comes from participating in those games while on active duty, as a DoD WMD Response player during the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici City Training that was directed during the 90's to better prepare states and large cities for mass casualty WMD events. I also have a lot of experience supporting military wargaming of alternatives in my current job.
Properly run, they are amazing tools for generating insight - precisely because they put the players, who have competing stakes and interests, as well as complementary ones, into situations and let them play themselves out, providing a feedback loop that really doesn't exist in the current paradigm being used to craft the bill.
You take in the requirements, generate a situation, and tell people to implement their ideas - and then you have the other players react to those ideas, and then you run through another turn, three will usually do it for something of this size and scope.
In a sense, it's happening already with the think tanks blizzarding people with white papers, politicians floating balloons, and the punditry jumping in on it, with the Press trying to make some sense of it. The beauty of the wargame is there are people whose job it is to collect the data and collate the threads in an organized fashion - and to facilitate the discussion and feedback loops.
Heh. Right now - my sense of the stimulus is that it will litter the landscape with things like this.
And generate lots of new infrastructure... which will have to be maintained... while we don't maintain what we have already. And that's just the eponymous "shovel-ready" stuff.
Feh. There has to be a better way.
I suspect this would be a hugely difficult thing to pull off. Not just the egos, but the political egos would be a bitch to manage.
If something like it were to happen (and I think it may well *be* happening in the financial and manufacturing sectors, though I have no visibility of same) it would be fun to be involved in.
They are doing something in the same fashion that throwing a concrete block to a drowning person is doing something.
Re: "The stimulus plan, oy my aching head."
I must not get it, as I read it, the more I read about this whole picture, I have a different view. I see people covering each other's back, way, way too closely. This is only an observation on the subject, nothing experiential involved.
Grumpy
Thanks for the laugh at that image. I really needed that after somebody suckered me into looking at a compilation of the new administration's achievements thus far.
Then I made the mistake of thinking about your scenario a little more and wondered how many people are throwing the concrete block at, rather than just to, the drowning person. *sigh*