Government – Page 84 – artdiamondblog.com

“A Libertarian Celebration of Hustling, Hacking and Free-Form Development”

Source of book image: http://www.hmhco.com/shop/books/the-bright-continent/9780547678313#

(p. 21) Africa’s gains have come not because of Western largess or painful structural adjustment programs set out by the likes of the International Monetary Fund, Olopade argues, nor are they the work of governments. They are largely the fruit of Africans’ efforts to help themselves, through creative means that sometimes involve breaking the rules.
. . .
She excavates a hopeful narrative about a continent on the rise, “a libertarian celebration of hustling, hacking and free-form development.”
The best solutions, according to Olopade, are local, developed by people closest to the problem, not bureaucrats in Washington or Brussels: the South African gynecologist who operates out of two shipping containers stacked together, the Kenyan family who take over an abandoned plot of land to grow vegetables to eat and sell.
Central to Olopade’s thesis is the concept of kanju, a term that describes “the specific creativity born from African difficulty.” It is the rule-bending ethos that makes it possible to get things done in the face of headaches like crumbling infrastructure, corrupt bureaucracy and tightfisted banks unwilling to make loans to people without political connections.
Many countries have these kinds of hacks and workarounds. In India, the term is jugaad, and it has had its moment in the sun as a business school concept. India runs on this informal hacking of the system that makes life and business possible.

For the full review, see:
LYDIA POLGREEN. “Home Improvement.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., APRIL 13, 2014): 21.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date APRIL 11, 2014, and has the title “Home Improvement; ‘The Bright Continent,’ by Dayo Olopade.”)

The book under review is:
Olopade, Dayo. The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2014.

In France “‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ Means that What’s Yours Should Be Mine”

Guillaume Santacruz is among many French entrepreneurs now using London as their base. He said of his native France, “The economy is not going well, and if you want to get ahead or run your own business, the environment is not good.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) Guillaume Santacruz, an aspiring French entrepreneur, brushed the rain from his black sweater and skinny jeans and headed down to a cavernous basement inside Campus London, a seven-story hive run by Google in the city’s East End.
. . .
A year earlier, Mr. Santacruz, who has two degrees in finance, was living in Paris near the Place de la Madeleine, working in a boutique finance firm. He had taken that job after his attempt to start a business in Marseille foundered under a pile of government regulations and a seemingly endless parade of taxes. The episode left him wary of starting any new projects in France. Yet he still hungered to be his own boss.
He decided that he would try again. Just not in his own country.
“A lot of people are like, ‘Why would you ever leave France?’ ” Mr. Santacruz said. “I’ll tell you. France has a lot of problems. There’s a feeling of gloom that seems to be growing deeper. The economy is not going well, and if you want to get ahead or run your own business, the environment is not good.”
. . .
(p. 5) “Making it” is almost never easy, but Mr. Santacruz found the French bureaucracy to be an unbridgeable moat around his ambitions. Having received his master’s in finance at the University of Nottingham in England, he returned to France to work with a friend’s father to open dental clinics in Marseille. “But the French administration turned it into a herculean effort,” he said.
A one-month wait for a license turned into three months, then six. They tried simplifying the corporate structure but were stymied by regulatory hurdles. Hiring was delayed, partly because of social taxes that companies pay on salaries. In France, the share of nonwage costs for employers to fund unemployment benefits, education, health care and pensions is more than 33 percent. In Britain, it is around 20 percent.
“Every week, more tax letters would come,” Mr. Santacruz recalled.
. . .
Diane Segalen, an executive recruiter for many of France’s biggest companies who recently moved most of her practice, Segalen & Associés, to London from Paris, says the competitiveness gap is easy to see just by reading the newspapers. “In Britain, you read about all the deals going on here,” Ms. Segalen said. “In the French papers, you read about taxes, more taxes, economic problems and the state’s involvement in everything.”
. . .
“It is a French cultural characteristic that goes back to almost the revolution and Robespierre, where there’s a deep-rooted feeling that you don’t show that you make money,” Ms. Segalen, the recruiter, said. “There is this sense that ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ means that what’s yours should be mine. It’s more like, if someone has something I can’t have, I’d rather deprive this person from having it than trying to work hard to get it myself. That’s a very French state of mind. But it’s a race to the bottom.”

For the full story, see:
LIZ ALDERMAN. “Au Revoir, Entrepreneurs.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., MARCH 23, 2014): 1 & 5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 22, 2014.)

‘Diane Segalen moved most of her executive recruiting practice to London from Paris. In France, she says, “there is this sense that ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ means that what’s yours should be mine.”” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Koch Industries Was Only Major Ethanol Producer to Oppose Ethanol Tax Credits

(p. A17) I have devoted most of my life to understanding the principles that enable people to improve their lives. It is those principles–the principles of a free society–that have shaped my life, my family, our company and America itself.
Unfortunately, the fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation’s own government. That’s why, if we want to restore a free society and create greater well-being and opportunity for all Americans, we have no choice but to fight for those principles.
. . .
Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs–even when we benefit from them. I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished.
Koch Industries was the only major producer in the ethanol industry to argue for the demise of the ethanol tax credit in 2011. That government handout (which cost taxpayers billions) needlessly drove up food and fuel prices as well as other costs for consumers–many of whom were poor or otherwise disadvantaged. Now the mandate needs to go, so that consumers and the marketplace are the ones who decide the future of ethanol.

For the full commentary, see:
CHARLES G. KOCH. “OPINION; I’m Fighting to Restore a Free Society; Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., April 3, 2014): A17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated April 2, 2014, and has the title “OPINION; Charles Koch: I’m Fighting to Restore a Free Society; Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.” )

Koch’s philosophy of the free market is more fully elaborated in:
Koch, Charles G. The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World’s Largest Private Company. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007.

Delta Overcomes Obstacles that Ground Other Airlines

Source of graphic: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

Cancellations due to mechanical failures, piliot illness and government regulations are often announced as though they were acts of God, outside the possible control of airlines, for which the airline is blameless. But airlines can take actions, and improve processes, to reduce the frequency and consequences of such cancellations. In airlines, and in other firms, there is not a sharp line between what can and what cannot be under the firm’s control.

(p. D3) Atlanta

The crew of Delta Air Lines Flight 55 last Thursday couldn’t legally fly from Lagos, Nigeria, to Atlanta unless they waited a day due to new limits on how much pilots can fly in a rolling 28-day period. The trip would have to be canceled.
Instead, Delta headquarters told the captain to fly to San Juan, Puerto Rico, which they could reach within their duty limits. There, two new pilots would be waiting to take the Boeing 767 on to Atlanta. The plane arrived in San Juan at 2:44 a.m., quickly took on fuel and pilots, and landed in Atlanta only 40 minutes late.
The episode, unorthodox in the airline industry, illustrates the fanaticism Delta now has for avoiding cancellations. Last year, Delta canceled just 0.3% of its flights, according to flight-tracking service FlightStats.com. That was twice as good as the next-best airlines, Southwest and Alaska, and five times better than the industry average of 1.7%.
. . .
Managers in Delta operations centers move planes, crews and parts around hourly trying to avoid canceling flights. How well an airline maintains its fleet and how smartly it stashes spare parts and planes at airports affect whether your flight goes or not.
Delta thinks it has come up with new analytical software and instruments that can help monitor the health of airplanes and predict which parts will soon fail. Empty planes are ferried to replace crippled jets rather than waiting for overnight repairs.
Mechanics developed a vibration monitor to install on cooling fans for cockpit instruments. A plane can’t be sent out on a new trip with a broken fan.
Now when vibration starts to increase, indicating that a bearing may be wearing down and getting close to failing, a new fan is swapped in. The wobbly fan goes to the shop for new bearings. That has reduced canceled flights.
So has spending $2 million to have spare starters for Boeing 767 engines at all 767 stations abroad. Starters last about five years. While each plane has two and both engines can be started with one, you can’t send a plane out on a long trip over oceans with only one working.

For the full story, see:
SCOTT MCCARTNEY. “THE MIDDLE SEAT; A World Where Flights Aren’t Canceled; How Smartly an Airline Stashes Spare Parts and Planes at Airports Affects Whether or Not Your Flight Takes Off.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., April 3, 2014): D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 2, 2014, and has the title “THE MIDDLE SEAT; A World Where Flights Aren’t Canceled; Inside Delta’s new strategies to avoid stranding fliers.”)

Government Pushed Kiewit to Ignore Worker Safety

Source of book image: http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1369819962l/17934699.jpg

(p. C9) Boston Harbor’s filth is legendary. It was mock-celebrated in the 1966 song “Dirty Water.” The city’s water-treatment plants were hopelessly inadequate, and barely treated sewage had been pouring into the harbor for decades.
. . .
The Deer Island Sewage Treatment Plant was supposed to solve these problems. Begun in 1990, the $3.8 billion facility would process human and industrial waste on a small island in Boston Harbor and then send it through a 9.5-mile tunnel into the deep waters of the Atlantic. Fifty-five vertical pipes called risers spurred off the tunnel’s final section to further diffuse waste before releasing it into the sea. Temporary safety plugs, likened to giant salad bowls, had been placed near the bottom of each riser to keep water from seeping in before construction was complete.
These plugs were a source of conflict between the tunnel’s owner, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), and the company they hired to build it, Kiewit, “the Omaha-based construction giant” that, Mr. Swidey notes, “had built more miles of the U.S. highway system than any other contractor.” The director of MWRA, Doug MacDonald, had left a job as a partner in a Boston law firm to take over the authority, a behemoth of 1,700 employees and, at the peak of harbor cleanup, an additional 3,000 construction workers. Mr. MacDonald’s job included mollifying various parties who disagreed about how the Deer Island project would reach completion: Kiewit; the tunnel’s designers, mostly out of the picture by 1998; ICF Kaiser Engineers, hired by MWRA to protect its interests and act as Mr. MacDonald’s eyes and ears; the union “sandhogs” who bored out 2.4 million tons of rock to create the tunnel; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, ostensibly looking out for worker safety but seeming more interested in handing out fines; and, though federal funds for harbor cleanup had long since dried up, “a bow-tied federal judge who served as the cleanup project’s robed referee, threatening stiff fines or worse if the deadlines he imposed were not met.”
. . .
The problem weighed most heavily on Kiewit. The firm was contractually obligated to deliver on time, subject to late-fee penalties of $30,000 a day, and to cover cost overruns. More, Kiewit had fronted the construction costs and would only be paid by selling the tunnel, piece by piece, to MWRA. The contract further obligated Kiewit to provide “lighting and ventilation (or breathing apparatus) for the personnel” that pulled the plugs but, in what seemed a senseless conflict, mandated that the plugs “could be removed only after the tunnel was completed,” writes Mr. Swidey, “meaning after the sandhogs had cleared out, taking their extensive ventilation, transportation, and electrical systems with them.”
Kiewit protested that clearing the tunnel of its life-sustaining infrastructure would make “the risk of catastrophe [to the workers pulling the plugs] . . . exponentially higher !” They offered several sound alternatives. In response, ICF Kaiser accused them of just wanting their payday. After a “year-long memo war,” Kiewit capitulated, cleared the tunnel and hired a commercial dive team to go into a pitch-black airless tube.

For the full review, see:
NANCY ROMMELMANN. “BOOKS; One Mile Down, Ten Miles Out; Their oxygen was starting to get thin. On the verge of passing out, Hoss radioed back to the Humvees. The reply was an expletive, and the line went dead.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat.,March 15, 2014): C9.
(Note: ellipses between paragraphs, added; ellipsis inside last paragraph, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 14, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘Trapped Under the Sea’ by Neil Swidey; In 1999, five deep-sea welders had to traverse a tunnel beneath Boston Harbor with no breathable air, no light and no chance for rescue should things go horribly wrong.” )

The book under review is:
Swidey, Neil. Trapped under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles into the Darkness. New York: Crown Publishers, 2014.

Sweden Shows ObamaCare Will Cause Health Care Delays and Rationing

(p. A11) President Obama has declared the Affordable Care Act a success–a reform that is “here to stay.” The question remains, however: What should we expect to come out of it, and do we want the effects to stay? If the experiences of Sweden and other countries with universal health care are any indication, patients will soon start to see very long wait times and difficulty getting access to care.
. . .
Rationing is an obvious effect of economic planning in place of free-market competition. Free markets allow companies and entrepreneurs to respond to demand by offering people what they want and need at a better price. Effective and affordable health care comes from decentralized innovation and risk-taking as well as freedom in pricing and product development. The Affordable Care Act does the opposite by centralizing health care, minimizing or prohibiting differentiation in pricing and offerings, and mandating consumers to purchase insurance. It effectively overrides the market and the signals it sends about supply and demand.
Stories of people in Sweden suffering stroke, heart failure and other serious medical conditions who were denied or unable to receive urgent care are frequently reported in Swedish media. Recent examples include a one-month-old infant with cerebral hemorrhage for whom no ambulance was made available, and an 80-year-old woman with suspected stroke who had to wait four hours for an ambulance.
Other stories include people waiting many hours before a nurse or anyone talked to them after they arrived in emergency rooms and then suffering for long periods of time before receiving needed care. A 42-year-old woman in Karlstad seeking care for meningitis died in the ER after a three-hour wait. A woman with colon cancer spent 12 years contesting a money-saving decision to deny an abdominal scan that would have found the cancer earlier. The denial-of-care decision was not made by an insurance company, but by the government health-care system and its policies.

For the full commentary, see:
PER BYLUND. “OPINION; What Sweden Can Teach Us About ObamaCare; Universal public health care means the average Swede with ‘high risk’ prostate cancer waits 220 days for treatment.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., April 18, 2014): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 17, 2014.)

“If You Do the Right Thing and Lose, You Still Did the Right Thing”

Senator Tom Coburn. Source of photo: online version of the NYT interview quoted and cited below.

(p. 12) You recently learned you have prostate cancer and announced that you’ll be leaving the Senate next January two years before the scheduled end of your term. How are you feeling? I’m feeling good. I’m not cured of the disease, but I’m on my way to marked improvement. And they may potentially have a cure. But I’ve got 5 or 10 years in front of me even if they don’t cure it.
. . .
Do you really think the problem in Washington is that people don’t listen to one another? My philosophy is different than most of the people up here. I think if you do the right thing and lose, you still did the right thing. I think if you do less than the right thing and win, it’s morally reprehensible.

For the full interview, see:
Leibovich, Mark, interviewer. “Power Is a Tool’.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., MARCH 16, 2014): 12.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date MARCH 13, 2014, and has the title “Senator Tom Coburn: ‘Power Is a Tool’.”)

Government Wire Inspectors Only Showed Up to Get Their Pay

(p. 121) Edison had originally planned to offer service to the entirety of south Manhattan, south of Canal Street and north of Wall Street, but engineering considerations forced him to carve out a smaller district, bounded by Wall, Nassau, Spruce, and Ferry Streets. Still, his company had to place underground some eighty thousand linear feet of electrical wire. This had never been attempted before, so it should not have been a surprise when H. O. Thompson, the city’s commissioner of public works, summoned Edison to his office to explain that the city would have to be assured that the lines were installed safely. Thompson was assigning five inspectors to oversee the work, whose cost would be covered by an assessment of $5 per day, per inspector, payable (p. 122) each week. When Edison left Thompson’s office, he was crestfallen, anticipating the harassment and delays ahead that would be caused by the inspectors’ interference. On the day that work began, however, the inspectors failed to appear. Their first appearance was on Saturday afternoon, to draw their pay. This set the pattern that the inspectors followed as the work proceeded through 1881 and into 1882.

Source:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.

Bill Clinton Says U.S. Control of Internet Protects Free Speech

(p. A11) . . . , Mr. Clinton, appearing on a panel discussion at a recent Clinton Global Initiative event, defended U.S. oversight of the domain-name system and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann.
. . .
“I understand why the reaction in the rest of the world to the Edward Snowden declarations has given new energy to the idea that the U.S. should not be in nominal control of domain names on the Internet,” Mr. Clinton said. “But I also know that we’ve kept the Internet free and open, and it is a great tribute to the U.S. that we have done that, including the ability to bash the living daylights out of those of us who are in office or have been.
“A lot of people who have been trying to take this authority away from the U.S. want to do it for the sole purpose of cracking down on Internet freedom and limiting it and having governments protect their backsides instead of empower their people.”
Mr. Clinton asked Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia: “Are you at all worried that if we give up this domain jurisdiction that we have had for all these years that we will lose Internet freedom?”
“I’m very worried about it,” Mr. Wales answered. People outside the U.S. often say to him, “Oh, it’s terrible. Why should the U.S. have this special power?” His reply: “There is the First Amendment in the U.S., and there is a culture of free expression.”
He recalled being told on Icann panels to be more understanding of differences in cultures. “I have respect for local cultures, but banning parts of Wikipedia is not a local cultural variation that we should embrace and accept. That’s a human-rights violation.”

For the full commentary, see:
L. GORDON CROVITZ. “INFORMATION AGE; Open Internet: Clinton vs. Obama; The former president strongly defends the current system of oversight by the U.S.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., MARCH 31, 2014): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the shorter title “INFORMATION AGE; Open Internet: Clinton vs. Obama.”)

Little Estonia Prepares Defense Against Russia’s Evil Empire

Toomis Hendrick Ilves, President of Estonia. Source of photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Perched alone up in eastern Baltic are Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Their fear of Moscow propelled them to become the first and only former Soviet republics to seek the refuge of NATO. But now doubts are appearing. The West has responded tepidly to the Crimean aggression. Military budgets are at historic lows as a share of NATO economies. The alliance, which marked its 65th anniversary on Friday, has never faced the test of a hot conflict with Moscow.

In this new debate over European security, Mr. Ilves plays a role out of proportion to Estonia’s size (1.3 million people) and his limited constitutional powers. A tall man who recently turned 60, he has the mouth of a New Jersey pol–he grew up in Leonia–and wears the bow ties of a lapsed academic. Americans may recall his Twitter TWTR -0.15% feud two years ago over Estonia’s economy with economist Paul Krugman, whom Mr. Ilves called “smug, overbearing & patronizing.”
. . .
Estonia managed on Thursday to get NATO’s blessing to turn the brand-new Amari military airfield near Tallinn into the first NATO base in the country. This small Balt tends to be proactive. While European governments axed some $50 billion from military budgets in the last five year amid fiscal belt-tightening, Estonia is only one of four NATO allies to devote at least 2% of gross domestic product to defense, supposedly the bare minimum for security needs.
“It lessens your moral clout if you have not done what you have agreed to do,” Mr. Ilves says of defense budgets. His barb hits directly at neighboring Lithuania and Latvia, which both spend less than 1% of GDP on their militaries.

For the full commentary, see:
MATTHEW KAMINSKI. “THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW; An American Ally in Putin’s Line of Fire; Estonia’s president, who was raised in New Jersey, on how Crimea has changed ‘everything’ and what NATO should do now.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 5, 2014): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 4, 2014.)

Where Ideas Go to Launch Versus Where Ideas Go to Die

(p. 1) PALO ALTO, Calif. — THE most striking thing about visiting Silicon Valley these days is how many creative ideas you can hear in just 48 hours.
. . .
Curt Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, which invented Siri for your iPhone, recalls how one leading innovator (p. 11) just told him that something would never happen and “then I pick up the paper and it just did.”
What they all have in common is they wake up every day and ask: “What are the biggest trends in the world, and how do I best invent/reinvent my business to thrive from them?” They’re fixated on creating abundance, not redividing scarcity, and they respect no limits on imagination. No idea here is “off the table.”
. . .
What a contrast. Silicon Valley: where ideas come to launch. Washington, D.C., where ideas go to die. Silicon Valley: where there are no limits on your imagination and failure in the service of experimentation is a virtue. Washington: where the “imagination” to try something new is now a treatable mental illness covered by Obamacare and failure in the service of experimentation is a crime. Silicon Valley: smart as we can be. Washington: dumb as we wanna be.

For the full commentary, see:
Thomas L. Friedman. “Start-Up America: Our Best Hope.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., FEB. 16, 2014): 1 & 11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date FEB. 15, 2014.)