It looks obvious

Beside of the obvious ridiculous believes about the abilities of a President, any President, to really solve her economical problems, I was pretty impress with this short clip:

We are in, comparatively, very good place when our poor own a car and a house. For many countries house and a car, will be considered luxury.

I wonder what is the social justice of saving Mr. Ramirez from loosing “his” house:

Despite making only $14,000 a year, strawberry picker Alberto Ramirez managed to buy his own slice of the American Dream. But his Hollister home came with a hefty price tag - $720,000.

And I would really wonder why making me, that earn more than Mr. Ramirez but didn’t dare buying such an expensive house need to pay for the bailout? The fact is that with the burden on the middle class increasing to save irresponsible borrowing, and borrowers, we are increasing the circle of people that might loose their homes, that doesn’t seems social justice to me - not at all.

When I started to develop photography as more serious hobby I decided to separate my photography attempts from this blog. The mix of the writing with photography seemed to be wrong, and I think that it was the right decision. In general my photos can be found in my photo-blog or in Flickr and here I’m writing about “other” things.

But since this is a personal blog I wanted to tell you about a portrait I took today which I’m pretty proud of. I post here the medium size thumbnails but I seriously recommend watching it in large version. Compliments are not required, but highly welcomed

Democracy is really great, mostly when it allow informed voters to make decisions about the policies the government should make…

This is by the way doesn’t refute in any way the arguments in favor of democracy, nor for individual freedom. It just emphasize the need to limit the scope of the damage such voters can inflict on other people.

Joe the plumber is really OK. If you expecting inarticulate and ignorant person you are going to be disappointed. I really enjoyed listen to him - he is eloquent, understand the issues and represent his point of view very well:

And by the way - when I’ll read the story of Robin Hood to my girls he will not be a hero for the wealth redistribution but for protecting human rights. Furthermore I don’t think that any politician can boast as Robin Hood while using the coercion monopoly of the state to force wealth distribution - if they want to be Robin Hood they are welcome to hide in Sherwood forest and take the risks he took!

I have an habit of watching TV series in a very long delay. I don’t like the waiting period between episode and I don’t have patient to see if the TV show worth my time. I started watching the Sopranos when it was already in its fourth season - I picked the DVD’s from netflix and enjoy an uninterrupted watching. I did the same thing with Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire slayer, and recently with the best TV I ever saw - The Wire.

I assume that most people know already what the show is about, so I’ll not get into the details. I’ll just say that the series using the police investigation story as a tool to portray the decay of American urban structure and social fabric. The story is being told with rare qualities which provide real intellectual stimulation and emotional reactions. One of the main themes of the story is the inherent inefficiency of organizations to solve real problems - set with the wrong incentives, driven with agenda that has very little positive effect on real problems institutions are busy with self preservation, satisfying foreign interests and focusing on meaningless measurable goals. And although the series isn’t advocating for Libertarianism, it has - as the New Yorker Magazine identified, a Libertarian obvious streak:

Simon makes it clear that the show’s ambitions were grand. “ ‘The Wire’ is dissent,” he says. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.” He also likes to say that “The Wire” is a story about the “decline of the American empire.” Simon’s belief in the show is a formidable thing, and it leads him into some ostentatious comparisons that he sometimes laughs at himself for and sometimes does not. Recently, he spoke at Loyola College, in Baltimore; he described the show in lofty terms that left many of the students in the audience puzzled—at least, those who had come hoping to hear how they might get a job in Hollywood. In creating “The Wire,” Simon said, he and his colleagues had “ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy—not Aristophanes. We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state.” He went on, “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”

[...]

Over the next several days, the writers poked holes in each other’s ideas and, like Greek gods, mapped out the fates of the characters. Most of the trajectories were grim, but one troubled character, they decided, would pull himself together and enjoy what George Pelecanos calls one of the show’s “inglorious redemptions—not Rocky knocking the Russian out in the ninth round but somebody getting through to the other side.” Simon often says that “The Wire” refuses to indulge in the “life-affirming” messages that are woven into the fabric of network TV. Still, he seemed glad to incorporate this small victory into an otherwise rigorously unsentimental picture. “We don’t have a lot of victories,” Simon told his colleagues. “As cynically as the rest of this stuff is ending, it will validate the one place we put any of our sincerity, which is individual action.” It’s hard to classify Simon politically, but anytime you start thinking of him as some sort of bleeding-heart socialist you’re brought up short by his unremitting skepticism about institutions.

If, for some reason, you didn’t watch The Wire yet - I highly recommend doing so it is really worth the time.

Enjoying the warm weather and the great autumn we traveled yesterday along the hudson river and stop in several places. One of our stop was in the first American winery - Brotherhood - hopping to catch the last tour at 4 PM and maybe to enjoy tasting of few of the wines. The place itself is very nice and worth a visit, we also enjoyed the brotherhood riesling before and liked it so we had somewhat high expectations from the visit.

Arriving at about 3:00 PM we assumed that we have plenty of time, but we were wrong. We discovered that the lines for wine purchasing, and people obviously bought many bottles of wine, and for the winery tour are same lines. Additionally some computer problems caused the payment process to slow down even more than normally. So after standing in line for about 45 minutes we start to express our displeasure from the service and from the fact that we are going to miss the tour due to unreasonably bad service.

Quickly we were pulled out of the line and registered to tour and while waiting to the tour - and to the tour guide to pull everybody that still waiting in line - One of the owners came to apologize. He expressed his frustration with the new process that was initiated by consultants that the winery hired to improved its processes. One of the things he repeatedly said was that the visiting process was working well for years and that he doesn’t understand why they had to change it.

The fault of the messy inefficient process is, obviously, the owner’s and not the consultant’s. He hired them to recommend changes - and he is the one that should make the decision if he is going to institute them completely, partially, or as sane company owner should do - ignore them. The fact is that hiring consultants to improve the processes in your own company is a bad decision - nobody should know better than you where are your weak points, nor do they have the knowledge about your priorities, vision and the way your company should do better. Most of the time the visiting consultant experience is limited to consulting and they tries to force general solutions on specific problems.

I don’t remember where did I heard the expression “outsourcing the brain” before but the person that coined it was painfully accurate. I do remember, however, this wonderful post that concluded:

The whole fraud is only possible because performance metrics in knowledge organizations are completely trivial to game. The best part is that most management consultants, the stunningly good-looking, bright, earnest chipmunks with 4.0s in Russian Lit from Harvard who work for these companies, have absolutely no way of knowing this, so they can go through this whole exercise without even knowing that they’re doing it! They get all the way through the 2-year associate program on their way to MBA school without even realizing that they haven’t done a goddamn thing about productivity, all they’ve done is caused a fairly pointless transfer of wealth from ExxonMobilConoco to BainMcKinseyGartner’s senior partners. And it’s a lot of fun! First class flights to Houston and Oslo! Helping the world be more productive! Rock on, young stunningly-good-looking Management Consultant.

The tour, by the way, was very nice and so were some of the wines we tasted.