This is actually economics and management, and it’s something you maybe haven’t thought about. But it’s bothering me this morning, so…..
Back when the length of U S Senate and House terms were being set, it look a long time to get a letter from, say, the West Coast back to the halls of power in Washington.
According to an Amazon forum, it took Pony Express:
Fastest, 7 days plus, average around 10 days summer, 12-16 winter
Now, let me apply some of our renown Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) skills and look at the problem in the time domain.
Let’s remember that 7-days was for just one way. In order for there to be two-way communications, it would be 14-days plus a day for typing or writing because back then there were secretaries and such. Some places were closer/faster, so let’s aggregate turn-around and travel time at 14-days.
A 2-year congressional term is 730 days. So this means, the number of sequential back and forth communications that could be fired off would be (rounding off) 52.
Obviously, for a senate position (6-years) there would be three times as many, or 156 such exchanges.
At the end of these exchanges, if a voter still hadn’t gotten something ironed out, there would be an election. Throw the buggers out.
Fast forward to the present.
And email (even on a slow day on the net) takes 2-minutes to send. Even with a big-ass attachment.
Once it arrives, composing a reply could take an hour…but since it might have come in during a lunch break, and there could be a weekend, let’s generously say 3-days for turn around. And then another 2-seconds in transit.
Given that the transaction speed is what makes government responsive, not the calendar (lol) then the length of a modern Congressional seat should be 3-days times 52 transactions, or 156-days.
And, by inspection, we see that Senate seats should be held for 468 days (1.28 years) which we could round off to one year and three months and buy senators a copy of Dragon so they can work as hard and fast as the rest of us.
And this relates to economics how, exactly?
Well, it brings down the stupid election spending and – because of higher turnover – there just might be less incumbent suck power and lower corporate bidding, which could put us all back in the game when comes to decisions like global taxes, fracking…well, we all have a list, right?
Any other Economic angles?
Yes.
The whole world almost melted down completely in 1974 when Bank Herstatt welched on a debt.
That led the financial world to adopt something called continuous settlement – and that’s a fine concept to be roll over into government.
Lookie here: When Elaine goes shopping in town, I know when she will be home and when I need to go out and schlep in the groceries. I can tell by when her debit card is dinged by watching the bank in real-time.
If banks can instantly ding my account, why can’t we get government online, elected along this continuous settlement model and get responsive?
Don’t mean to get off our usual path of honest reporting of crooked finance, the continuous printing of money, or the pending monetary collapse of Europe. But this is actionable except for one thing: The Old Paradigmers can not change it themselves.
If the Congressional Record allowed and reported constituent comments, Facebook would be in trouble.
Meantime, stories of government waste continue to pile up because of unresponsive government. The Washington Post reports three-quarters of a billion dollars a year is being spent on government employees who are on paid leave.
Life’s getting too short for this old man to run for office against one of these $100-million marvels that pretend to “represent us” unless we can squish down term length to something more reasonable and in keeping with modern business practice. (The only thing longer than a senate term, though, is still software support hold times….)
Instead of running for office, I may have to settle for a high-paying government job, that I could be immediately be laid off from on administrative leave. I recommend you apply for one immediately, too.
More after this…
Verizon Earnings
Kicking it:
Wireless
- Added 1.5 million net retail connections; retail postpaid churn of 1.00 percent; 106.2 million total retail connections; 100.1 million total retail postpaid connections.
- 4.8 percent year-over-year increase in service revenues; 4.6 percent year-over-year increase in retail service revenues; 31.9 percent operating income margin; 49.5 percent segment EBITDA margin on service revenues (non-GAAP).
Dow futures are up 45 when we looked and some additional gains in the metals. Crude is still hanging about $83.
Meantime, the National Association of Realtors is out with existing home sales…down a bit…
They also report in part “…unsold inventory is 4.5 percent higher than a year ago, when there were 2.21 million existing homes available for sale.”
One of these days that REO held by the banks will come out…
Tales of Two Three Oscars
Odd how these news rhymes work out:
Oscar Pistorius gets five years in jail.
Oscar de la Renta checks out at age 82.
And rounding up the Oscar cluster is speculation about which films might be hot for the 2015 Oscars.
The Dirty West/Ukraine Oil Re$serve$
Was using cluster bombs in Donetsk says a human rights group.
Not true says the who yah gonna believe.
Aw…hell….didn’t they get the memo about the Dneiper-Donets petroleum basin? Have a State Dept. cookie and read:
The Dnieper-Donets basin is almost entirely in Ukraine, and it is the principal producer of hydrocarbons in that country. A small southeastern part of the basin is in Russia. The basin is bounded by the Voronezh high of the Russian craton to the northeast and by the Ukrainian shield to the southwest. The basin is principally a Late Devonian rift that is overlain by a Carboniferous to Early Permian postrift sag. The Devonian rift structure extends northwestward into the Pripyat basin of Belarus; the two basins are separated by the Bragin-Loev uplift, which is a Devonian volcanic center. Southeastward, the Dnieper-Donets basin has a gradational boundary with the Donbas foldbelt, which is a structurally inverted and deformed part of the basin.
“You mean Ukraine was / is all about oil and gas?”
D’oh. Of course it ain’t over…it’s never over. Just like the Leviathan gas find off Gaza…double d’oh dough…
Everything is a business model, remember?
Too Much Sizzle
And not enough steak when comes to news content says a new Harris Poll out this morning:
When provided with several types of news stories and asked which are under-, over-, or appropriately covered, three-fourths of U.S. adults (76%) say celebrity gossip/scandal stories are over-covered, while half (49%) say the same about general entertainment news and 44% believe sports news gets too much coverage. And perhaps the midterms are to blame, but a third of Americans (33%) feel U.S. elections are over-covered in U.S. news media.
Maybe, but I bet the ad departments of corpmedia love it….