The cost of our Democracy

An average winning Senate race costs $10; a House race, $1.5m.

Assuming a 6 day week, 10 hour days, 50 weeks a year, in one election cycle Senators put in 9,000 hours and Members of Congress 3,000. If half of that is legislating and the other half fund-raising (i.e., talking to donors), then a $100 dollar donation should buy me a 4.5 minute conversation with my representative in the Senate, and 10 minutes with my House representative...

Alternatively, the billing rate for a Senator is $1,333 per hour and a member of congress $600. Lawyers without particular high charge rate specializations might bill their time at $250 for associates and perhaps $400 for partners.  So democratic representation is more expensive to buy - by the hour - than legal counsel. Could that explain why we are such a litigious society?

S/360 legacy

IBM dominated the computer industry in the 1960s and 1970s with its S/360 architecture mainframes. With the introduction of the PC, IBM's ability to control accounts from the center - a key part of its sales strategy - disappeared, and the company has been trying to find its way in a "post S/360 world" ever since.

But despite the rise of client-server and the web, S/360 will be around for a while. Companies invested in COBOL applications and customized MRP systems that can't easily be replaced and indeed in might not be cost justifiable to do so. So MVS, VSE, VM, IMS, CICS and CMS are likley to be around for quite some time.       

Corporations face a dilemma - when their core business is shrinking slowly but not going away, they are held hostage by the past, committed to supporting those legacy systems and customers and unable to make a clean break (even if they could come up with another 'killer app", which is anyway far from certain).

Microsoft is in the same position today that IBM was twenty years ago.  And Apple may well be there twenty years from now.

As the 21st century matures, the tech landscape may well become littered with semi-zombie companies that are dying but haven't quite stopped moving yet...   

Gun control, again

Another mass shooting, and as usual the gun rights faction of congress (and Fox) give us: "thoughts and prayers" and "this is not the time".

Senator Dick Durbin pleaded that "this should not be the new normal", but if one is being realistic it has been the "normal" for years. Every atrocity is followed by the same pattern of rhetoric from both sides and every time nothing changes. That's our normal now.

The "bump stock" an ingenious modification to a semi automatic rifle that gives it roughly the same rate of fire as a manufactured fully automatic is a simple and cheap way of circumventing an overly  narrowly written law restricting the sale of fully automatic weapons. That is a simple loophole that should be closed for starters. 

But the broader problem is the assertion of "rights".  The right granted by the second amendment, ignoring the debate over whether it was intended only to apply to a "well regulated militia" ignores the externality that flows from its granting.  The right of an individual to "bear arms" indirectly represents an externality, in the "costs" that flow from non-self-defense gun related homicides. Without cast iron prevention, it is inevitable that innocent people will die.

Thoughts and prayers are nice, but getting a little old. Nicer would be collective action that prevents another mass shooting.