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Archive for the 'Government' Tag
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USA: Cutting GAO budgets a guaranteed way to waste even more
Almost every western country is currently developing or has implemented plans to reduce administrative overheads and cost of government services. Often this happened by just reducing service levels and extent instead of looking for ways to spend the government money more wisely.
Sometimes such blunt tactics shed a light on the true intentions behind some of these “cost cuttings” – quick & dirty fixes, reduce social benefits and put even more pressure and fear into the majority of citizens.
Cost cuttings are seen across all areas of government services not stopping even with closing hospitals, fire services or massive cuts with other essential services.
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Government: Your Taxes at Work – Reaching the Millennium Goals
For this year’s Christmas we thought a short metaphor / parable describing how a very prominent PPP/ government agency in Europe has handled one of its most important business services for years now and is by this wasting billion of tax payer’s funds, might get you into the right spirit for donations to that help-industry. Like every holiday season they will certainly like many others of these so-called “humanitarian agencies” in the next days appeal to you for more donations.
Most of these agencies are doing fine but this one is certainly the black sheep. And as it seems many in that “industry” do know that but still the billions (of tax payer’s money) continue to be coming in.
Let’s assume for our little metaphor you are the owners of a small company with a few hundred staff members. Almost your whole business depends on letters people send you by mail and replies you pass back to them by mail as well…
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Life: Fake Work in the wild
Fake Work – the best description for a cancer / plague often seen in large monolithic organizations. It is also very popular in organizations that have far to many people for the tasks assigned to them, but justify their existence with such counterproductive activities.
We’ve observed its most extreme use with a so-called Public-Private-Partnership in Geneva where 600 people are “working hard” to burn through Billions of tax payers funds while doing the work of 50. The sadest thing about such environments is that those who don’t do anything productive will most of the time get the recognition while the few others working hard are often treated like dirt.
Here’s the best definition we found …
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Life: The role of the state to impact morality
This video is out of a series of short videos starting with “How to Live a Meaningful Life” up to “Reflects on Goodness” all of them interviews by the great BigThink web site with U.C. Berkeley social psychologist Dacher Keltner.
If you interested in Professor Keltner’s work and that of his colleagues at the…
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Civil-Rights: (Official) Censorship is coming back to Europe
Today the German Parliament will vote on a new Censorship law to be put in place to block web content as decided by the German administration. Based on black listing web sites and blocking those at ISP level via DNS and the displaying of so-called Stop pages the planned law was originally been handed around and legislators were seeking public approval by false-flagging it as a solely preventive measure against child abuse / pornography.
While almost all experts heard on this matter (fighting such illegal material and use) have clearly demonstrated that the censoring of access is no way forward towards stopping such activities particularly as many of the web servers in question were even physically located in Germany and other means (take-down notice to providers) proofed that within shortest notice (often less than a day) the material was taken off the net, it became more and more clear that the German Government is seemingly following a completely different agenda. The latest text of the law not even contains a reference anymore to the previously so broadly used argument of fighting child abuse but provides the general right to block any Internet content as…
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Film: Torturing Democracy
Torturing Democracy is the 2008 documentary film from awarding-winning producer Sherry Jones on the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques“ by the Bush administration in the so-called “War on Terror”. The 90 minutes documentary took more than 18 months to make and includes interview from high ranking U.S. military personnel and the State Department, including former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage…
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