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An Overheard Conversation Between Two Software Engineers
From a friend who’s working on a software startup in Manhattan:
Engineer 1 – “…I’ve got a buddy working at the State Department in technology. They won’t let him use any browser other than Firefox. It makes his life as a developer miserable. He needs Chrome and other tools that they won’t let him use.”
Engineer 2 – “Bummer. Why don’t they let him?”
Engineer 1 – “He hasn’t asked. He was just told it’s not allowed but he’s thinking about making a request. He might get an answer from the higher ups by Christmas.”
Engineer 2 – “That’s why you can’t get anything done in government.”
They came from modest middle class families (one from an immigrant family). They studied hard to go to good schools. They negotiate their own value in the labor market with great interest. They like working for profit making businesses and aspire to be entrepreneurs one day.
Both voted for Obama.
Who will win their votes in 2016?
We’ve got to give these guys a strong reason to go against their liberal friends. There are real social costs to voting conservative in liberal social circles. We need to give moderates, undecideds, and shaky Democratic voters the confidence to defy their cultural cliques.
Well, good people of Ricochet, what are we to make of that? How—how can the GOP give moderates and shaky Democrats “the confidence to defy” their own friends and families?
Published in General
NAACP v Alabama
More protection for political speech privacy. Make the left work to find lynch mob targets. As long as you can get fired for political speech, you won’t get it. You will get socially acceptable pablum as defined by the left.
Stories like this one are a great start, Peter. Those are the things that resonate – stories. Facts and data do, too, but they don’t stick with anyone (especially if they’re on the other side of the aisle) like a story does. They can identify with a story; a statistic not so much.
I’ve worked for a defense contractor and had many interactions with US gov’t employees, and how they work, what tools they use. They are laughably behind the rest of the world – I mean it’s bad. They are easily a decade behind the rest of us. Why?
Because it’s government. The individual cases and reasons are legion, but it boils down to government.
I think you’re going a step to far here. You’re assuming that they’d make the connection that Republicans would do something about this.
I think that’s a questionable premise: Republicans made no effort to do anything about this during the second (or first!) Bush Presidency. Why should they start now?
I think that this is a lot of the appeal of both Pauls: that people feel they might really be reformers, unlike the majority of Republicans.
If Republicans were to run someone who’s a genuine reformer, with a track record as such, he would have a true appeal. Isn’t that all of Christie’s appeal? (I don’t think he’s the one, but for example.)
Study Scott Brown’s upset over Martha Coakley in the special election to replace Ted Kennedy. Don’t mimic the Conservative Lite policy, but watch how Brown worked the voters. He was the best I’d seen on the stump in a long, long time. The victory speech joking about his truck with John Ratzenberger and Doug Flutie up on stage with him was a sight to behold, and just plain exciting.
Before anyone gets too excited, Engineer 1 might be miserable for a damn good reason.
Federal networks are notoriously insecure and poorly managed, whitelisting what can be run is a step to securing the network. This seems pretty central to the entire NIST SDC, well now USGCB I guess, standard that’s being rolled out.
Firefox was vetted and approved awhile back, I have no idea if anyone is even looking at Chrome although they probably should be.
“There are real social costs to voting conservative in liberal social circles.”
Nope. Not buying it.
There may be social costs to talking conservative, but how can there be social costs to voting conservative? Last I checked we still had a secret ballot.
I’m perfectly prepared to lie about how I vote if necessary.
I gotta say, Rob’s argument works really well. I can walk out of my house this afternoon and buy an affordable, high-power phone in any color I want, and in minutes customize my phone screen with pictures of my children and fill it with apps I want. I can then use that phone to go to Nike.com and customize a pair of shoes and have those shoes delivered to my front door. This is the world we live in and yet Democrats insist that the only solution to any problem is a slow, one size fits all, 1950s style bureaucracy.
If someone conceives of a solution today, it may become law next year, then it will be passed to an agency, they’ll interpret it and develop a plan, then they’ll implement. The whole process takes years so now you have a 2014 solution being implemented in 2018. The world changed. We got there too late.
For me this brings up the strategy fight between the establishment and conservative wing of the Republicans. To reach these two engineers a (establishment) platform of making government work better might help, however conservatives often see this as being “caretakers of the welfare state”. The conservatives have a point, as Tuck says above, in that often Republican presidents (and Congress’s!) only reform at the edges and instead of making government more efficient end up making government more bureaucratic as they push through mandates on the agencies like “Buy American” mandates, Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), or security mandates that shackle departments with onerous outdated technology and make it three times more costly to acquire software and hardware.
The Republican’s should take a cue from New Zealand, which has brought in private sector-like reforms that have greatly increased the efficiency of government.
If a Republican government can gain some credibility with the public by delivering government more efficiently, conservatives might be able to convince more people that the real debt-drivers (SS and Medicare) can be reformed.
How—how can the GOP give moderates and shaky Democrats “the confidence to defy” their own friends and families?
Tell them about the “none of your business” response to a personal question?
What kind of person needs “the confidence to defy” bestowed, anyway?
A caution: after Obamacare and Benghazi, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could vote for Obama. Now, two years later, the ineptness and lackadaisical political smearing and … and … [as SpongeBob’s narrator says: “three hours later…”] … list of Obama disasters , I can’t imagine anyone voting Democrat. How could any sane person want to continue this?
That’s the last thing I said before the last loss.
Sorry, Peter, but I will just give my continual refrain answer that you can’t get to the middle voters without doing something about the media filter that is now more firmly fixed in place than ever before and is built to be transparent to any left winger and any left wing idea and absolutely opaque to conservatives and conservative ideas. Developing a solution to this problem is needed — working around the edges “getting the message just right” simply won’t work.
I’m reading David Horowitz’s new book, Take No Prisoners, and he shows the real problem with our country right now. We have a home-grown five-alarm anti-American fire going on and anyone who points it out is attacked. And worst of all, like with slavery and Jim Crow, if any fire is acknowledged the Republicans and conservatives are blamed OR the damage done by the fire is deemed necessary and evidence of things improving.
For example, recently I was talking to a moderate to conservative LIV engineer and he offered his assessment of Obamacare: “Well, it’s been needed for a long time now and we just have to get it working.”
Until Republicans can attach shame to Democrats and their shameful policies, you can forget these voters. Democrats know the game of scapegoating by now. They’ve perfected it under Obama (it’s all Bush’s fault, obstructionist Republicans, etc.).
Republicans have just barely begun to tell the truth about the immorality of socialist policies (see AEI). Republican politicians are at the foot of a steep learning curve. Until they can explain why Ferguson happens (not just what happened), the average voter will have no emotional connection to what Republicans say.
I have a Left-leaning friend who encounters stuff like this from time to time. I listen with a sympathetic ear, but at the end of the conversation I always shrug my shoulders and say, “Well, that’s what they get for voting for Democrats.” It irks her, but I hope over time its underlying truth will sink in.
All good suggestions. I have a separate quibble, though, about an item in your OP that muddies the waters, Peter.
He hasn’t asked. …he’s thinking about making a request.
This is no moderate and shaky Democrat; he’s a heart of the envelope Democrate waiting to be told what to do. We should be competing for the moderates and shakies these next few times around. We can invite Engineer 1’s buddy later, during the cleanup and recovery phase.
Eric Hines
Here is a thought. Most of the sorts you are talking about, Peter, get their news from the mainstream press, which manages to downplay and bury things like the IRS scandal. Nonetheless, they do not like the surveillance state (and rightly so). The Republicans ought to make something of this. How can we be free if the government tracks our every move? If I were running the Republican campaigns against incumbent Democratic Senators, I would repeatedly hammer them for building a police state. This bothers the Silicon Valley types a lot, and my bet is that it bothers their counterparts in Manhattan and elsewhere.
Hi, Peter. It’s Paul (insert “Where’s Mary?” joke here). You may recall I asked you essentially this question at the great LA Ricochet podcast/party.
I still don’t have “The Answer” to what to do about my software-developing ilk and their overwhelming tendency to buy a technocratic vision that’s shown to be delusional over and over again. You would think they’d discover, along with the late, great computer scientist Alan Perlis, that “a year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to convince anyone of the existence of God” (and, for those for whom that’s a bridge too far, cue David Berlinski’s “The Devil’s Delusion.”). Maybe we need to buy them all copies of Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (one of my great joys is to have met Dr. Knuth and thanked him for that and 3:16).
One thing that is clear to me, though, is that we have got to break the left’s stranglehold on the idea that only they—and, more importantly, their ideas—support women and minorities. Frankly, this likely means addressing it head on, with explicit, direct appeals. Rand Paul is obviously leading the way here. It’s not enough to simply reiterate that “equal treatment under the law” is a bedrock principle, and anyone taking that stance after Ferguson will deservedly be bitterly laughed out of the room irrespective of what the facts are. Not good enough. We need to be preaching black gun ownership in the Democratic KKK south. We need to be preaching the first-generation non-Anglo-Saxon immigrant landing at Ellis Island; enduring the indignity of having their very name changed by early 20th century typewriter legerdemain; the struggle to find and uphold their ethnic and religious community in America; their learning this glorious, bizarre mudball of a language we presumptuously call “English;” and their establishment of their business. The pride with which they hung a not-yet-clichéd “Est. 1932” outside, now faded, chipped, and worn by another 30 years of every element New York has to offer.
We must appeal to pride. Not vanity. Pride. Individual pride, accomplishment, and yes, ethnic pride. We’re all immigrants here, a fact I’m reminded of every time I recall dinner-table conversation with my grandmother and elder aunts, in German, my Germanless parents (it was unpopular when they were teens, for some reason…) beaming. My family’s story is about betrayed promises of constitutional monarchy, riots in Berlin, religious persecution in Alsace-Lorraine, risking lives to come here, a century pre-Great Society.
Why are we so bad at making hay of that?
I’m not allowed to install any software on my computer at work, and the IT policies in place on the computer prevent me from even trying.
No problem though, I simply install PortableApps versions on a USB thumb drive and run them from there.
A related problem: I understand why we are creamed in the Black and Latino communities, but why do Republicans lose by even greater numbers with Asians? Asians should be one of our bedrock constituencies – they are people who consistently produce more than they consume and are even more intensely victimized by reverse discrimination programs than WASPs. My stab at a reason is that the MSM has portrayed Republicans [in places like Silicon Valley that doesn’t have much contact with the real thing] as Todd Akin/”bible thumpin'” yahoos that live to hate gay people, stop contraception and start wars. Blowhards like O’Reilly – caricatured so well by Colbert -reinforce this image.
The most practical solution I can think of is ;
a) Accept defeat on the hot button issues like gay marriage and first trimester abortion.
b) Admit there is a problem in this country with the hollowing out of the middle class and admit that we are willing to compromise our ideological purity to address it: a perfect compromise would be to offer to accept a $10/hr minimum wage after we have secured the border, implemented E-Verify and put in place biometric IDs to enforce immigration law.
If you want to get a feel for how hopeless that crowd is, listen to Leo Laporte’s podcast, This Week in Tech. I get the impression that a lot of Silicon Valley listens to it. When they stick to tech issues it’s pretty informative. But they can’t help straying into politics, and when they do, not only do they show their liberal bias, but how uninformed they are about the conservative position, often misrepresenting it to suit their own arguments.
I had enough of listening to Laporte’s suite of podcasts, limiting my listening to Security Now, that does stick to tech.
But I think those shows accurately represent the thinking there (as well as New York).
Also: Why does an employee who develops software for the State Department need Chrome to develop software for the State Department if the State Department only allows its employees to use Firefox?
I seems to me there’s no need for him to make the software he works on Chrome-compatible if none of his clients are allowed to use Chrome.
It sounds like he simply prefers Chrome, and would like to use it on his work computer for personal reasons not related to his job.
(Also, it seems odd that the State Department employs full-time web software developers.)
Limited to 200 words in my last post. I’d also like to add one further point; in my lifetime the very best impacts conservatives have made have been when we went over the heads of the MSM with things like the Contract With America. I recall some of Reagan’s success came from blueprints for governing laid out by the Heritage Foundation and the Grace Commission ferreting out government waste. Why don’t we have another Grace Commission [a Romney Commission?] laying out what rent seeking regulations and programs we are willing to tackle if the fence sitters give us a chance?
Please do a post explaining how PortableApps works, and email me when you do: paul.rahe@hillsdale.edu.
So moderates and dems only have liberal leaning friends? Do you think the entire country is like DC, NY, and CA? Romney lost because he could not excite the conservatve base. Having to choose the lesser of two evils is getting old.
The Republicans need to shred two of the favorite pages in their playbook:
1. “Vote for me, I’m not as stinky as the other guy”
2. “We need to eliminate capital gains and corporate taxes to really stimulate entrepreneurial growth and get the economy moving.”
The fact that they’re true, doesn’t make them effective with the voters that need to be reached. Republican candidates need to realize very few people own their own businesses, and that most people are more concerned with the pump price of gasoline than depreciation schedules.
It will also help if
3. The GOP “Leadership” (Boehner and McConnell) can refrain from mocking core Republican voters, and avoid stabbing them in the back with “comprehensive immigration reform.”
4. GOP elected officials will realize that “holding hearings” and “introducing bills” is not the same thing as “getting results.”
I’m not real optimistic.
“Moderate” and “middle of the road” and especially educated well-off professionals don’t vote GOP because of one reason: social issues. They view the GOP, rightly or wrongly, as a backward party of hicks who can’t get over the social issues.
And yet there’s a wing of the GOP that wants to dig themselves even deeper in the social issues…excuse me…”value” issues. This will drive these sort of people, who would be “natural” GOP allies, away.
So here’s a suggestion: STOP IT! Stop with the social issues. Its divisive.
Well, social issues don’t belong in government in the first place. That’s a conservative position.
Want to lose these people for good? Keep drumming up about “values” and “morals”.
PS: And no, the “media” and the “scandals” have nothing to do with it. I’m a conservative, and I don’t even buy the “scandal” stuff. It’s overblown, and frankly, no one wants to vote for a Party because the other ones has “scandals”. Run on merit. Especially for these sort of people…sensationalism isn’t going to work.
Oh no, I ain’t gettin’ suckered into doing free IT support … again.
;-)
But seriously, it’s probably easiest to read their Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portableapps.com
AIG (#28):
Social issues from the left are entrenched in government in many ways. (Obamacare comes to mind as a great recent example.) Social Conservatives are trying to push back. We are a key part of the base, and the GOP cannot win in 2016 without a very good turnout of our ranks.
It is OK if our issues are not emphasized. It is not OK if our planks are watered down in the platform, or if our leadership disavows us, or calls us names, or undercuts any SoCon candidate who says something awkward. We lose interest when our own standard-bearer is seen to be running away from our issues.
I don;t see any amount of rhetoric making good for the GOP leadership’s “not quite as pro-spending big-government party as the other guys” approach. Part of the Tea Party critique of the weak sauce offered by the GOP is that it positions them poorly to differentiate from the Democrats (in a marketing sense), and they will have to suffer along with the handicap.
In the analogy of the engineers, the GOP offers them Firefox with the buttons re-skinned to look like Chrome, but none of the different functionality which the engineers know they need. The GOP then goes to blame the Chrome developers for being disruptive. The engineers have no reason to select ChromeFox. They can tell the difference between an elephant and the north end of a southbound rhinoceros with a pair of tusks glued under its tail.
Peter Robinson:
Well, good people of Ricochet, what are we to make of that? How—how can the GOP give moderates and shaky Democrats “the confidence to defy” their own friends and families?
The fact that “we’re” asking this question means that we’re already lost. I’m finding Ricochet less and less useful every day.
Yes, isn’t it rich that the GOP probably has Socons for free if they just don’t insult them. What’s the % of the GOP voters who are Socons? 30% at a minimum, eh? Yet, some of these geniuses here want to drop this large faction in the HOPE of getting more Asians or Latinos or moderates. Pathetic but typical line of libertarian “reasoning.”