RHK: Rest in Pieces

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whyiswhy 12/5/2012 | 3:09:13 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces "Switzerland is a good axample of a stable democracy. It has been around for 900 years so there must be something going for it."

Switzerland: If your family name does not go back 900 years, forget being accepted, forget getting a job, etc. I do like the direct Democracy.

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rjmcmahon 12/5/2012 | 3:09:12 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces I think it much more unrealistic to expect someone who only makes $1400 per month to understand a 600 page $110M budget. I wouldn't have my tax form filled out by someone like that, let alone give them access to my bank account.

Unrealistic or not, it happens.

And if they are in the position of voting budgets, and only vote themselves so little, I reiterate what I said.

I don't know the answer to why the pay is so low. But it is what it is.

In reality, they do make more: it's called graft.

The people I know have something called integrity. But agreed that graft and corruption can occur when societies don't fairly reward public service.

And that's where your arguement really breaks down.

So your argument is that integrity is a directly related to pay? Didn't work for Skilling and Lay, nor many, many others. I'll suggest integrity comes from somewhere else.

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whyiswhy 12/5/2012 | 3:09:12 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces "It's unrealistic to expect citizens of city with population of 100 thousand to read a 600 page, $110M, budget and understand the finer details while at the same time raising their families, doing their day jobs, and coaching little league events on weekends. Somebody elected to do the job can, and in many cases, does. Even when only paid $1400 per month with no benefits, pensions, etc."

I think it much more unrealistic to expect someone who only makes $1400 per month to understand a 600 page $110M budget. I wouldn't have my tax form filled out by someone like that, let alone give them access to my bank account.

And if they are in the position of voting budgets, and only vote themselves so little, I reiterate what I said.

In reality, they do make more: it's called graft.

And that's where your arguement really breaks down.

-Why

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rjmcmahon 12/5/2012 | 3:09:12 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces I do like the direct Democracy.

The founders of the USA built a representative republic for good reasons. Elected representatives are supposed to become wise and do the right things for their constituencies. It's unrealistic to expect citizens of city with population of 100 thousand to read a 600 page, $110M, budget and understand the finer details while at the same time raising their families, doing their day jobs, and coaching little league events on weekends. Somebody elected to do the job can, and in many cases, does. Even when only paid $1400 per month with no benefits, pensions, etc.

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paolo.franzoi 12/5/2012 | 3:09:11 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces
Given our politicians (all of them both sides of the aisle) and things like bribing the local inspector for your home. You should assume every single person (without exception) involved in government is a crook, until they prove otherwise. I can not name a single politician who is out for others only for themselves.

seven

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rightlight 12/5/2012 | 3:09:11 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces Yes I remember Nov 2000. I also remember March 2000 as well when the DotCom bubble burst. Folks were laughing at the dumb money being lost and saying real men make real money in telecom. Talk about being handed your own lunch.

But I think most intelligent people knew that a bubble was forming and that it would eventually pop. Afterall, 10-20x Sales valuations and 1B+ acquisitions were making a lot of people "light headed" and delirious. NT at the 100+ range and I was smartly out, leading into that Nov crash. The crash was arguably predictable. What really caught me was the suckers rally. Post crash by 2001 with NT stocks at almost half the all time high, you think it was a reasonable bargain. I'm sure lot's of folks felt similar with other optic holdings. Yes we knew the storm was coming. But we thought we had enough muscle to weather the storm. We'd continue funding our optic holdings thinking we could ride out the storm, perfect storm et all. 1/2 the value? Even a 1/4 of the value? We would do the right thing and stay committed to these extremely hard working and talented crew. No different then how you stay with your soldiers with full back up when it's the enemies turn to attack. To REALLY know that Nov 2000 was not only the bursting of the telecom bubble, but a complete nuclear flattening of the entire telecom sector for almost 5 years, one would not only have such an unearthly crystal ball but such a person would have to follow through with what would seem to be bizarre behavior. You would immediately stop funding and supporting your start up soldiers, leaving them to hang and dry, or try to trade them and merge to their competitors. You would shut the door on new upcoming and talented prospects and tell them to drop it, "you'll never make it, it's a telecom nuclear winter" "Save your souls and find another job in another industry". You would short the already half off public stocks and laugh your way to their humiliating dollar status or all the way to bankruptcy. I don't know, it's just something I would not be proud of if I could look back and see what I could have done different. I would not want to be a proud soldier and survivor and say I smartly dodged the battlefield and cut and ran as my comrades died in vain. However I also would not want to be one of the heroic soldiers bankrupt in vain and gave it my all, pocketbook and all. So that leaves me at best somewhere in between? I did get bloodied. I did lose a lot of money. I did help some of my fellow industry mates. But I haven't spent all my cash and I'm still trying to figure out how to come out of this with something of value. So, it's not the bubble burst that gets me, it's the after effects.

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vrparente 12/5/2012 | 3:09:10 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces fgoldstein: Agreed that there was no "UUnet data" -- thus the reason I put it in quotes ...

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TripleChip 12/5/2012 | 3:09:10 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces " I did get bloodied. I did lose a lot of money. I did help some of my fellow industry mates. But I haven't spent all my cash and I'm still trying to figure out how to come out of this with something of value."

rightlight, I applaud your stand and feel myself with you.

"So, it's not the bubble burst that gets me, it's the after effects."

Bubble was not a good thing... And would there be a bubble aftermath if there were no bubble?

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stryke_d 12/5/2012 | 3:09:09 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces Well said, but it is not just in the land of the free that this phenom can occur. If as whyiswhy points out even Switzerland has its foibles it is probably about time we start reconsidering the system(s) we have in place.

Hard to believe that in the end we humans are still driven by seven.

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stluka 12/5/2012 | 3:09:08 AM

re: RHK: Rest in Pieces My only sales experience was a brief stint selling encyclopedia's door-to-door in 1983. I sure wish I had been earning sales commissions at UUNET though instead of just drawing an engineers salary.

Actually UUNET did have reasonably accurate traffic data which was measured at every router and switch interface in the network. Customers were billed based on the P95 traffic load. Peering traffic was measured and used to negotiate peering agreements with other ISPs. Backbone traffic was measured to determine the health of the network.

During the period from 1995 through 2000, customer traffic increased geometrically, roughly doubling every 200 days (not 100 days). Regardless, in 1996, the ILECs and IXCs were continuing to grow there networks at only 15% each year - UUNET was forced to pay premium prices and endure long lead times when leasing circuits for its backbone.

The forecasting model that I created was intended for use at a midyear 1996 conference with all of the ILECs, AT&T, and WorldCom to convince these carriers to build more faster. It was based on best-case sales forecast but more significantly, it incorporated wildly inflated assumptions regarding the backbone capacity needed to support the predicted demand. The model predicted that by midyear 1997, UUNET's underbuilt backbone would need increase 10-fold to support demand at an acceptible level of service. This message was misinterpreted, extrapolated, exaggerated, etc. resulting in probably the most successful vendor management inititative ever executed.

But when UUNET began to believe its own BS and tried to actually grow the backbone at that rate, the folks in capacity planning argued against it. Unfortunately, no one was listening to capacity planning anymore. I transferred to network finance where I was able to prevent UUNET/WorldCom from investing in a number of trans-oceanic cable systems but my influence diminished there as well. I quit the company in disgust in 2001 a few months before the accounting scandal broke.

By the way, Andrew Odlyzko was the first person that I saw publicly challenge the growth estimates that were being touted by the entire industry. Smart guy.

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