Horror stories. Actually, I wish more of them were doing porn, like at the SEC. They’d be less likely to be causing other mischief. I’ve heard some specifically about NASA as well.
As Derbyshire is fond of saying — we’re doomed.
[Update Tuesday morning]
I’ve had to shut down comments on this post, because for some reason it’s drawing spammers like flies.
I did not find the SEC porn story very surprising at the time. You do not need to go to the civil service to see it. I know a couple of system administrators in the private sector and have heard a fair share of stories of mid/high level management streaming porn videos to their offices. As you can imagine all corporate network traffic is logged, even filtered for low level staff on occasion, but these people have special network privileges due to their “unique” position. Hah.
As for Eastern European countries, yes, a lot of them have really low taxes. Estonia is one of these Eastern European countries, with formerly fantastic growth, rates that imploded overnight. So did Ireland until it collapsed. They used to call it the Celtic Tiger.
There has indeed been convergence where Europe (in general) has privatized a lot of areas, even imposing EU level directives to privatize, as it was perceived the economy was performing worse from low agility from the state running businesses.
The target economic model for the EU was the US during Clinton basically. For example in France energy used to be state controlled, a lot of countries have been privatizing social security (e.g. Sweden), medical care, banks were privatized.
IMO some of these privatizations were warranted (say wireless telecoms) but a lot were a disaster. They destabilized the economy.
The energy sector privatizations in particular are sure to cause issues in the future as there is a need for reinvestment in electricity generation, transmission, petroleum alternatives. The privatized enterprises are mostly not interested in spending money in infrastructure or R&D with a multiple decade return. In France, for example, they have been replacing baseload nuclear power with windmills and gas fired power plants.
My ex is a CA state employee. I talked with her last night. She just got back from vacation and three job interviews in different departments were waiting for her when she got back (the process for some being over a year, it was just a coincidence.) She takes these interviews including tests on the clock. One had a test before the interview. If you passed the test, you did not get the interview (it was designed to frustrate… some kind of management test.) She failed the test and had a great interview. What is going on?
My experience since I’m a kid is that 10 to 20% (usually at the lower end) of government (and even military) know what they are supposed to do and actively do it. There is no work ethic there.
My brother-in-law, a supervisor in the water dept. for CA before he retired, used to give my sister a clipboard and take her on inspections throughout the state. I love my sister, but don’t see how the clipboard was going to fool anyone. But I guess in civil service it didn’t take much.
JSC at least, is pretty diligent about those cruising adult sites via their system A friend there tells me of at least one person who was canned for it. And I’ve found that their servers will bounce back my e-mails to her there, if they have URLs that contain certain words, no matter how harmless the site itself is.
This, for example:
http://io9.com/5394972/the-ultimate-space-porn-a-648-megapixel-image-of-our-galaxy
…would not have made it.
(and others may have had issues too, as io9.com no longer uses the ‘p’ word in the actual URL of those things they call ‘space porn’)
I have seen people walked out for this kind of thing. No excuses, no chance to plead, just walked out the door. Companies usually have very strict policies as to what can and can not be done with their IT system, and they usually go through a lot of trouble to let their employees know what those policies are. The people who got fired were just plain stupid.
Shortly after I started at a startup company (that was later acquired by Symantec) there was a bit of a snafu over the secretary. She had posted naked pictures of herself on some cpu overclocker’s forum. The guys in the office started passing these pictures around and eventually passed them on to my manager.. who was actually a founder and had shares in the company. Fearful that the company was going to be sued for sexual harassment, he went straight to the CEO. Everyone who had the pictures in their browser cache was suspended. One of them decided to argue and said a few things he soon regretted and was summarily dismissed. It took me a month to find out what had happened. It remains one of the best places I’ve ever worked.
Friend of mine who worked for the florida state govt was canned when a subordinate, intent on getting his job, planted porn on his machine. Best reason to keep a strong password and firewall running at all times.
As for Eastern European countries, yes, a lot of them have really low taxes. Estonia is one of these Eastern European countries, with formerly fantastic growth, rates that imploded overnight. So did Ireland until it collapsed. They used to call it the Celtic Tiger.
And Ireland will be called the “Celtic Tiger” again. A -3% growth rate for one year does not make a “collapse”. I imagine the growth rates for those eastern European countries will recover as well. I see the key issue being whether or not their governments interfere with the recovery of the country (as has happened in the US, for example).