Bad Sheeba Poetry - Catitude :o)

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I lay on the laptop to heat keep,

Should you die before I wake,

I don't care because I'm a cat.

On October 29, 2009, UCLA Engineering celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Internet. Forty years ago, a team led by UCLA's Professor Leonard Kleinrock, sent the first message on ARPANET, which later became the Internet. The Internet has revolutionized communication, education, business and entertainment leading to dramatic changes in our social, political and economic lives.

I know I will forever be grateful for the internet, that is how I met my bride.  How about you, any special memories of the internet???

Have You Hugged A Project Manager Today?

November 5th, 2009. Today is International Project Management Day. If you have not yet hugged this underappreciated creature, why not seek one out :o)

The international project management day is intended to encourage project based organizations worldwide or organizations who utilize project management methodologies to schedule some type of recognition event within their organizations or coordinated locally with others to truly demonstrate appreciation for the achievements of project managers and their teams.

In most organizations, project managers do not seem to receive fair recognition for the work they do. Certainly the project sponsor and maybe a few stakeholders will offer some type of thanks or appreciation upon the completion of a successful project but generally, the people who are the actual target audience of the project deliverables often go about their daily operations without any thought about how the new system that has improved their well being was provided or how their new cafeteria was designed and built, or their newly expanded parking lot was completed.

The Importance of Recognition, Acknowledgment, and Saying Thank You. Of course, this appies to many jobs and professions, but today, it is focused on Project Managers.

Business Travel :o(

It is interesting as we age, and get more comfortable in our home situations, how business travel becomes less appealing.  Whether it is because you have young children at home, pets, or are just a homebody, being on the road is not always all it is cracked up to be.

I am in Chicago for two days to keep our Project Management Institute Region humming, and more importantly, to make sure that our local chapter voice is heard.  This is my fifth year of doing this, so it is more about providing direction than getting ideas on how to grow our organization.

The plus side is that Beth gets to eat her EggPlant Crapisan, and I do not. 

Hope you all had a good Hump Day, and that you are prepared to slide into the weekend.

Philosophical Phun - Consequentialism :o)

Consequentialism, as its name suggests, is the view that normative properties depend only on consequences. This general approach can be applied at different levels to different normative properties of different kinds of things, but the most prominent example is consequentialism about the moral rightness of acts, which holds that whether an act is morally right depends only on the consequences of that act or of something related to that act, such as the motive behind the act or a general rule requiring acts of the same kind.

One common illustration is called Transplant. Imagine that each of five patients in a hospital will die without an organ transplant. The patient in Room 1 needs a heart, the patient in Room 2 needs a liver, the patient in Room 3 needs a kidney, and so on. The person in Room 6 is in the hospital for routine tests. Luckily (for them, not for him!), his tissue is compatible with the other five patients, and a specialist is available to transplant his organs into the other five. This operation would save their lives, while killing the "donor". There is no other way to save any of the other five patients (Foot 1966, Thomson 1976; compare related cases in Carritt 1947 and McCloskey 1965).

We need to add that the organ recipients will emerge healthy, the source of the organs will remain secret, the doctor won't be caught or punished for cutting up the "donor", and the doctor knows all of this to a high degree of probability (despite the fact that many others will help in the operation). Still, with the right details filled in, it looks as if cutting up the "donor" will maximize utility, since five lives have more utility than one life. If so, then classical utilitarianism implies that it would not be morally wrong for the doctor to perform the transplant and even that it would be morally wrong for the doctor not to perform the transplant. Most people find this result abominable. They take this example to show how bad it can be when utilitarians overlook individual rights, such as the unwilling donor's right to life.

This problem cannot be solved by building rights or fairness or desert into the theory of value. The five do not deserve to die, and they do deserve their lives, just as much as the one does. Each option violates someones right not to be killed and is unfair to someone. So consequentialists need more than just new values if they want to avoid endorsing this transplant.

Another popular charge is that classic utilitarianism demands too much, because it requires us to do acts that are or should be moral options (neither obligatory nor forbidden). (Scheffler 1982) For example, imagine that my old shoes are serviceable but dirty, so I want a new pair of shoes that costs $100. I could wear my old shoes and give the $100 to a charity that will use my money to save someone else's life. It would seem to maximize utility for me to give the $100 to the charity. If it is morally wrong to do anything other than what maximizes utility, then it is morally wrong for me to buy the shoes. But buying the shoes does not seem morally wrong. It might be morally better to give the money to charity, but such contributions seem supererogatory, that is, above and beyond the call of duty. Of course, there are many more cases like this. When I watch television, I always (or almost always) could do more good by helping others, but it does not seem morally wrong to watch television. When I choose to teach philosophy rather than working for CARE or the Peace Corps, my choice probably fails to maximize utility overall. If we were required to maximize utility, then we would have to make very different choices in many areas of our lives. The requirement to maximize utility, thus, strikes many people as too demanding because it interferes with the personal decisions that most of us feel should be left up to the individual.

However, most people begin with the presumption that we morally ought to make the world better when we can. The question then is only whether any moral constraints or moral options need to be added to the basic consequentialist factor in moral reasoning. (Kagan 1989, 1998). If no objection reveals any need for anything beyond consequences, then consequences alone seem to determine what is morally right or wrong, just as consequentialists claim.

For me, it is about personal choice and considerations of others around us. We start with those we love, they come first. Then, we move down to acquaintances, they may or may not be deserving of our benevolence, but again, it is a personal choice. Beyond that, it becomes much more altruistic. To me, the summation comes from Spock in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan; "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one". It is up to each and every one of us to make these distinctions for ourselves, within our belief systems.

Taxing Texting?

This is the first I have heard of this, but it would not surprise me to see more of this type of tax going forward.  I know our local income tax just went up, and it is costing us more than an additional $100 a month.

The city of Vallejo, Calif. is voting today on expanding utility taxes to include text messages, pager messages and VOIP calls. The measure would lump these together with gas, electricity, water and other utilities, while lowering the overall utility tax rate from 7.5% to 7.3%.

This follows the example set by Sacramento and 40 other towns in California which have added electronic communications to their taxable utilities, both to reduce the burden on those clinging to land-lines and to increase city revenue.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Vallejo's general fund has lost $18 million in the past two years. It declared bankruptcy in 2008.

While officials contend that the change will have only a minimal impact on a typical resident's utility bill, some locals are concerned that the measure opens up the door for taxes on other forms of communication not presently taxed.
As more and more people abandon land-lines, many communities will be looking to replace lost tax revenue by charging for text messages, voice-over-Internet calls, e-mails, and IM conversations.

Catitude :o)

"Cats regard people as warm-blooded furniture." Jacquelyn Mitchard




















Disclaimer - this is not Sheeba, but a remarkable resemblence :o)

The Wiz Quiz :o)

Whoever wrote this one deserves a HUGE pat on the back!

Like most folks in this country, I have a job. I work, they pay me. I pay my taxes and the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit. In order to get that paycheck in my case, I am required to pass a random urine test (with which I have no problem). What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don't have to pass a urine test. So, here is my Question: Shouldn't one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare check because I have to pass one to earn it for them? Please understand, I have no problem with helping people get back on their feet. I do, on the other hand, have a problem with helping someone sitting on their ass - doing drugs, while I work. . . Can you imagine how much money each state would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a public assistance check? I guess we could title that program, 'Urine or You're Out'.

New Stephen King Book :o)

Stephen King is back and ready to make your hair stand on end with 'Under the Dome,' a complex novel about society and humanity with that signature King touch.  This is a 1000 page novel coming out on 11/10/09.  Looks like we found our third book for our Cabo San Lucas trip :o)

Sunday Silliness - Irresponsibility

IRRESPONSIBILITY

No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.