Elon Musk was supposedly surprised that when processing government employee retirement records, sometimes they have to go back into the paper archives to look up information on an employee’s earliest years with the government. There are some records that just aren’t digitized or at least fully digitized, especially old ones from decades ago.
In an ideal world, every government record would be digitized and available in a fully indexed, open and future-oriented non-vendor database format that is protected by secure encryption and the block chain to ensure the record is consistent with the day it was inputted. Data needs to be not only easily accessed by authorized employees and systems, but also able to be read generations into the future, kept consistent and secure. The problem is that many of those technologies did not exist 30 or 40 years ago, and many cases not even a decade ago.
The truth is we aren’t that far removed from when data storage was costly, computers were difficult to use and required advanced training. Even the era before computers wasn’t that long ago. Most government employees don’t retire until at least 30 years, which would be 1995. Before the Internet was mainstream, when a 2 GB hard drive on a personal PC was a big thing. Many of the most dedicated government employees have decades more experience, some have 40 or even 50 years of experience.
It’s not to say there wasn’t servers back in 1985 or even 1975. The thing is the technology was primitive compared to what was available today. You packed bits back in the day, you had to consider every attribute you captured with every ever big data set, and store it in the more efficient way possible.
Is there a lot of resistance in government to capturing and storing as much data as possible on a variety of topics? Absolutely, for one people have legitimate privacy concerns. Data storage is cheap but not free, especially for datasets with millions if not billions of sets of rows, and hundreds of attributes. I know as Director of Data Services for the Assembly, one of the things I spend a lot of time thinking about is how much data we really need in our database. It’s not always apparent what data will be used immediately, and what will take up space and go stale before it’s ever used. A byte doesn’t take up much space but a half billion of those bytes works out to be 5 GB.
Paper is often seen as secure. It’s much harder to alter a paper document, at least accidentally. It’s easy to physically control access to paper documents. It’s also seen as reliable, as long as it’s filed in the proper file cabinet and there is no destruction to the archives in form of fire, flood or other disaster. Electronic storage, with off-site backups might be more be a better option but such technology used to be costly, and not always available.
As the head of the data director, with many older clerks who grew up in an era of clunky, slow computers with limited and expensive storage, I do see some of the resistance to getting away from paper documentation of reports run and work completed. It seems like in their minds that paper is more convenient and secure, less likely to get accidentally deleted. But paper is just used for documentation of completed tasks, as a backup, not as a primary storage of data. I am trying to get away from such things, to reduce the amount of paper in the garbage cans going to landfill at the end of day, but it’s tough to transition and institution, and you have to pick your battles where you can.
The government is old, it has a lot of long-time employees, but the truth is things are electronic where it counts. Infrequently accessed, legacy records of limited use, like long ago time sheets when data storage was costly, and paper was the norm are fine to be on paper in secure storage, and pull manually as needed. That said, people should be doing things that computers do poorly like manually fixing records that aren’t systematically broken, while computers make big changes to datasets that have systematic problems that can easily be corrected using SQL or an AWK script. Things should continue to be digitized and automated whenever possible, but there will still always be a need for some legacy paper records and manual input and correcting.
something simple and straightforward that would work with Google Auto Ads. I am not sure if I will keep the Auto Ads on or just do manual ad placement like I was previously doing but it seems like a good way to increase revenue which has been in the doldrums lately. 
The blog pulled in $1,100 the first year of advertising but things have not been so good lately. Hey, it’s covered rent increase and kept me able to keep up with normal investing. And most of the reductions in revenue – it’s winter, most people who are less crazy then me aren’t wilderness camping or looking for places to camp. 
That said, I think it’s the ad advertisers really don’t like me talking about enjoying marijuana. 
It’s stupid, it’s legal and it’s fun. Maybe I actually seeing my money go down the drain, pissing on the stupid advertisers. 
I tell you when I own my land, I will never own a television or even a big screen computer monitor. Not that I currently do, though I do have that monitor I use at home for map making. Maybe I will keep that monitor or replace it, if I do need for business purposes but I probably will keep it locked away for anything but work. 
which was absolutely packed. I mean really people, can you survive without shopping one day. 
And most of people who shop there are suburbanites, and even in a horrific ice storms, they live 2 miles away from the grocery store and there are no hills in the way of store to loose traction on. 
And like any good shopper with a snow storm coming, I bought milk 
, whole-wheat flour to make homemade bread 
, a bag of grapefruit 
and a bag of mixed frozen fruit 
. Got have good things to eat between now and a bigger shop at Walmart plus plastic bags to toss in fire 
I mean recycle into carbon dioxide 
the next time I can get up to the woods to smoke grass 
and spend under the stars singing along with the Dire Wolf. 
I don’t know why I enjoy singing along with Don’t Murder Me when I’m high as fuck, but I do.
with the snow and sleet just starting to come in. The ice trail, I mean bike trail was just a sheet of ice. The air has that pungent smell of cow shit spreading, 
as growing season will be upon us before you know it. 
Environmentalists don’t like winter spreading, as you get a lot of run off especially on the edge of fields but it also if you’re expecting rain, it can help integrate it into the soil, if the ground isn’t frozen that hard. Plus barns have be cleaned, manure storage ain’t unlimited. Bedpack and hard solids don’t run off as much.
as I’m a hillbilly who doesn’t clean shit up as well as I should at times when the landlord isn’t coming over. I did get the overflowing compost bucket out, and I do need to get the now couple of 5-gallon buckets out to my parents house sooner then later as I’m running out of space. I know if I had my own land, I could have hogs and chickens and feeding them rather then my parents compost pile, but it’s not like grapefruit peels, onion skills and egg shells burn well, so as least it’s feeding their garden, 
which I do get good fresh produce from in the summer.
a bit before any session working on the internet for any length of time. I could get internet at home, but that’s money, 
and honestly I don’t need any excuse to spend more time in my dumpy apartment. It’s kind of nice to be on the library internet where your bandwidth is unrestricted. I see all these ads for connected homes, and I’m like no way in hell do I want those nauseating ads flashing on my screen or that orange President Man spewing hate on my TV 24-hours a day. 
I had options but I kind of like riding my mountain bike to work 
be it the burn ban, the gun restrictions. That doesn’t mean I love Trump or drill baby drill, but New York is fundamentally an urban state with urban policies, even if you live out in the sticks. Plus all the properties I really liked were too far away from work for reasonable community. 
Plus, then you have to dispose of said property when you want to get less restricted land in a more remote location in a state without those urban restrictions put on rural locations. 
As I like to say, a suburbanite house in an rural area that smells like cow shit, really isn’t what I’m looking for. The apartment has survived for another year, and hopefully I’ve provided enough profit for my landlord that he won’t raise my rent that much this year. I think he mostly uses the apartment building as way to fill gaps in his budget for the money he looses milking cows. 
