Oxymorons

Don't you just love that word?  Not quite oxygen ... and I've never heard anything nice about a moron ... put it together and what do you have?  A self-contradicting phrase or thought.

The Paperwork Reduction Act is definitely an oxymoron.  Take it from someone who saves coupons so he doesn't support the Lakers quite as much when he shops at Staples to buy four cases of paper for the price of three -- hoping they will last at least a few weeks!

So what is the Paperwork Reduction Act anyway?  It was a law passed by a consortium of environmentalists (who thought they could save some trees) and budget hawks (who never can pass up a chance to waste dollars in an effort to save pennies).  The concept is that each and every government form should be evaluated to assure that it is actually needed, with the hope that some of those forms would be eliminated.

I encounter my fair share of government forms in my line of work.  At one time in my life, my job required me to read the Federal Register every day.  This is fascinating reading, everyone should try it some time.  They would never have the same view of government again.  Every new regulation and many routine decisions must be published there so that we the people have the chance to read about them, if we choose to do so.  The fact that few do is besides the point.  So if you want to start a new radio station in Delano, California, the impact of your station on surrounding stations is evaluated.  Which frequency should be assigned.  Why?  How much transmitting power should the station be allowed to have?  The level of detail is amazing.  Maybe you would like to sell a new type of car.  Lots of engineering details, math, the whole bit is all there -- got to make sure the bumpers are strong enough, the emission controls work, etc., etc.  Perhaps you have a great new drug to introduce to the market ... (you get the idea).

The Federal Register used to start on page 1 on the first day of the year.  It was a pretty good size book, typically 300 full 8 1/2 by 11 size pages in small print -- every day.  The pages were numbered like National Geographic magazines used to be ... sequentially increasing with each issue, so that as the year progressed you might well be referring to something on page 73,112.  Really.

So these are the folks who are trying to reduce the use of paper.  Noble thought.  Except I haven't found a single form that has been eliminated with this law.  I'm sure there are a few obscure ones out there somewhere, just so the law can be justified.  I just haven't seen them yet.  What I have seen is the new forms that were created with questionnaires to assure that the existing forms are needed.  These forms are renewed periodically, usually about every three years.  So we have continuing new paperwork required to justify the old paperwork.  It's enough to make you want to buy shares of Weyerhauser or Georgia Pacific. 

So what exactly has me in this mode of thought?  Well, I made another donation to the folks at Intuit today ... five copies of the 2011 version of QuickBooks Premier Accountant software.  We have perfectly good copies of the 2008 version, but we do payroll processing services among other things at our company, and Intuit is seeing to it that the payroll portion of the program will suddenly stop working at the stroke of midnight on May 31.

We are downloading this software one copy at a time.  This is no small program.  It's 500 megabytes -- read 500 times 1024 times 1024 bytes, that's over 524,000,000 characters of computer code.  Even with our high quality internet connection, it still takes about an hour per copy.  It's now about 9 pm, so I got this genius idea to write today's blog post on computer A while waiting for the last copy of the program to finish downloading on computer B.

That got me thinking about the oxymoron of computing efficiency, with a detour to something you might encounter more often, paperwork reduction (not).

Computers have been doubling (or more) in speed and memory every year since they were invented.  Try multiplying 2 times 2 times 2 ... 60 times.  The answer is a really, really big number.  So if computers are so big and so fast now (and they are), why do we have to wait so long for them?

Because the programs have grown in size even faster than the computers have ...  This, my fine friends, is what the oxymoron of computing efficiency is all about!

Your friendly tortoise has a unique sense of humor.  Thanks for letting me share it with you ...

PS - What's the craziest oxymoron you've encountered?  We'll have a vote for the best entry, and the winner gets ... two units of his or her favorite candy bar (unless of course, you're on a diet and would prefer a pine float :)  (In case you're wondering, a unit for this purpose is roughly equal to 20 grams)

PPS - Yes, I did walk today ... if you'd like to know more, Terreeeblay is lonely, but his blog loves company.  Click here to see today's stats:  http://terreeeblay.blogspot.com/2011/04/86.html