If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
In this, a lesson for the Digital Excellence movement, not unlike Daniel Burnham’s call to make no small plans.
One may fail to see the humor of the situation for want of experience, another may fail to appreciate the experience (in a joke) for lack of humor.
It’s funny, this occurred to me on today’s road trip… and all these variations are playing off of each other. Some stress the situation experienced, others a statement on the situation. I’ll leave it to the reader to play with the permutations. Drop the parenthetic remark above, and some aspect of the sense changes, but both carry meaning, multiple meanings for me. The abundance and joy of polysemy.
I’ve always liked the saying that the Lottery is a Tax on people who are bad at math.
I’ve got a new adage, based on reading Sascha’s brief note on what the Australians are investing in their broadband infrastructure, by comparison with our meager and near meaningless investment.
The new adage: Bad Government is a Tax on a People (Who are Bad at Math)
The adage may seem out of place given that our friends in the Southern Hemisphere are investing close to $1,400 per person, whereas in the USA it would be closer to $25 per person, but my point is that we just don’t understand the math, first of relative speeds provided by our infrastructure compared with those being deployed elsewhere, and second by the relative costs per bit/transit of any data we are passing over our networks (compared with relative cost/speeds elsewhere) and third, the real costs necessary for a meaningful investment as opposed to either lip-service investments or sweetheart deals for selected entrenched interests.
The heart of the adage is this: we really need to understand relative scale, scope and value when we make any collective judgment or investment. (And likewise when we foreclose any option.)
Personally, I’m a bit more cautious when it comes to the notion of national broadband strategy. I want more freedom for diverse range of actors ranging from community to local government to private sector.