The Red Monkey

SACRAMENTO — State Controller John Chiang issued a stern warning Friday about California’s cash reserves, telling legislative leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger they must act on nearly $9 billion in budget cuts the governor is seeking by March — or the state will run out of cash to pay its bills.

Without making those cuts — which Chiang says will pump $1.3 billion into the state’s checking account — California would be broke by April 1, no fooling.

The state wouldn’t climb back to what’s considered a safe level of cash on hand, $2.5 billion, until later that month, when tax revenues are expected to begin flowing into Sacramento.

“While our current cash condition is marginally better than it was one year ago,” Chiang wrote to leaders, “it is still precarious.”

Even with the budget cuts, the state’s cash reserve would still be far below that cushion in March and April.

To that end, Chiang is calling for an additional $2 billion in cash-flow “solutions.” Looking at previous cash crunches, that could mean some payments, like income tax refunds, would be delayed for a few weeks to keep the cushion intact.

“Call it overdraft insurance,” said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the state Finance Department. He stressed that officials are still huddling over specific solutions.

If the budget gridlock lingers all the way to July, then IOUs could come back into play.

And because many budget cuts

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require months of ramp-up to take effect, delaying action on a new budget could inflate the state’s overall $19.9 billion deficit by $2 billion, Palmer warned.

“Inaction ignores the projected cash shortfall which we face in less than 70 days,” Chiang wrote. “Only you can prevent history from repeating this year.”

Contact Denis C. Theriault at 916-441-4651.

This must be what living in the movie Groundhog Day must feel like. Is anyone surprised by this?

The Legislature’s budget analyst on Wednesday recommended that lawmakers go along with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal to cut state employee pay, even without labor unions’ consent, saying the state’s fiscal distress warrants the action.

The report by Diego Martin and Jason Dickerson of the Legislative Analyst’s Office suggests that the state’s finances are so grim and Schwarzenegger’s bargaining position so weak that the Legislature should use its wage-setting powers to reduce state workers’ pay.

“Under the current budget climate, with state employee unions at odds with the governor, and given the unprecedented level of personnel cost cuts sought by the administration, it is virtually impossible for the administration and state employee unions to reach the level of savings assumed in the governor’s budget through bargaining,” the report concluded.

Schwarzenegger’s budget plan envisions a 5 percent payroll cut across the board starting in July that would chop costs by $945 million overall, $530 million of it from the general fund. If the federal government doesn’t funnel more money into the state, Schwarzenegger would cut wages another 5 percent.

Normally, unions and the administration bargain over pay and benefits, then the Legislature signs off on those deals.

Now the bargaining atmosphere is “dysfunctional in (an) unprecedented budget climate,” the LAO’s report said. It noted that the state has little to offer in exchange for union concessions, and Schwarzenegger is in the last year of his term.

The unions can resist concessions “if they think they may have better bargaining prospects with the next governor,” the report concluded.

But state Senate leader Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said he opposes imposing lower wages on the state work force and that labor unions and the administration have to bargain.

“We need to save money in a way that’s effective,” he said. “That means working with the people on the front lines. Don’t go around them.”

Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear said that the administration has approached legislators and the unions to talk about the governor’s budget proposal.

“We’ll be negotiating on dual tracks,” he said.

Schwarzenegger’s 2010-11 budget plan would affect about 230,000 state workers paid from various sources.

Without budget cuts, tax increases or a mix of both, the state’s general fund, which Schwarzenegger has proposed at $83 billion, is still going to come up short by an estimated $20 billion by the middle of 2011.

About $10 billion from the general fund pays employee wages and benefits. Two-thirds of that pays for staff in the state’s prison and parole systems.

Besides cutting pay, the governor’s budget plan would require all employees to pay another 5 percent toward their own pensions. That would free the state of a $724 million obligation next year.

Most state workers now put in 5 percent. Highway Patrol officers, firefighters and a few other public safety employee groups contribute 8 percent.

But boosting contributions would be “very risky” the analyst’s report said, because the courts have repeatedly turned back attempts to save money by altering pension payments for current employees. The LAO recommended lawmakers reject the pension plan.

The notion of changing the public pension system appears to be gaining traction in some quarters. A Public Policy Institute of California poll released today revealed that 78 percent of likely voters believe state and local government pensions are either a “big problem” or “somewhat of a problem.”

Schwarzenegger supports lowering pensions for newly hired public employees, and pension change advocates are collecting signatures for November ballot initiatives to do that.

Unions vehemently oppose any such changes.

The LAO also criticized the governor’s plan to reduce salary costs another 5 percent with a “work force cap” that allows each department to figure out how to meet its target.

The administration figures most of the savings would come from erasing budgeted but vacant positions or through attrition. Schwarzenegger has set Monday as the deadline for the 150 or so affected departments to submit budget-cutting plans.

The report questioned the wisdom of unallocated, across-the-board work force cuts that don’t weigh priorities.

“We recommend that the Legislature weigh its own priorities, carefully analyze the operations of each program and department,” the report concluded, “and either eliminate or reduce the scope of programs, which often would necessitate reductions in the size of the state workforce.”

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

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Call Jon Ortiz, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 321-1043.

I guess that the public and the state officials do not want competant and qualified candidates taking jobs with the state? Pay is already low compared to jobs in the public sector and the Federal Government. Depressing them more will make the qualified and useful employees to leave while the chaff stays behind to run things.

If you think its bad now, then wait until the last worthwhile employee has walked away. Anyone who thinks that state employees are getting rich working for the state needs to do a little more research about pay and retirement. Its not as good as you think it is.

A Little Less Conversation

Have you ever invited employees to a meeting just so they wouldn’t feel left out? If so, you may be an overcommunicator.

By Joel Spolsky |  Feb 1, 2010

Josh Titus

Cross-functional or Dysfunctional? On every project, one person should be in charge of the flow of communication. You want the decision-making process to look like Figure A — not Figure B.

Joel Spolsky is the founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software in New York City.

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When was the last time you scheduled a meeting and invited eight people instead of the three people who really needed to be there simply because you didn’t want anyone to feel left out?

When was the last time you sent a companywide e-mail that said something like, “Hey, attention coffee drinkers: If you finish the pot, make another!” even though there is actually only one person who violates this rule (and she’s your co-founder)?

When was the last time you got into a long discussion over the color palette for the new brochure with a programmer, who has nothing to do with the brochure but sure knows that he doesn’t like orange?

These are symptoms of a common illness: too much communication.

Now, we all know that communication is very important, and that many organizational problems are caused by a failure to communicate. Most people try to solve this problem by increasing the amount of communication: cc’ing everybody on an e-mail, having long meetings and inviting the whole staff, and asking for everyone’s two cents before implementing a decision.

But communications costs add up faster than you think, especially on larger teams. What used to work with three people in a garage all talking to one another about everything just doesn’t work when your head count reaches 10 or 20 people. Everybody who doesn’t need to be in that meeting is killing productivity. Everybody who doesn’t need to read that e-mail is distracted by it. At some point, overcommunicating just isn’t efficient.

It’s a particularly insidious problem for fast-growing start-ups. When you’re really small and you’re just starting out, you don’t have that many people, so keeping everyone in the loop on everything doesn’t really take that much time. But as you get bigger, the number of people who might potentially get involved in any particular discussion increases, and the amount of stuff you’re doing as a company increases, and the amount of time you can waste overcommunicating becomes a serious problem.

As companies expand, the people within them start to specialize. At such a point, some managers will conclude that they have a “keep everyone on the same page” problem. But often what they actually have is a “stop people from meddling when there are already enough smart people working on something” problem.

It’s not that Bob in Accounting doesn’t have anything useful to say about the photography for the new advertising campaign. Yes, Bob has a master’s in fine arts. Yes, Bob is an amateur photographer. And maybe he even has better taste than do the people in marketing. Still, Bob shouldn’t be telling the marketing manager what to do, because it’s just not efficient. In fact, it’s highly inefficient.

The cost of overcommunication within organizations was fleshed out by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks helped run the OS/360 project at IBM, building a giant operating system for the company’s mainframes. In those days, computers were large, room-size, water-cooled machines, sometimes with a massive 256,000 bytes of main memory. OS/360 was probably the largest software project ever attempted to that point. And it was monumentally late.

Every time some aspect of the project fell behind schedule, IBM assigned a few more people to the task. And what Brooks noticed, which still surprises people, is that this didn’t work. His observation came to be known as Brooks’ Law: Adding people to a late project tends to make it run later still.

Read that sentence again, because it’s not intuitive. Brooks discovered that adding people to a project will put it further behind schedule.

How can that be? Well, when you add a new person to a team, that person needs to communicate and coordinate with all the other people on the team. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is. The new kid doesn’t know what’s going on, so somebody else on the team — somebody who just last week was doing productive work — has to stop his or her work and show this newbie the ropes.

The bigger the team, the worse it gets. When you have a team of one person, you have no communication requirements. None.

Add a second person, and now you have a single connection: Adam and Mary have to talk to each other once in a while.

Now add a third person, say, Srinivas, and suddenly we’ve gone from one connection to three, since Srinivas has to talk to Adam and Mary.

Add a fourth person. I’m running out of names here to help me out — OK: Britney. If we add her, and she needs to coordinate with all of them, you get six connections.

For the mathematically inclined, the formula is that if you have n people on your team, there are (n²-n)/2 connections. This chart illustrates how this becomes a problem:

People	Connections
1	0
2	1
3	3
4	6
5	10
6	15
7	21
8	28
9	36
10	45

As you can see, the communications costs start to rise pretty rapidly until, on large teams, all anyone ever has time to do is to coordinate with everyone else — and no one gets any work done. In 2006, Moishe Lettvin, a former programmer at Microsoft, wrote a blog post describing the year he spent coordinating the list of items that would be featured on one menu in Windows Vista — the menu you use to turn off your computer. (See The Windows Shutdown Crapfest.) Lettvin figured that 43 people all had a voice in designing this one menu. Forty-three! By Brooks’s formula, that means managing 903 connections. Lettvin says he spent so much time on coordination tasks that, in 12 months, he produced fewer than 200 lines of code.

As the boss, you need to design ways to reduce communications paths. Eliminate companywide mailing lists — or at least charge $1.50 to post to them. Stop having large meetings. You need a culture in which people don’t get uptight because they weren’t included in a meeting, which means you need a culture that rewards people for doing their jobs and frowns on meddling in other people’s work.

And on every project, assign one person to make sure that communication happens — but only the right communication. Otherwise the team will just start having long meetings with everyone there and, frankly, people will socialize, and bloviate, and speechify, and argue about things they don’t really care about just to hear their own voices.

I think this is probably one of those cases in which the old, 1950s style of management accidentally got something right. In those General Motors–style companies, they at least had an idea for how information needed to move up and down neat, regimented org charts, which showed a modicum of recognition that the right answer is not that every single person in the organization needs to pay attention to everything.

When you started your company, you probably did a great job of communicating. Everybody told one another everything. And your customers loved it, because when they called in to ask about their purchase order, everybody knew where it was. But as you get bigger, you can’t keep telling everybody about every purchase order, so you have to invent specific communications systems so that exactly the right people find out and nobody else. Not because it’s confidential. Because it’s a waste of time.

Joel Spolsky is the co-founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software and the host of the popular blog Joel on Software. For an archive of his columns, go to www.inc.com/author/joel-spolsky.

Today is bubble wrap appreciation day, or “BWAD.” Celebrated the last Monday of every January, it’s the day to celebrate your love of everyone’s favorite packaging helper. Some partake in the festivities by making bubble wrap animals, bubble wrap dresses, or simply grabbing a piece of bubble wrap and popping all the pockets. And if you don’t have any lying around, you can always play the online bubble wrap popping game. Hooray for bubble wrap! You’ve filled our hearts almost as much as you’ve filled our landfills. (Thanks to GitEmSteveDave!)

Smaato Inc. have published the Smaato Mobile Advertising Metrics which for the first time revealed the Click Through Rate (CTR) Index by Handset operating system. The metrics are based upon 3 Billion ad requests served in the Smaato Network in December 2009. The December performance numbers for the different handset types show a significant spread between the operating systems in regards to the CTR. Symbian phones had the highest CTR (161) compared to the averaged Index of 100, followed by Apple iPhone (119, with iPod Touch). Following closely, Windows Phone Handsets perform above the average indexed at 100 placing the smartphone handset operating system in third place for in the Smaato Index.The Index consists of the average CTR of all devices and this number is set to 100. This was followed by feature phones, then Android phones at 65, close to half as much as the Windows Mobile rate. Following far behind is Palm and Blackberry, with an index rate of 28 and 26 respectively. In short, this means the odds of your ad being clicked on Windows Mobile is about the same as iPhones and iPod Touch’s, and 4 times as much as a Pre or Blackberry. While the distribution of an app may be better on the iPhone, the competition is also much more there, meaning it is just as viable to try an ad-supported app on Windows Mobile than the iPhone, and certainly much more when compared to RIM or Palm, where it seems you could never sustain a business based on ads. Are you ready for ad-supported apps on Windows Mobile? Let us know below. Thanks Matija for the tip.

Brace yourself for another long year of budget talks.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a fiscal emergency and demanded swift action to eliminate nearly half of the state’s $19.9 billion deficit by March.

But the Legislature, divided as ever along partisan lines in an election year, doesn’t inspire much confidence that it will solve the budget anytime soon.

For starters, California should have enough cash to pay its bills until July. That means lawmakers and Schwarzenegger can negotiate all spring without the immediate specter of embarrassing IOUs.

While lawmakers were able to reach a difficult compromise last February to impose tax hikes and spending cuts, the repercussions of that agreement have encouraged both parties to hold their ground this time.

“I predict that this will go long,” said Joe Mathews, Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “I think Democrats will be under intense pressure not to cave in and hit their constituencies this time. And Republicans, after what happened with the February 2009 budget, are not going to want to raise taxes.“

The two GOP leaders who negotiated last year’s deal to temporarily raise taxes by $12 billion annually lost their jobs. One Republican leader, Sen. Dave Cogdill, was ousted the night of the budget vote. The other leader, Assemblyman Mike Villines, stepped down last spring.

Assemblyman Anthony Adams, R-Hesperia, suffered a recall threat and bowed out of seeking re-election this year. The message sent by conservative GOP activists was clear – raise taxes at your own peril.

Democrats did not face the same degree of blowback. But some public employee unions and mental health groups helped kill budget measures in the May special election. After another round of cuts in July, activists grumbled that Democrats had ceded too much in budget talks.

That led Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, to declare in October, “I’m done cutting.”

“They got really hammered in the blogosphere and by interest groups,” Mathews said. “There’s now a stronger feeling of, ‘Let’s reject these cuts, let’s just fight and protect this.’ “

Nearly every legislator is in a safe district with little jeopardy of losing his or her seat. Only a handful of sitting lawmakers – as few as two – will face a serious re-election challenge in November.

Under term limits, lawmakers constantly look for other open seats to extend their political careers. That means surviving another party primary, where Republicans face anti-tax pressures and Democrats need support from unions. At least 10 sitting lawmakers will likely face competitive races in June.

“It makes it harder and harder for these elected officials to make tougher decisions, in particular when so many are involved in primary races running for some other office,” said Richard Temple, a Republican political consultant who once worked in the Legislature. “You can’t do any kind of compromises when you’re in these primary races.”

He suggested that “most likely nothing will happen until after June, when legislators have a little more wiggle room and have gotten through the primary.”

Tony Quinn, a former GOP legislative aide and editor of the nonpartisan California Target Book, said he thinks one political factor could contribute to the Legislature reaching a quick deal that makes at least a partial dent in the shortfall: Schwarzenegger’s nomination of Republican Sen. Abel Maldonado to become lieutenant governor.

The Senate has to confirm Maldonado by Feb. 21, perhaps motivation for Steinberg to seek a budget vote from Maldonado. The Santa Maria moderate was crucial to last year’s deal.

If Democrats reject Maldonado’s confirmation, the budget path becomes dicier, Quinn warned.

“If the Democrats turn him down, they will have just turned down the one guy who helped them,” Quinn said. “That would seem to me to make the relations between the two parties even more frigid, and he will not be of any more help in the future.”

Continued on next page »

1. 1
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Call Kevin Yamamura, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 326-5548.

If they pass it on time then its news. Otherwise its just business as usual.

Set Up Your Loved Ones with the Best Tech Tools for Keeping in Touch

Why do you almost never send hand-written letters to loved ones? The effort—locating pen and paper, writing, addressing, and stamping—can seem colossal on any given, always busy, day. But keeping in touch is easier than you (and they) may think.

Photo by el monstrito.

Want to do something nice for your loved ones? Keep in touch with them more often. If you’ve got friends or family members who aren’t so good about online communication, these apps and tips make video chat, simplified email, and photo sharing easier to do on a regular basis.

Making a web connection isn’t about “fixing” a relative’s computer—though that’s not a bad idea, next time you’re visiting. It’s about lowering the barriers for communication, for both yourself and the person on the other end, so you can get used to keeping in touch through the easiest available methods.

If it’s that hard for you, it’s doubly hard for a person who didn’t constantly have a computer in front of them their whole careers. There are, thankfully, solutions that don’t require either side to invest far too much time and effort to get started with. The reward is time well spent with far-off family members, which will certainly pay dividends for a long time to come.

Set up their computer

The apps we want to use to connect are pretty easy to install, for the most part. But if sending a bunch of download links over email to a relative isn’t a realistic option, you can do the setting up yourself, from nearly anywhere in the world, with minimal pain. We’ve previously provided an in-depth list of tools for giving tech support or grabbing files from any system, but below are the two easiest solutions. (We’re not even going to pretend your relatives are using Linux, but, if they are, see if you can walk them through connecting to your reverse VNC setup.)

CrossLoop: (Windows) The How-To Geek loves this little remote-control app, and for good reason: It’s a VNC remote control app without all the back-end fiddling (“Do you know your IP address, Uncle Robert? Okay, type ‘cmd’ into the start bar …”). The client only has to install the software and tell you their access code, and you run the same app and connected from your end. The Geek’s site detailed the connection in a screenshot tour. It’s secure enough for a one-shot Skype setup or settings fiddling, because it requires a fairly complex code and doesn’t persist on the computer beyond your session and the next time they shut down.

LogMeIn Free: (Windows/Mac) It’s another fancy, all-in-one VNC client, but it works between PCs and Macs. Doesn’t offer the remote file transfer of CrossLoop, and is just a little more complicated for the relative you’re having install it to get going with it. Still, it claims and (generally) delivers “two-minute setup,” and, though intended for accessing your own home computer at the office and elsewhere, it’s still works as a tech support tool.

Make their system more accessible

If you’ve got remote access to a relatives’ computer, you can also make it easier for them to use. Bigger type, screen magnification, higher contrast themes, and other tools can make the computer an easier place to navigate for older relatives, but they might never discover those options on their own.

You can read up on the built-in accessibility tools inside OS X, in Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP.

Set up video chat

These days, nearly every laptop has a webcam and microphone built in, and USB-connected webcams are cheap and easy to set up. Video chat is a lot more personal than a phone call, and feels like the next best thing to jumping in your car and visiting. (It’s especially good for keeping up with the grandkids, nieces, and nephews as they continue to grow up so fast.)

Skype is the go-to pick for video chat—it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it’s been designed to be fairly easy to install and get started without having to dive into the preferences and configuration settings. If you’re not there, either in-person or remotely, most computer users can set up Skype just by clicking Next, Next, OK all the way through the installation process, minus one pause to set up an account. They’ll end up with Skype automatically starting and logging them in when their computer boots into Windows, but that’s something you can undo later, or not worry too much about if they’ve got a decently new system.

If most of your relatives have Macs, iChat is probably easier to set up and use than Skype. It is, however, limited to Macs, and so a fairly limiting option for families not entirely descended from typeface designers (Kidding!).

If Skype isn’t going to work for your relatives, in terms of software setup, try the web-based TokBox. It’s free for both parties, it’s one of our readers’ favorite video chat applications, and the quality is surprisingly good for a web-based client. You can sign up your relative for an account ahead of time, then simply email them a link to the chat you’re initiating with them, along with their username and password.

Last, Gmail’s video chat functionality installs via a browser plug-in and works surprisingly well, too—provided everyone involved has a Gmail account.

Better email for everyone

You don’t always have time, or the right hair, to jump into a video chat. Sending an email is probably second nature to you, but some relatives hate their email—and you would, too, if you had it their way. Help them reconnect with the (type)written word.

The New York Times recommends a stripped-down email service called PawPawMail for computer unsavvy relatives, which any more tech-patient relative can set up for the email account that they’ve likely received from their cable, DSL, or other internet provider. It’s a nice, simplified interface for email, and probably far easier to use than Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, or even Mail.app for Mac—the picture aggregation is a nice touch. Then again, it’s also $5 per month, so you’ll want to test it out before committing.

My own mother also grew to loathe desktop email clients, especially when Verizon tech support would have to talk her through SMTP setup when she spent time at our summer camp. The Verizon webmail interface just wasn’t cutting it, either. So, using Gina’s guide to consolidating multiple email addresses with Gmail, and Gmail’s mail and contact importer, I set her up with a Gmail account that used her same password and, more importantly, sent and received email transparently through Verizon.net. Her friends didn’t have to update their address books, and once she saw the magic of auto-complete, as-you-type contact names, she was hooked. I also set up sidebar labels, hooked to filters, that show her emails from her children, automatic notices of bills due, Netflix updates, and so on.

Photo sharing

My in-laws have a desktop computer in the living room, as well as a laptop. My wife and I would only occasionally receive digital photos from them, and they’d either be gigantic, 3 MB-each files, or tiny thumbnails forwarded from a photo developing service. While at their house at Thanksgiving, I showed them the Picasa desktop software (available on Windows and Macs), particularly the clever facial recognition and easy collage features. I set it up on their system, set it to always watch their desktop, downloads, and pictures folder, and returned home.

When we returned for the holidays, they had a special gift prepared for a son of theirs: a T-shirt featuring a photo collage of family members, assembled and ordered right from Picasa. I was pretty floored; these were folks I’ve long been the Computer Explainer for, but Picasa was intuitive enough for them to manage on their own, even into the advanced features. The main thing that required a little explanation was the somewhat quirky “holding”/thumbtack system, and its difference from “Starred” photos, but other than that, it’s a perfect photo simplifier: the left-hand folders are albums that show up automatically, the main window is filled with pictures, and photos are automatically knocked into manageable but visible size for emailing—and it’s even easier if you set up a Gmail holder account for the user.

That’s one editor’s take on making computer computer connections easier to keep up with, across long distances and different levels of tech savvy. What tools have you used to stay in touch with your less computer-friendly relatives? We’d love to hear the recommendations in the comments.

Send an email to Kevin Purdy, the author of this post, at kevin@lifehacker.com.

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radink 09:18 AM

Laptop on soft bed = not smart.

Anyhow decent article. Ill have to keep this one in mind. Reply

relyk5 promoted this comment

relyk5 09:25 AM

@radink: Nah, it’s fine. Macs have a new feature that reduces the heat they produce by 200%. It’s to save the environment. Reply

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