Post by icefisher on Jul 3, 2010 15:59:56 GMT
Here is what happened with the AGW boondoggle.
Accountants sometimes hit a wall. The sheer weight of numbers and complexity of transactions just becomes baffling. Meanwhile the beast continues to crank out transactions like a huge respiring beast with operating results (thinking a company like Enron here though I am not talking about Enron) moving on a commodities market place quite actively.
The accountants pour over transaction books that have literally millions of transactions with the team of auditors being maybe a few score of individuals working on a sampling basis trying to get the pulse of the beast.
For the auditors the price of failure is huge. They fail and not only do they lose their jobs they take down an accounting giant with 10's of thousands of partners.
The rewards of success are limited as they will make their salaries and earn a fair profit for the firm partners that oversee the work. The profit is limited by competition and other giant accounting firms that would like to have the client.
So the accountants conscious of the risk work hard to get the true pulse of the beast via careful evidence gathering and the investigation of every odd looking transaction.
Usually they succeed, even though occasionally the beast respires in a way that fools the auditors into believing something other than the actual nature of the beast.
In climatology we had folks hotly pursuing the nature of the climate. Hard working and smart scientists like Dr. Roger Revelle pursued the greenhouse gas theory. Meanwhile its the 1950's and the beast is relaxed and ghg are increasing but the beast is calm and connections are not being made.
However, come the 1980's the beast suddenly gets restless. Numbers start to fit. Excitement and fear is generated. Wallets open and in rush an army of smart, attentive and interested scientists. But they are not operating like auditors. This is instead more like a gold rush and the gold might be found under any rock.
A runaway planet might will kill worms in the garden, drown polar bears in the arctic.
The scientists didn't rush in with the idea of constrained common purpose of getting the basic findings right as there is no consequence of failure. They rushed in because for a few decades in time the beast was in tune with the theory and the theory felt good and money was available.
History wasn't consulted it was redefined to stay on tune.
Even academic misconduct is fair game as long as you deliver money and you prove to be a good grant getter.
Heck nobody even makes bones about it. An academic misconduct investigation actually concludes that because you are a good grant getter you must be doing good work.
Thats because there are no consequences, the University is immune to suit by the public like the government is immune to suit for a failure to properly interpret their work. In civil law they are separated by virtue of no explicit contract to produce dependable work.
The multi-ten thousand accounting partnership wasn't immune though, even though 99.9% of its partners where even remotely involved in the failed audit they were all parties to the engagement contract with the stockholders of the firm the people who have everything at risk as people do with the success of their government.
Consequences have huge impacts on how a consensus is built. Folks might choose to not invest in the stock market but over the long haul that has been an ignorant choice.
If fundamentally that is changing it is only changing with the emerging concept of firms too big to fail a scheme in which even the stockholders have no consequences for the actions of their corporations thus the BOD becomes complicit in the firm scamming the public as the consequences have been removed.
We aren't talking private enterprise here anymore we are talking governments and no consequences. Corporations become governments.
If you study your history you will find the essence of that in governments that have historically chosen to hand over important decisions to the government. Their charts have a very different slope. A government is an institution which by any measure of investment is a institution too big to fail.
Because the required investment in that is actually staring down death's throat.
Accountants sometimes hit a wall. The sheer weight of numbers and complexity of transactions just becomes baffling. Meanwhile the beast continues to crank out transactions like a huge respiring beast with operating results (thinking a company like Enron here though I am not talking about Enron) moving on a commodities market place quite actively.
The accountants pour over transaction books that have literally millions of transactions with the team of auditors being maybe a few score of individuals working on a sampling basis trying to get the pulse of the beast.
For the auditors the price of failure is huge. They fail and not only do they lose their jobs they take down an accounting giant with 10's of thousands of partners.
The rewards of success are limited as they will make their salaries and earn a fair profit for the firm partners that oversee the work. The profit is limited by competition and other giant accounting firms that would like to have the client.
So the accountants conscious of the risk work hard to get the true pulse of the beast via careful evidence gathering and the investigation of every odd looking transaction.
Usually they succeed, even though occasionally the beast respires in a way that fools the auditors into believing something other than the actual nature of the beast.
In climatology we had folks hotly pursuing the nature of the climate. Hard working and smart scientists like Dr. Roger Revelle pursued the greenhouse gas theory. Meanwhile its the 1950's and the beast is relaxed and ghg are increasing but the beast is calm and connections are not being made.
However, come the 1980's the beast suddenly gets restless. Numbers start to fit. Excitement and fear is generated. Wallets open and in rush an army of smart, attentive and interested scientists. But they are not operating like auditors. This is instead more like a gold rush and the gold might be found under any rock.
A runaway planet might will kill worms in the garden, drown polar bears in the arctic.
The scientists didn't rush in with the idea of constrained common purpose of getting the basic findings right as there is no consequence of failure. They rushed in because for a few decades in time the beast was in tune with the theory and the theory felt good and money was available.
History wasn't consulted it was redefined to stay on tune.
Even academic misconduct is fair game as long as you deliver money and you prove to be a good grant getter.
Heck nobody even makes bones about it. An academic misconduct investigation actually concludes that because you are a good grant getter you must be doing good work.
Thats because there are no consequences, the University is immune to suit by the public like the government is immune to suit for a failure to properly interpret their work. In civil law they are separated by virtue of no explicit contract to produce dependable work.
The multi-ten thousand accounting partnership wasn't immune though, even though 99.9% of its partners where even remotely involved in the failed audit they were all parties to the engagement contract with the stockholders of the firm the people who have everything at risk as people do with the success of their government.
Consequences have huge impacts on how a consensus is built. Folks might choose to not invest in the stock market but over the long haul that has been an ignorant choice.
If fundamentally that is changing it is only changing with the emerging concept of firms too big to fail a scheme in which even the stockholders have no consequences for the actions of their corporations thus the BOD becomes complicit in the firm scamming the public as the consequences have been removed.
We aren't talking private enterprise here anymore we are talking governments and no consequences. Corporations become governments.
If you study your history you will find the essence of that in governments that have historically chosen to hand over important decisions to the government. Their charts have a very different slope. A government is an institution which by any measure of investment is a institution too big to fail.
Because the required investment in that is actually staring down death's throat.
