The Angry Drunk Bureaucrat: City for Kids Who Don't Read Not Good

The Rules of Bureaucracy

Rule #O: "The Rules of Bureaucracy are mutable, non-canonical, non-ordinal, and contradictory, except in the cases where they are not."
Rule #1: "Document everything you do; if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen."
Rule #2 [The Sixty Minutes Rule]: "Never do anything that would cause Ed Bradley, Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Steve Croft, Leslie Stahl, or even Andy Rooney to persue you down a hallway with a camera crew."
Rule #3: "Nothing Simple is Ever Easy"
Rule #4: "It's about the money; follow the money."
Rule #5: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Rule #6: "Politics is the enemy of good government."
Rule #7: "The biggest detriment to public service is the public."
Rule #8: "The second biggest detriment to public service is the service."
Rule #9: "There's a reason; there's ALWAYS a reason."
Rule #10: "The Law is a harsh mistress: The rigorous and exacting application of which can benefit of society when used correctly to advance good policy and block bad, and be the bane of society when used incorrectly to advance bad policy and block good."
Rule #11: "Public service often involves waking up in the morning, opening up the newspaper, and discovering that someone, somewhere out there thinks that you're a dickhead."
Rule #12: "No one really knows what you do."
Rule #13 [Luke's Rule]: "No one ever acts like the bastard they really are."
Rule #14: "Bureaucracy endures."
Rule #15: "The longer you work in bureaucracy, the more Catch-22 resembles non-fiction."
Rule #16: "Politicians are not smarter than you."
Rule #18: "Money is not created equal."
Rule #19: "Mediocrity is normalcy."
Rule #17: "Within any bureaucratic structure, resources (e.g. people, money, knowledge, etc.) are not distributed uniformly."
Rule #20: "Don't assume a fiduciary liability without a committed resource allocation."
Rule #21: "If you do your job and obey the law, they can't reasonably fire you."
Rule #22: "The Budget will always be wrong."
Rule #23: "Always sign in blue."
Rule #24: "A Bureaucrat must be able to explain and justify his/her actions to laymen without resorting to the phrase 'because the Rules say so.'"
Rule #25: "Never voluntarily relinquish control of an original document."
Rule #26: "Sometimes you just have to say 'Screw the rules'"
Rule #27: "Change sucks."
Rule #28: "Sometimes the answer is 'No.'"
Rule #29: "It is very easy to make difficult decisions when no one has a clue what's going on."
Rule #30: "If you hang around long enough, eventually you will become an expert in something."
Rule #31: "Data, technology, and automatic processes can never completely supplant human interaction."
Rule #32: "Cover thine own ass."
Rule #33: "It's not real until it has its own acronym."
Rule #34:There is nothing more dangerous than an elected, resourceful idiot.
Rule #35: It will always take longer than expected.
Rule #36: Coming Soon...

Monday, December 05, 2005

City for Kids Who Don't Read Not Good

Got this in my inbox this morning:

America's Most Literate Cities, 2005

Drawing from a variety of available data resources, the America's Most Literate Cities study ranks the 69 largest cities (population 250,000 and above) in the United States. Previous editions of this study focused on five key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, and educational attainment. The 2005 study introduces a new factor—the Internet—to gauge the expansion of literacy to online media.

The original study was published online in 2003 at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. A link to the 2004 rankings is provided here.

MOST LITERATE CITIES

The top 10:
1. Seattle
2. Minneapolis
3. Washington, D.C.
4. Atlanta
5. San Francisco
6. Denver
7. Boston
8. Pittsburgh
9. Cincinnati
10. St. Paul

Dr. John W. Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University, is the author of this study. Research for the 2005 edition of AMLC was conducted in collaboration with the Center for Public Policy and Social Research at CCSU.

More info here.

Because of the new inclusion of "online literacy," I personally blame Pittsburgh Webbloggers for this drop in ranking (from 3rd place). Have you seen some of the illiterate tripe that they try to pass off on us? Shame on them!

The Angry Drunk Bureaucrat

Pages

About Me

The Rules of Bureaucracy

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...

Monday, December 05, 2005

City for Kids Who Don't Read Not Good

No comments:

Recorded in the Office of the Prothonotary

Public Comment Period

Other Blogs

Other Public Servants

Adjourned sine die

The Filing Cabinet