That smell in the air (no it's not the incinerator, but it's almost as bad.)

This recurring theme keeps popping up in life lately of this constant change. Change for change sake essentially. It doesn't hurt that it is Obama's catch phrase and all, but this smell has been in the air for quite some time before that. It's this idea that what we have now may or may not be working, but we can't really tell so let's change it anyway in an effort to make some improvements. The paradigm now is constant improvement. Ever increasing (unsustainable) profits. And while I do believe that you can always make something better, the reality is that eventually you do get down to splitting hairs. So little improvement that it's barely noticeable. So in an effort to make it feel like things are still getting better, people forget (or never knew) what has been tried in the past and decide to relive it again, even though it was a bad idea to begin with. Literally just making changes to validate their existence. You will notice it with a company that centralizes their operations, and then decentralizes their operations 5 years later, and then another 5 years later, they recentralize it again. And of course, management gets paid sweet bonuses at every step because they somehow improved the system (even though it has yet to pan out). It seriously is this oscillating fan blowing the wind back and forth, first in one direction, then the next, all in an effort to say "we did something." I guess it just find it amazing that with so much documented history out there that we can so easily forget where we've been and keep reliving the same mistakes over and over again.

It's like solving the Rubik's cube. Just because it looks like you can line up one side, doesn't mean you're on the way to solving it. It could still be screwed up just as bad as if no two cubes were next to each other, but because you don't know how it's solved, you think you're headed in the right direction. Go ahead and just keep turning the cube just to feel like you are making progress. Unless you know what you are doing, it will probably look jacked up when you have gotten tired of fiddling with it.