George Schussel

<br><div align="justify">My oldest granddaughter, a college sophomore, recently asked me if there would be any innovations left for her generation to discover, given all the discoveries that have happened with computers, the Internet, composite jet planes, smartphones and medical care. My immediate response was that the ONLY thing remaining constant is change. I recounted an episode early in my career of managing data centers when the CEO asked me when we were going to stop changing things in the data processing department. My knee jerk answer was “never!”. As that word escaped my mouth, for a moment, I expected to be told to look for a new job. But I survived, and yes, we continued to change things to take advantage of never ending improvements from automation. She and I then got into a discussion covering autonomous vehicles, space travel for civilians, new immunotherapy approaches to cancer, artificial intelligence, deep learning, blockchains, and more. I assured her that a good education will prepare her for the inevitable and accelerating rate of change that she’ll experience. Our conversation then turned to politics and I told her about how my father had managed to get us out of WWII Nazi controlled Europe and into the United States. We were immigrants with green cards. I later was fortunate enough to be educated at UCLA and Harvard. And that in turn led to a career in information technology. Many of America’s high tech companies have been founded by immigrants in a proportion larger than immigrant numbers in our society would suggest. These companies create the high value, high paying jobs that give the USA the highest standard of living in the world. The fact that America, a country of immigrants, has been so successful is not a coincidence!

- <b><i>George Schussel</i></b><br><br></div>

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12/5/2012
Take one fiscal cliff with water an hour before bedtime; you’ll feel better in the morning

American print, Internet, and television media seems fixated on the looming fiscal cliff, a broad based package of federal spending cuts and tax increases. Of course this cliff, a product of bipartisan compromise in 2011 has the goal of helping the American Government rein in its record setting binge of spending far more than it takes in. Overspending is a political disease, even those politicians who rail against it, vote for deficit spending. This disease, however will, with certainty, lead to debasement of the currency through inflation. The debasement of a currency was the fundamental factor leading to the rise of Hitler in the 1930s, ultimately resulting in 10’s of millions killed during WW II.

I think going over the fiscal cliff can be good for the American economy. Read on…..

7/1/2012
Another day, Another Summit, Another Euro?

Too much borrowing, too much debt, and too much under water real estate for sale are characteristics of societies with inflexible labor markets and unaffordable welfare systems. THIS is the problem that has driven a wedge between the productivity of northern Europe vs.Southern Europe.

The alternatives are a breakup of the single currency or turning it into a giant version of Italy—a difficult-to-govern transfer union with political and financial instability hard-wired into its constitution. Both of those ultimately lead to the risk of financial catastrophe. Read on…..

5/31/2012
Why the Euro can’t survive without radical change

Austan Goolsbee, professor of economics at the University of Chicago and former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2010 to 2011 has written a short and brilliant analysis of the European monetary crisis. It’s in the May 30, 2012 Wall Street Journal and entitled “A Fiscal Union Won’t Fix the Euro Crisis”. His analysis is so excellent and profound that I can’t improve on it and for those of you who don’t subscribe to the WSJ, you can find its text in the blog link above. Goolsbee concludes that the ONLY solutions to Europe’s crisis are: 1) allowing easy and complete mobility between European countries for workers, 2) allowing strong inflation in German and other Northern Europe economies, or 3) creating strong and ongoing subsidies from countries like Germany, France, Belgium, Finland and the Netherlands to countries like Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain.

5/20/2012
RACK ONE UP FOR THE LIBERAL NOBEL LAUREATE

France’s new president, Francois Hollande, was elected based mostly on his rejection of the Franco-German ideal of reduced borrowing and fiscal austerity and with a program that stresses growth rather than restraint. On CNN earlier today he picked up support from American Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman. Krugman made some good points about differences between the situations here in the USA and Europe. Read on……

5/7/2012
Does anyone in government care about lowering costs?

A recent government report prepared by the GAO (General Accounting Office now renamed the Government Accountability Office and recognized as the non-partisan investigative arm of Congress) shows how several $100’s of millions of dollars a year in the Federal budget could be saved if only the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) implemented the suggestions and programs identified in the report.

The report is GAO REPORT REVEALS MULTIPLE WAYS TO END THE WASTE OF MILLIONS ON UNNECESSARY OVERINCARCERATION.

History has shown that reports like this one, with multiple benefits, including less government spending, aren’t normally implemented. Read on to understand why….

This library is a history of my publications in the Information Technology field over the years. Much of this work was published before the advent of the World Wide Web and so these works are not generally available except here. Articles are organized into the following categories:

4th Generation Languages & tools
Client/Server computing
Columns in Client/Server Today magazine
Computing and the Economy
Computing History
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Databases and DBMS
Downsizing Computing
IBM Observed
Management Information Systems
Operations Research
Personalities and Human Interest
Real Time Enterprise
Schussel’s Downsizing Journal (newsletter, 1991-1993)
Web and e-Business

This library has been sourced from old paper files and that’s why it’s presented in Adobe Acrobat form (.pdf). If you don’t have Adobe software to read these articles, a free reader can be downloaded from www.adobe.com/products/reader.html. To make things easier, each article in the library is summarized.

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet and work with many of the finest and most interesting people in the data processing business. Just a few of those who’ve been kind enough to work with us and help in the development of the DCI company, (Wikipedia Reference), include:

Siebel’s Tom Siebel
Apple’s Steve Jobs
IBM’s Steve Mills, Tom Aser, John Swainson, Bruce Lindsay, Don Haderle, and Janet Perna
Sybase’s Bob Epstein and Mark Hoffman
Salesforce’s Marc Benioff
Relational developers Ted Codd and Chris Date
Cullinane’s John Cullinane
CA’s Charles Wong
IBI’s Gerry Cohen
Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Ken Jacobs
UC’s Michael Stonebraker
Consultants Ed Yourdan, Charley Bachman, Larry DeBoever, Paul Hessinger, Herb Edelstein, Robert Metcalfe, Ken Orr, and Tim Bajarin
MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson
Powersoft’s Mitchell Kertzman

I’m currently working with the folks at Relevant Data www.relevantdata.com in what’s looking to be an exciting new field – that of big data predictive analytics. The more I learn about this field, the more it reminds me of the early days of data base management systems (DBMS). It has many new companies being formed to provide software to handle the big data opportunity. Relevant Data (RD) believes that value from Big Data must be integrated with a set of advanced tools that parse, intelligently analyze and distill the data into a form for humans to use when they have to make real world decisions.

If you want to see more of my background information please proceed to the resume link.

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Articles

George’s Resume