Re: relational reasoning -- why two tables and not one?
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:18:15 GMT
Message-ID: <rRPBm.48223$Db2.7830_at_edtnps83>
Bob Badour wrote:
> paul c wrote:
>
>> A guy I worked for pointed out that the WWI British Admiralty ruled
>> the world's seas with about five hundred people in head office. Today
>> it manages not to rule the seas with tens of thousands of employees.
>> He said this advancement was made possible by computers.
>>
>> (I suspect this progess was also aided by government aping of private
>> enterprise ideologies.)
>
> Are you sure it wasn't the loss of the finest traditions of the Royal Navy?
Heh heh, I believe the most unspeakable ones probably persist mostly in secret even though more of them is spoken about because of the wantonness of the modern media but let's not get into that. I still have my mother's 1941 assignment order and 1945 permission to resign from one of the Admiralty establishments, there must have been a typing pool of some size and lots of carbon paper, but real signatures were still needed and if I'm not mistaken there were several postal deliveries a day. A few years ago after a long search I reached her close friend from those days who had been a real-life spy. Very private and swore me to secrecy about some remarkable and harrowing experiences, but her accounts of those days emphasized how much administration was done based on personal responsibility, where systematic thinking could be discarded and nearly everybody took responsibility, no matter what their position was. In the early 1990's I was booed by a crowd listening to Robert Reich when I had the nerve to scoff at his proclamation of the new service economy.
I never saw so much printed paper until personal laser printers were invented, long after the systems they supported had been computerized. The decision to click the print button is now taken by people who basically have no responsibility at all.
The same boss told me there was more inefficiency in big business than in any government, having worked in both on several continents I'm pretty sure he was right. It's fashionable in N.A. and Britain to say either otherwise or if one is in certain political camps to not try to argue the point but it remains one of the big lies of the times. For one thing, in spite of its proclaimed ideologies, private business prefers not to compete with government on many fronts, especially for money from the markets. Actually, I saw more technical creativity in government whereas on the db side of business, all 'thought' was copycat, except for the NIH syndrome which was copycat except for implementation which was adhoc.
This guy was from Europe and he also remarked that he had never seen so much political patronage as in N.A.
I should emphasize that I place the blame for computer misuse mostly on the customers, not the vendors, even though my rants might suggest it's all about vendor incompetence. Received on Fri Oct 16 2009 - 03:18:15 CEST