Re: Now you tell us what you've done.
Well I haven't done any of that, thank you for your service and I sincerely hope you're generally OK after all that.
I was only painting some very simple broad brush strokes to show some of the massive amounts of bloat that we have in every nook and cranny of our society. I wasn't at all even focusing on IT departments.
I'm not surprised or very concerned about the number of downvotes I got for criticizing our capitalist system. I know full well the ocean of propaganda we all swam in all our lives, pleople older than me even more so, that says at least we're not communist so be thankful for what you've got.
I have worked with civil servants, almost entirely a very pleasant bunch. Automating systems that included the faxing around of water sample quality results. Why did this remain to be done in the 21st century? Why did it need to be contracted out to my private sector employer? Why was it at all difficult for my employer to get those contracts (and be paid in a timely manner) from various regional jurisdictions? Just one simple example, from a couple of decades ago now, but I do not have the feeling that things have changed much at all in any meaningful way.
I have also dealt with many a civil servant as a client in my handful of decades on this planet. I served my time in the trenches at a call center doing tech support for piano sized printers so I have above average sympathy for frontline workers. I fully understand "I understand your issue but the system is set up so that there is nothing I can personally do to solve anything for you." It still really grinds my gears though and I can see why some people sometimes vent their feelings on the people who least deserve it.
My point was basically that for those who wonder why it seems like capitalilsm is collapsing under it's own weight, you just need to look in the nooks and crannies and under the couch cushions of any office tower for the reasons to become plainly apparent. Be that a bank, or a government agency, or a marketing firm, or a lawyer's office, or an accountacy, or etc parasitic organizations who don't actually produce anything of value just take their tupence for keeping an eye on things, and have more than their share of people putting cover sheets on TPS reports all day. If I go buy a bicycle I can clearly see the armies of people who had nothing to do with building it or handing it off to me who have stuck in their fingers in some stupid way. I would just go past the grocery store with their $16.00 grapes and take a trip directly to the farmer and offer them a life changing $0.50 worth of barter for the same grapes instead of the $0.20 they normally get, but there are whole other armies of people in place to stop me from crossing any borders with dangerous goods like that, who also need to be paid and have their own headquarters office towers with lawyers and accountants and etc. I guess this is what getting old is all about, realizing that it's the same as it ever was under every system that's ever been tried for thousands of years and anyone who says they have a way around any of it is 99.99% likely way worse than the status quo. And so it goes until it all gets burnt down and rebuilt all over again.
