Posts by Doctor Syntax 40432 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
It's time to start mandating standard sizes. Power tool batteries are a good case in point. I now have a battery operated hedge trimmer and paving cleaner which can share batteries and charger because they're from the same manufacturer. We also have a battery operated vacuum cleaner whose battery packs look similar from a distance except for colour. Closer up they're not alike and not interchangeable. I can't help thinking that the EU's standardisation efforts should extend to these packs as well as to phone chargers. It wouldn't help with my existing stuff but it would be good to think that in future I could swap the batteries around and also have a 3rd party supplier.
I suggest you replace TQM by ISO9000.
Back in the distant past my then employer took to TQM. It had a mantra of "Get it right first time, every time". All the quality stuff led me to deciding quality is like sex, those who spend all their time talking about it aren't doing it. Anyway after spectacularly failing to get a relocation project off the ground, and without any admission that they hadn't got it right first time any time, the top team decided that ISO9000 and continuous improvement was the way to go. Nobody managed to answer my question of how, if we were getting it right first time every time with TQM, could we have scope to continuously improve.
What ISO 9000 wants is consistency. I quickly discovered that quality was a sliding scale and maintaining your position on it was more important than where that position was. I referred to it as the mediocrity management system.
To see the effect of consistency in practice take a look at Trustpilot reviews for banks. This is, of course, subject to selection bias as they're more likely to be the home for disgruntled reviews rather than praise. What you'll see is a lot of what the reviewer considers to be service failures plus a few where an employee actually owned the problem and dealt with it.
I have an awful suspicion that the banks don't really like these employees - they're providing inconsistent customer service. Being generous, this might be because providing dreadfully bad service is the only way they can be consistent.
(Not being generous I have an even more awful suspicion that by dis-empowering the branch staff they can make branches so bad that there's little push-back from customers when they close a few more.)
"email is clunky and awkward"
With email I have a local archive of all manner of things - business transactions, private and my long-closed freelancing business, family stuff, family history stuff, local history stuff, everything I've been interested in and felt the need to keep going back for years.
To some extent it is clunky and awkward because even with some rules-based stuff, because no email client I've seen has been designed to do half what an efficient office filing system would do but it's a different league to depending on somebody else's computer to do it for me.
Messages are not always ephemeral.
"Isn't FaceBook?"
I suppose if you have two addicts typing online together it doesn't look like i's async.
OTOH I mentioned a genealogical one-name study in another comment. I remember an occasion where we were both online at the same time after one of us - can't remember which - had just got a break on a line. The conversation went on by email as each of us kept working on it. I said "at the same time" - here it was lunch time, I've no idea what time it was in California where he lives. By the end of my lunch (and probably Bargain Hunt as well!) we'd sorted out the entire line between us.
And there are other MSPs who offer paid for services without the data leaching. They're not expensive - even for a Yorkshireman.
In fact the only gmail address I use is the one that takes incoming mail from a website contacts page and, because it's a group's page, not mine, it needs to be separate from my private MSP account. And good luck to Google monetising whatever they search from that.
Bottom line, there are many options for communicating with others. Selecting one that rewards toxicity, even if your own use isn't toxic, is a matter of choice, maybe even a matter for your conscience.
"The first two options don't work because most of my friends don't know each other."
Do they need to?
I have a couple of mailing lists, one is a local history group and the other is a genealogical one name study group. Although to an outsider their interests might appear to overlap, in practice there's little in common other than my own involvement.
"Efficiency had won over redundancy."
Zuck has made his position clear - everyone should use Facebook for communication with each other. Perhaps this was taken literally which mean there was no communication network other than Facebook's. No back-channel to manage the infrastructure. If you think you're all the communication the world needs why would there be?
The public sector in the form of local government already had a remit for test and trace. Either it's not central government therefore had to be replaced because controlling things is what central government likes to do or, possibly, its very existence was overlooked.
As to app development, Google and Apple had got together (and how often can that be said) to provide the necessary underpinnings but HMG wants a Homegrown Unbeatable BRItish System because that's the nature of the current HMG.
Just more blundering in both cases.
Free from what?
This is a variation on the "Me freedom to extend my fist stops short of the end of your nose" classic.
If a country has freedom to defame than it lacks freedom from defamation. What you have in reality is not limitless freedom but a choice of incompatible freedoms.
"a series of measures to relieve pressure on vital supply chains, including by streamlining the testing process for HGV drivers, creating skills bootcamps to train up HGV drivers, as well as introducing short-term visas for fuel drivers, food haulage drivers and poultry workers to ease pressures facing these supply chains."
There's a list of fire-fighting activities if I ever saw one. If Lewis's is expected to concentrate on that things aren't going to be fixed. A lot of our problems are decades old. They stem from governments keeping retail price inflation* down by sourcing more and more stuff from the cheapest manufacturers world-wide. The retailers were complicit in that. Appointing someone from a manufacturing background would have made more sense.
* By ignoring housing as part of the cost of living they let actual inflation rip, fuelling it with low interest rates.
"There isn't a worker shortage... there's a shitty job/wage environment problem."
This isn't an either/or situation. It's a long and short term situation.
Employment factors combined with Brexit might have left us short of HGV drivers but that doesn't mean that simply upping wages will suddenly materialise a sufficiency of drivers. It simply means that drivers are being shifted to whoever can pay the most. In some instances that means your rubbish won't be collected because bin lorry drivers are being poached by transport companies.
New drivers have to be trained and tested. The capacity for both is limited. Even if training suddenly stepped up there needs to be an increase in testing and that means either training more testers (which takes time and presumably means diverting some existing drivers into doing that with short-term knock-on effects) or shortening with the existing testing. HMG seems to have settled for the latter; we'll have to see what the road safety consequences of that are in the coming months.
"disclose information to police without breaching any obligation of patient confidentiality"
The logic in this seems strangely familiar....
Ah, yes, I remember. We can leave the EU without reimposing a hard border in Ireland and without creating a new one in the Irish Sea. Perhaps it would be as well to see how that conundrum can be solved before creating a new one.
"The relationship between large corporations and open source is often strained."
I think many of them looked on it as a PR move. I made them look trendy, hip, cool or whatever. The fact that it has legal significance for the way software is developed passed them by - and maybe bypassed their legal departments. It doesn't seem to be the prerogative of large corporations either as some startups seem to have done the same.
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