Expertease II: governing principles

Towards the end of last week I made a post about ancient history: the .com bust, and thus shed some of the bile that’s been corrupting my conscience since it happened. I’m still in debt as a direct result of being fucked over not once, but twice, by companies which were mis-managed during the .com boom. The MDs of the companies in question, by the way, cleared not less than $20million each. But that post was merely an example of a type of thinking which is particularly obvious in boom-and-bust economics of the modern, oligarchic variety. My primary concern here is that public servants are beginning to imitate the flaws, as well as the benefits, of private enterprise. Governments are starting to publicly ignore their experts. This is concerning both because it means our nations are being mismanaged but also because of the message it sends to the electorate. Every time Bush, Brown or Sarkozy perpetrates one of these fiascos, another swathe of the population will buy into the lie that opinions are more important than facts, and that politics are more important than policy.

Expertease I: .com crumble

One of the things that used to piss me off about the internet industry is the way businessmen would hire experts and then ignore them. This was true in every company I worked for. Another thing which was true is that the powers in the company, MD, CEO, whatever, were always salespeople. Always. No exceptions. Every one of the top management people I worked for had come up through the sales force, and this influenced the way they thought.

Now, I’ve worked with sales people who thought that the way business worked was like this:

1. Ask the people who do real work “Can the company deliver $product”.

If answer is “yes”, sell $other_product which looks and sounds similar.

If answer is “no”, sell the thing anyway and then present to the board a fait accompli.

2. ???

A.k.a. “We’ve sold it, now those lazy geeks have to build it or the company loses face and reliablity.”

3. Profit!

Rant round-up

In the absence of considered articles about any of these things, let’s have a round-up of things that pissed me off while I was too doped to rant about it.

The BNP

Who piss me off quite often, to be fair. Having looked around a bit it seems the original contention that the BNP are organising the strikes is not quite true; this is more akin to the violent bastards highjacking peaceful protests, with the British Wildcats hopping onto a relatively reasonable industrial action and trying to nick the platform. But they could do it if we didn’t shout about it, so thank you, MiniTru.

The Government

They used to have that kind of law. They got broken during the civil rights activism of the 60s and early 70s because journalists for whom the job meant something kept taking pictures, getting beaten up, getting locked up, and still publishing until the law got changed. Now they’ve changed it back. Bastards.

The Government, the puritans, and the Daily Mail

I almost didn’t mention this, because I still haven’t figured out whether I’m ok with people assuming I like kinky porn (because, obviously, if I care about this I must be a deviant…) Decided it shouldn’t matter whether people think I’m kinky or not; this is thought policing, and it’s wrong.

More later.

Jawing away

I’ve spent a lot of the last two weeks in a severely altered state of consciousness, due to the regular application of prescription pain-killers. I also may be boiling up a rant about the NHS as a result, but then again, I may not; most of the actual people in it are working very hard and fighting their own bosses.

But, I’m back on the net and will be ranting shortly.  Apologies for the short break.