https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/attack-on-competence
“New Zealand has recently suffered through our current government's latest
budget week. There were, of course, a whole lot of awful things in the budget,
but one of the most aggravating ones was what they've chosen to do to the
public service: they've elected to cut 8,700 jobs in the public sector, and
when asked how the shortfall in services would be managed, Nicola Willis, our
finance minister, came up with the brilliant idea that "AI" would be used to
fix the shortfall. This is, of course, obviously and transparently stupid and
isn't going to work no matter how you spin it. New Zealand's taxation and
investment policy is likewise stupid: the aggregate effect of these tax and
public sector cuts will be to sharply reduce state revenue, reducing the
ability of our government to do, not to put too fine a point on it,
anything
at all. This has been a consistent pattern with the government: they do things
that, practically or legally, simply don't work, and then blame literally
anything else when, despite the best efforts of the public sector whose job it
is to carry out their diktats (and which they've been cutting to the bone), the
whole idea turns out to be incompetent and falls apart at the seams.
The inevitable conclusion of witnessing the last two-and-a-half years of what's
passed for governance is quite simply that the people leading our country are
incompetent. And yet they were elected. And it isn't as though their
incompetence was hidden: it was plain to see from the get-go. People loved it.
The pattern is similar in the tech industry: whatever people might say about
what they want from people, revealed preference seems to suggest that they love
incompetent people and hate competent ones. It's difficult, really, to read our
current moment as anything other than an attack on the very concept of
competence.”
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
