Posts by Doctor Syntax 33144 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Personally, I'm of the opinion that fictional entities, which exist only on paper, like Twitter or any other corporation, have no legal rights period."
Any entity to which the legislative process grants legal rights has legal rights. I doubt any court dealing with a case involving those legal rights would take any note whatsoever of your opinion. You're free to hold it, of course, but you'd be unwise to rely on it in any legal process.
"Local governments are never that model enterprise. In fact, they rarely resemble each other. They have to provide a huge range of services without much control over revenue, their metrics of success are as varied as the communities they serve, and they have the huge pudding of legal responsibilities that comes from spending public money."
I wonder. The legal responsibilities are defined. Admittedly we have a strange way of slicing up the responsibilities between tiers in different ways in different parts of the UK and the devolved governments will have come up with their own ideas for additional responsibilities. Nevertheless the statutory duties have to be performed at some level.
It ought to be possible to write a function to implement each of those responsibilities. The different structures could just mean that the top tier here runs the function that's handled by the bottom tier there. Providing that the software is structured so that the total functionality can be allocated as required it ought not to be a problem provided it's designed that way.
It should be possible to have one or preferably two companies providing a modular applications suite for the core local government functions and central government mandate that they use one of them.
I'm sure one of the problems is individuals building their own little empires - Bob always handles street repairs but Alice is responsible for utility permits to dig up dig up roads except for gas because Fred's department inherited that from the municipal gasworks. It may well be that the a lot of the customisation requirements arise from just that sort of internal slicing. A mandated application suite might sort out a lot of that - optimise the responsibilities to fit properly structured software rather than pay to have the software customised to fit the egos of the departmental viceroys.
And handling those one-off huge capital projects? Well, do they expose taxpayers' money to excessive risks? Are they really things local government should be doing? That's a matter for which software support is a secondary consideration.
"The problem here, in turn, is that the customer is unlikely to be proficient at defining requirements, while the people who are actually good at that are (1) not proficient in the customer's domain, and, worse, (2) on the side of the seller."
One solution might be a rather old-fashioned one: stage the contract with different deliverables, the first being to analyse the customer's needs. There's a risk of the specification being gold-plated but the advantage being that if the specification turns out to be inadequate the supplier will only have themselves to blame.
"Over-provisioning of resources and idle or underutilized resources affected half of all respondents, with lack of skills or not having the right capabilities to manage resources blamed."
I'm reminded of the mustard manufacturer who said his profits come from the mustard diners left on the side of their plates.
"BT building their own factories to make the stuff, that same old 1960s public sector attitufde of make rather than buy, really going to go well wasn't it?"
If some utterly new technology is invented and you want to deploy it who is going to make the hardware? It's new. Are you going to wait around for somebody else to start making it so you can buy it or are you going to get off your backside and do it yourself?
"Škoda, from what I’ve heard, still have old-fashioned physical knobs and buttons for the crucial stuff like AC"
If VW have gone touch screen maybe Škoda have done so as well. My Škoda gripe - plastic button on handbrake failed - obvious internal stresses because the bits don't really fit back together. Cost of replacement button? No such thing - it's acomplet handbrake level assembly at £86 or nothing. You could buy a few days of BMW heating subscription for that. I suppose the newer ones have gone over to electric handbrakes like all the others. I don't think there's a new car I'd be prepared to spend money on these days.
Take a couple of minutes to think about this. First what does "ousted" mean? Blair decided to quit of his own acord as far as I'm aware. Should there have been an election then? You also end up with the situation where the PM is a liability to the country as a whole but the party in power doesn't want an election do they keep the figurehead in place. Is that a good outcome of your idea?
"And Birmingham Council is somehow unique among all councils in the UK, Europe or the world in this ?"
Probably in size. But there ought to be a good business in providing a system which has been designed from the ground up to deal with local government requirements*. Unfortunately there's a better business in flogging one-off customisations of something that wasn't designed for that purpose.
* At worst a system designed for local governemnt should require less customisation where the assumption fails.
A good way of keeping on top of this would be to require each rule, working practice or whatever to have a rationale - we do it this way because it's required in Act so-and-so or we don't do it that way because it would fail to deal with this and that. It would provide a basis for reviewing practices against changing legal or regulatory environments and a count for manglers who want to impose their own bright ideas.
"I'm not sure if this cachet is what led to low pay"
I think the root of the problem is that whenever economics push a government into a policy of pay restraint the only place they can actually implement that is in the public sector which progressively slips further back in pay which naturally gets reflected in who they can recruit.
Probably going to follow: Kirklees - Labour
That monstrosity was the product of the 1974 reform of local government. It welded together two local authorities which had no common history and named the result after a place that's actually in neighbouring Calderdale.
One of this year's gems has been to spenf goodness-knows what building out this corner to create a one-way, yes one-way, cycle lane about 10 metres long. It will probably last until the awkward turn into Acre Lane causes an accident. Or more likely well beyond the point when it causes several accidents. I suppose it contributes to some target for length of cycle lane.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.5916726,-1.8384101,3a,75y,99.83h,91.48t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sgsGiaMKCmb2M0QWNsv9J6Q!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en&entry=ttu
"It'll be even worse when they start offering it for free if you allow them to feed the text into their Bingbot AI training."
I'd like to see the effect on one of their bots if it had to deal with a suggestion Microsoft might offer something for free.
I've replaced to element in a kettle several times until the body of the kettle developed a leak. Since then I've had to junk one name brand hot water jug because (notoriously) a moulded plastic component in the latch failed. An appliance designed to be thrown away - but not to be replaced like with like. The much maligned Amazon Basics replacement just keeps working.
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