What have US healthcare, British railways, the shipwreck of Carillion plc, and the F-35 got in common, and why should you care? Well…none of them work terribly well, they all cost vastly more than expected, and nobody can put their finger on why. Cash seems to leak out of them by a thousand cuts, without…
Read More In The Eternal Inferno, Fiends Torment Ronald Coase With The Fate Of His IdeasThis is a fascinating and shocking story. The main problem with the auto-enrolment pensions system seems to be that the middleware that links Company X’s payroll solution to the pension fund is stupidly expensive. And I mean stupidly expensive, like £50 a signup plus £50 a year per-head recurring. As a result, the financial advisers…
Read More Digital disruption disrupts, except when it doesn’tTo expand on something I wrote as a comment, one of the things I hate about wizard privatisation schemes and especially “total outsourcing” or whatever is as follows. The FSTA deal for the RAF’s new jet tankers is especially awful and exemplary. Here’s the idea. Rather than buy the aeroplanes and do the job, we’ll…
Read More Railtrack in the sky, at war!So, I’ve been having a war with my exciting privatised energy vendor. Again. We had a chat about this in this post on think-of-a-number prices, but another opportunity came around. The day before the monthly direct debit payment went out, a letter lands saying that they’ve just doubled, yes doubled, the amount. Thanks. Anyway, of…
Read More Reading Gambetta and Clausewitz in an emerging low-trust societyRemember the magic lie-detector voice analyzer? It’s baaack. Also, Cornish Tory councillor Fiona Ferguson is a mensch. Here’s the story; it seems the council hired Capita aka Crapita to put the fear of God into people claiming single person’s council tax discount (THE BASTARDS!). Capita, which is the sole UK distributor of 100% guaranteed pure…
Read More Not this shit again. In which I praise a ToryAfter the westalgie post, here’s a classic quote: The stores were always full and we had spares for everything He’s talking about working in a British power station during the nationalised era. He also says it was wasteful and bureaucratic, but then, I only came for the ironic resonance.
Read More a case in pointHere’s a good piece on Tobacco Dock, where the soldiers covering for “can we call them Group Snore again?” G4S are camping. Wikipedia points out that it’s a building of great historic significance, marking the transition between buildings that incidentally used iron and ones that used it in their structure, and being the work of…
Read More it’s a taster of the legacy experienceSo I went to the TUC’s Netroots UK shindig yesterday. I missed the first session, and chose to not go to the one with Paul Mason in order to go to one with practical content, specifically Richard Blogger and Ellie Mae O’Hagan’s on defending the NHS from within. Having joined an NHS foundation trust, it…
Read More Notes from Netroots UK, and NHS total defenceHere’s a story from the Grauniad about privatised forensics lab LGC getting it Very Wrong Indeed. Now here’s another. LGC said one of its staff members made a “typographical error” while inputting code, leading Scotland Yard to spend more than a year trying to trace a non-existent suspect. It was confirmed last month, when LGC…
Read More utterly predictable and indeed predictedSo, why did we get here? Back in the mists of time, in the US Bell System, there used to be something called a Business Office, by contrast to a Central Office (i.e. what we call a BT Local Exchange in the UK), whose features and functions were set down in numerous Bell System Practice…
Read More The politics of call centres, part two: sources of failure