Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Day 29, and the pond experiences a digital disruption with the Caterists ...




The pond wasn't going to deal with the Caterists this day - there's only so much of the infinite stupidity to hand that the pond can absorb - but a kindly reader sent along an IT joke, and it's been a long time since the pond ran one, so the Caterists can act as a kind of digital bookend.

Now it might well be that the Caterists are hankering for that job, such is the gibberish on view in today's piece ...


You begin to see the problems right? Presumably the Caterists got their data from Roy Morgan, a service designed to provide banks with general feedback. There is no direct correlation between the notion of digital and the services surveyed. If there was, it might have been titled "measuring digital functionality in terms of measuring enhancement of customer satisfaction with bank customer services" or some such ...

Moreover, if you flip the figure, that means over 20% of customers are unhappy with bank services. That means that one in five of the mug punters who walk in the store aren't very satisfied, or even satisfied, with the services on offer.

But this folderol, this statistical nonsense is actually all to do with one thing ... getting rid of workers.

It must be noted that expensive, devouring workers are the bane of the Caterist life.

No doubt without idle, bone lazy, inefficient workers, every workplace would be much happier and more efficient. Imagine the Menzies Research Centre without actual Caterists!

No doubt once they're sacked and moved along, these disreputable useless cogs in the wheel of life can be moved along, and take their place in society as contented, useful consumers... buying anything they like with specially provided Caterist vapourware ... or perhaps just going off to die homeless in a gutter.

Now it so happens there was a politician offering digital advice this day ...


O course call centres aren't quite digital. But where do you end up when "the Optus the" or Telsta "gay marriage moi?" disconnect you from the full to overflowing intertubes?

It's certainly what happens when you try to work out how to connect to myGov, surely one of the most useless attempts at interaction known to humanity down under ...

One of the great delusions is that digital services fix everything, and it's admirable to see the Caterists deep in the grip of that delusion ...


Now it begins to get clearer. This is all about a monograph commissioned by the Menzies Research Centre, which in turn happens to be a way of sucking up to Angus Taylor.

It won't actually be customer focussed and about the needs of customers and delivering customer service, it'll be about the ideological zealotry of getting rid of staff ...

The ultimate Caterist world it seems, will be where functionality and interactions are done by machine, and no person or individual need enter the equation ...

All we'll need is Arnie and Robocop and a drone of three ...

Oh and a few clever app makers. These will of course be outsourced to some very cheap place. Let's stick a a lot of them in garages where they can fantasise about making a fortune from their app ... while thankfully their parents keep paying for the garage and the meals ...

At this point, we might revert to Husic, picking him up in the middle of a thought about the DTO ...


Yes, there's talking the digital talk, and there's walking the digital walk.

Now you can read the rest of the Husic here - it's outside the AFR paywall at the moment - but the question remains why we must read a politician to get a little basic understanding, when in reality that should be the job of the Caterists ...

Instead we get this sort of concluding dribble ...


What an incredibly stupid man. So much blather from the wisdom of the crowds through Adam Smith's invisible hand to Friedrich Hayek's e-driven transformation, when really the only visible and stated outcome seems to be ... fewer public servants.

But who will hand out the taxpayer grants to the Menzies Research Centre.

What's even worse, this dodo had the cheek to criticise Palaszczuk for mouthing the favoured platitudes of our time, while spouting a fountain of favourite Ayn Rand style platitudes ...

How funny did it get for the pond?

Well we headed off in search of that book by Angus Taylor and immediately came up with this:


Yes, it's one thing to talk the digital talk.

The pond had to resort to google cache to discover this ...


The pond's tip?

404!

Peeple need sheeple to make even a humble website work. Hire some peeple, sheeple ... is there a call centre we can ring up to advise further?

And no, the pond won't be forking over twenty bucks to read what Angus Taylor, subsidised by the Menzies Research Centre, subsidised by the Australian taxpayer, thinks about digital disruption...

There's already too much monstrous stupidity stalking the earth ...

So why not end instead with a logarithm joke which conveys Caterist complexity?


It's been awhile since we ran an xkcd joke, but there's lots more here ...




24 comments:

  1. I.T. is good, public servants are bad. How is this bloke on TV, published in newspapers and running an organisation that is a recipient of $200k of taxpayers money? The only saving grace is once The Warner family is finished with him (and his little boy Jones) he won't have a pot to piss in.

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  2. "..as easy as dealing with eBay." Nope, faceless Spanish-american call centre Asians working under an alias don't cut it. Neither do tax-optional faceless Yank company subsidiaries with special ADI exemptions granted by APRA to have their registered business address sited only in a Sydney Post Office mailbag.

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  3. Hi Dorothy,

    "Townsville’s community cane toad hunt yielded its lowest catch ever this year, raising modest hopes that the state’s population of unloved reptiles may be declining."

    Are they paying Cater for this shit? Cane toads are AMPHIBIANS!

    Give me strength

    DiddyWrote

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    Replies
    1. True, DW, the cane toads are amphibian, but even so the Australian Museum has this to say:

      Habitat
      Cane Toads are found in habitats ranging from sand dunes and coastal heath to the margins of rainforest and mangroves. They are most abundant in open clearings in urban areas, and in grassland and woodland.
      ( http://australianmuseum.net.au/cane-toad )

      So it might be a bit of a moot point as to just what percentage are safely hidden in the water at any given time.

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    2. The Townsville hunt may well have been down, for what would be the bloody use of engaging in it? Cane toads are found any-bloody-where except maybe up trees, and they'll be in your backyard too before long. In a future climate dystopia we'll eat the hardy buggers and be thankful for them just as many a canny murder of Torresian crows and some dwarf crocodile populations have learnt to now.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torresian_crow#Diet
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia#Predator_effects
      https://www.ehp.qld.gov.au/wildlife/livingwith/crows/
      http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/environment-waste/natural-environment/protecting-wildlife-brisbane/living-wildlife/torresian-crow
      CROWS KILL CANE TOADS

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    3. Hi GB and Anon,

      Taxonomy doesn't get much love anymore but it is the foundation of the biological sciences. It gives a rigour that allows deeper insights to how life evolved.

      The hierarchy of Class, Order, Genus and Species outlined by the Swedish philosopher (philosopher because science and scientist weren't a thing back then) Carolus Linnaeus would eventually lead inevitably to a point that it was understood that some organisms are more closely related than others. From there Darwin just had to know that there was enough time for changes to occur and bingo we have The Theory of Evolution.

      http://www.britannica.com/science/taxonomy/The-Linnaean-system

      A snake for instance is designated - Kingdom: Animalia, Phyllum: Chordata, Class: Reptila, Order: Squamata.

      A toad however would be designated - Kingdom: Animalia, Phyllum: Chordata, Class: Amphibian, Order: Anura.

      Linnaeus didn't always get his categorisation right (as DNA analysis has proved) but his system of classification changed our way of understanding biological systems.

      Dealing with periods of drought has always been a challenge for many animals and the solution has often been the same;

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestivation

      A Toad is still an Amphibian no matter how dry it becomes.

      DW

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    4. Hi Dorothy,

      Cater was born in Billericay, Essex[3] and grew up in Hythe near Southampton.[4] His parents were teachers. He graduated from the University of Exeter with an honours degree in sociology in 1980 and drove laundry vans for a year before joining the BBC as a trainee studio manager.[5] He worked as a producer in the London bureau of Australia’s Channel Seven from 1983 to 1986 before rejoining the BBC as a journalist.

      Quite the little shit

      DW

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    5. Now DW, you might be right in a scientific way, but the pond is inclined to the poetic. In the world of reptiles, everything is reptilian ...

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    6. Hi DW, re Darwin and "The Theory of Evolution". There were already other "theories" of evolution. Darwin (and Wallace) published a theory of evolution by natural selection. Natural selection is the key point.

      Delete
  4. This is about three posts old, sorry, but FDOTM has nailed the Oreo biscuit.

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2016/apr/19/calling-things-marxist-is-the-new-political-correctness

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    Replies
    1. It's never too late for a good link Mercurial. especially when it warns the planet of Carl Marxism ...

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  5. An oldie but a goodie:
    http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

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    Replies
    1. Malware and the Caterists wanted, still badly want, a bullshit culture war for the election and not the class war they've begun and are now hopelessly bogged down in.

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  6. So who needs to employ people at all, when we have computers, and those app things, and eBay, and machines that go *bing!* ? They'll all manage themselves, won't they?

    Gawd save us from fruitcakes who interpret the use of 21st century technology through the views of 18th century philosophers and turgid 20th century novelists.

    When the first Artificial Intelligence achieves self-awareness, I very much doubt that it'll immediately start reciting the work of Heyek. The thought of sending the entire staff of the IPA and the Menzies Research Centre on an exploratory voyage to the outer planets with a HAL 9000 computer is a very tempting one, though.

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  7. And in other loon news, during the New York primary campaign Donald Trump refers to the 9/11 terror attacks as '7-eleven'.

    Yes he really did!

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  8. More brilliance from Rowe (check out his April 19th offering). That's Abbott spitting out the money, a doppleganger Mal riding the pigs, and it looks like they've just completed a long jump and Morrison is clearing the shit up from the sand pit. And look at the windfarm on the hill, and the NBN rollout!

    But why the black stripes down the pig's backs?

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  9. What great event are planned for July 2nd?

    Warriors v Titans
    Cronulla v Parramatta
    Wests Tigers v Penrith Panthers

    There's never been a more exciting time to hold an election.

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    Replies
    1. Let's hope the Warriors aren't hosting, otherwise the Titans will have to do postals.

      Delete
  10. Well within minutes I received emails from Michaelia Cash (we need to smash the deeply corrupt Unions holding the construction industry to ransom, thus threatening the livelihood of 1,000,000 Australian Mums and Dads); and Labor rather lamely me asking for at least $10 to fight the good fight.

    There is a brilliant old Thurber cartoon of two cows standing in their stalls while the old farmer sits on his three-legged stool and starts milking away by hand. One cow turns to the other and says "Hmph! Men!"

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    Replies
    1. The pond loves Thurber ... if you ever get a link for that cartoon, send it along.

      Delete
  11. 7000 more public servants, 763k extra wages? On the back of my envelope, that is just over $100 each - seems like a good deal to me!

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    Replies
    1. Oh sheesh, taxonomists and now mathematicians. Will the Caterists ever get a moment's rest?

      Delete
  12. Ley insists on slugging cancer patients with extra pathology fees before the election.

    Does this qualify her for The Naughtiest Girl in the School award? Judging from her behaviour towards the terminally ill she doesn't appear to have attended Whyteleafe School as yet.

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    Replies
    1. Another plug from Pathology Australia, the mouthpiece for private (ie profiteering) pathologists. Ley is right, on this one.

      Delete

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