Incompetence

I'm sure everyone has noticed. Everywhere you go, in big ways and small, everyone else seems to have been massively enstupidated. People driving, people in stores, government at all levels. Where have all the smart people gone?

I had an interesting conversation with my doctor about how screwed up health care is. He blamed the new system where doctors are required to see 30 or more patients a day instead of 10-12 back in the 1970's. Which means we are all paying more and getting less so that a pile of MBA's who wouldn't know a stethoscope from a rectal thermometer can be paid far more than the front line staff that do all the work. 

OK so maybe "incompetence" is the wrong word. Maybe its just fatigue?

Here in the US, we can't seem to be able to figure out how to run a railroad at least as well as we did in the days of steam locomotives. We can't replace the lead pipes that are contaminating the residents of more than 2,000 cities.We can't keep up our roads. We can't attain the same level of literacy that we managed back in the days of the one-room schoolhouse.

It's not, however, just the United States. Germany seems intent on destroying its manufacturing capability. France used to get a higher percentage of its electricity from nuclear than any other country, yet they no longer seem to know how to keep them running. In Greece, over 140 people are dead due to a train collision that is being blamed on "Human Error". They are still sifting the wreckage for bodies, but some plebeian has already been arrested and charged with manslaughter. 

We can blame all sorts of things: budget cuts, privatization, global warming. But in my book, it all comes back to incompetence. All these supposedly smart people can't figure out that if you work somebody for 16 hours straight, they are going to fuck up? And that said fuck-up will cost far more than just hiring enough people to do the work? I don't care if the trains (or whatever) are government owned and operated or are privatized. The people running things should be smart enough to figure these things out. Deferred maintenance always leads to some disaster that costs more than what was saved. Google "deferred maintenance" if you don't believe me. Study after study after study has shown that after 6-8 hours people are no longer accomplishing anything, and after 10 hours they are in negative territory. And yet, odds are that the next time you go to the ER, both your nurse and doctor will have been there for at least 12 hours. Why? Because it makes the next quarterly statements look good. If patients are injured or even killed, so what? The MBA's already got their bonuses. 

This is how people think in every industry: healthcare, higher ed, manufacturing, meat packing, etc. Employees are tools to be used up, worn out then disposed of because there will always be someone desperate enough to take their place. No thought is ever given to who is injured or killed.

This is what our universities are teaching our kids how to run a business. What moron came up with this? Why did this spread to every MBA program? Talk about the inmates being in charge of the asylum.

Holy crap; this got way too long. I'll shut up now.