(There are complexities and counter-examples that moderate this generally true statement.)

Defund the organisation to point of total chaos and near-collapse. Blame employees for collapse in work quality.

Here are some more generally true statements:

Increase profits and improve efficiency by cutting out maintenance tasks and firing the people who do them. Blame accidents or outages on employees, customers, bystanders.

People die? Company goes bust? Who cares? Even if there are consequences, the executives/officials to blame have already taken the money and moved on to the next thing. You can't prosecute them or get the money back (unless they were stupendously dumb and got directly involved and stayed on 'til the bitter end and centres of power were so affected that prosecutors can't ignore it: see Theranos, Enron, etc.).

Otherwise good points I think, @scaramanga:

>>> cutting out maintenance tasks and firing the people who do them. Blame accidents ... Who cares? ... You can't prosecute them

> It's actually not sure that they are doing work. > (There are complexities and counter-examples that moderate this generally true statement.)

Guess, based on that I cannot really have a counter argument here :)

Hah, sorry. If you don't qualify a general statement, you'll get jumped on by people supplying the qualifier for you. I wish it weren't like that.

Relative size is a good point, certainly. We can look to several huge companies to see frustrating interaction points (hence my qualifier.)

But slack can also be perceived as waste, which can be cut.

And if your budget is cut, you are likely to see that slack as "first thing on the copping block" with the consequence that the queue begins to expand. But most systems have natural buffers which delay catastrophic failure. By that point there have been elections, you have retired, etc. and someone else is left holding the bag.

At that point you can blame the organisation for being "slow", or "inefficient", and then you can cut it's funding further, or destroy it outright or maybe outsource it to the private sector.

Then the private sector can drive profits by asset stripping and cutting safety or vital maintenance work, then when the whole system collapses, you can hold the taxpayer hostage by demanding a bailout of the, presumably vital, service (or you can renationalise it), and the whole cycle starts again.

Welcome to our planet, enjoy your stay, it's likely to be a brief one :)

I'm glad you've enjoyed writing your comments--like your style. :)

Yeah, more efficient nodes can delay that effect, but it seems that in real world system the existence of buffers means that consequences are delayed in ways that have significance (across careers, elections, etc) and those factors tend to dominate.

yw, nice that anyone reads it, without that i'd just be another mad shouty bloke on the internet, maybe i still am :)