• the beholder (unregistered) in reply to Ozz
    Ozz:
    trtrwtf:
    Okay, cutting to the chase: how are socialized services paid for on your anarchist collective? Or do you just do without roads, bridges, fire departments, police, army, and so forth?
    Here in the U.S. I'm assuming the same way they were paid for before the federal government started taxing people's income in 1913.
    Oh no, not this CRAP again!

    Okay people, if want to argue, bicker and whine politics, gun control, nazi spaceships, hypothetical pokemon battles between Napoleon and Churchill, or whatever the hell you're bent on that IS NOT a Curious Perversion on Information Technology™ get to this thread. It's already ruined after all, so no point screwing this one too.

  • EvilCodeMonkey (unregistered) in reply to Coyne
    Coyne:
    justanotheradmin:
    Gareth:
    Repeat after me:

    Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you.

    10 PRINT "Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you." 20 GOTO 10

    How can this be faster when the computer will never finish?

    Can you never finish faster than the computer?

  • (cs) in reply to trtrwtf
    trtrwtf:
    Okay, cutting to the chase: how are socialized services paid for on your anarchist collective? Or do you just do without roads, bridges, fire departments, police, army, and so forth?

    The difference is those aren't a waste of money. One can complain "the funds being wasted were taken at gunpoint from hard working citizens" without being, in general, against taking money at gunpoint from hard working citizens.

  • Valued Service (unregistered) in reply to trtrwtf
    trtrwtf:
    Random832:
    Almafuerte:
    This was back in '96. Argentina has been a democracy since '83. So, no, it wasn't taken at gunpoint.

    So, what exactly are the people your democratic government sends around to your house if you don't pay your taxes armed with?

    Okay, cutting to the chase: how are socialized services paid for on your anarchist collective? Or do you just do without roads, bridges, fire departments, police, army, and so forth?

    Person A: I don't like excessive taxes. Person B: Well, how will you go without roads. Person A: We can give up something other than roads to lower taxes. Person B: Oh noes, logic!!! I'm melting.

  • trtrwtf (unregistered) in reply to Valued Service

    Person A: Taxes are evil because they're taken by force Person B: How do you intend to pay for needed services then? Person A: You're just a big old poopyhead.

  • (cs)

    We have an app that relies, in part, on a large list of items we receive from our clients during setup.

    Normally, they send us a file and we import it straight away. Well, after I had gotten back from a nice long vacation I found that some of my people were hand typing the lists.

    I asked why they would ever do that.

    The response: They figured it would take a while to do it by hand and weren't sure what else to do while I was gone...

    The WTF here is simply that I had forgotten to leave a sufficiently large task list for them.

  • (cs) in reply to Random832
    Random832:
    Why is it that everyone in these stories always assumes they'll be out of a job, instead of just doing the same amount of work doing something else that previously didn't get done because there was no-one available to work on it?

    My faith in humanity was actually boosted slightly when this happened to me a few years ago.

    On a $2m government contract (in the UK), one of the companies involved had an admin assistant seconded to the project. One of her tasks was to take a spreadsheet of log entries extracted from the firewall guarding the web server, pick out the obvious spider entries, then do some basic analysis (number of requests per page; number of distinct IP addresses requesting at least two different pages each day, excluding our own organisations' IP addresses). This ate up most of her allotted 1.5 days per month to work on the project.

    She was actually quite happy when I set up a Perl script which did the same analysis in under a second for each month. Apart from anything else, this left her with time to do more useful things on the project. (Or maybe just meant she still billed for the 1.5 days but spent them out shopping. TBH, I'd still prefer that to actually having work like that done manually!)

  • danbruc (unregistered)

    Something like this cannot be true. In no possible world. With no possible interpretation of quantum physics. This is just plain impossible.

  • Eduardo (unregistered)

    I'm from Argentina too. I bet Gustavo is still screen-printing the filenames without knowing the existence of Google Maps. Here, the military (and most of our government) stayed in other time.

  • John Hensley (unregistered)
    Random832:
    Irrelevant political bullshit
    I wish someone would take you out of this comments section at gunpoint.
  • el_slapper (unregistered)

    Big classic

    I've been in another form of this : I was maintening an old COBOL application, that did crash each time it did receive unfit data. 90 minutes of work to repair the mess, each time. It happened usually 10 to 20 times a month, mostly at the end of the month.

    I've been foolishly asking for ages either more control in the emitting application, or for the right of changing the mechanism. I was about to get crazy.

    Finally, I did replace the "crash" mechanism by a little mail "file FFF rejected because of reason RRR" send to the file emmitters. The worse? They did love it! They had rejected the idea one thousand times. Now, I spend my time to more useful duties, as, errrm, repairing other crashed applications.

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to No'am
    No'am:
    At least they were scanning the maps as opposed to placing them on a wooden table and photographing them.

    Which is now the best way to do most digitisation, but not an option in the 90s

    TRWTF is slicing and re-taping the maps! I wonder how good that tape is holding now that the sticky has oxidised!

    As for the maunal inefficiency, many governments have an obligation to employ ex-service men for life, so this kind of mindless job creation serves a bigger purpose.

  • PPH (unregistered) in reply to Gareth
    Gareth:
    Repeat after me:

    Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you.

    Now, go to work for a company with a 250+ department of clerical workers built around the concept of maximizing manpower consumption. Because the department head's job title/status/paycheck is based upon how many employees he has reporting to him. That's Gustavo * 250 plus several layers of management.

    Now, have that department head weasel his way into having IT contracting and acquisition responsibility for all engineering departments. Just to make sure nobody actually cleans up the mess. So now you've got an Oracle database from which they print weekly reports of duplicate entries (on old-school fan fold paper) and have half a dozen people go through them with highlighters to fix the bad entries. Instead of adding a key violation and other input validation to prevent the bad entries in the first place.

    You'd say to yourself "These people suck. I'd never use a product from such an incompetent organization. They'll probably be out of business soon anyway." Well then, don't ever get on an airplane.

  • anitet (unregistered) in reply to savar

    I read this thinking ti was just like the UK. One government agency hired Fred, put him through 3 days of intensive interviewing and when he stepped in the door his new boss told him that he had to work slowly. It transpired that there was not enough work for 1 person in the team let alone 2. They overestimated everything and the management team re-inforced this approach.

  • Like a NaN (unregistered) in reply to Coyne

    The success of a protest is rated on how many times you can yell your half-rhyming mantra until you're interrupted or you get tired and go home.

  • Mr. TA (unregistered) in reply to Almafuerte

    Yes it was.

    The fact that some idiots voted for politicians who did not promise new taxes but then imposed them anyway, and that the politicians WILL send armed agents to your house if you don't pay up, makes it no different than the high-tax monarchies of years past.

  • Mr. TA (unregistered) in reply to trtrwtf

    It is idiotic, I suppose, to acknowledge that one's money is taken without doing anything about it. But hey, we can't help it but to at least complain.

  • Jimmy Wang (unregistered) in reply to Tom

    dir *.tif /b /s > filelist.txt

    now it's also recursive, so you don't have to change folders.

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