Since this thread has already degraded, I'll offer my two cents. The
biggest screw ups in US history have been instigated by groups of
privileged White men. I know my name may sound otherwise, but I'm a
White American male, so I'm not pointing the finger at another group.
Let's see, Enron, Arthur Anderson, the entire Bush Administration and
its fiascos in Iraq, Katrina, foreign policy in general, etc. I've
worked for large, major IT providers and I can tell you that
incompetency shows no racial or ethnic boundaries. It tends to exist in
large, politically connected, no bid contractors, not low bid
contractors or ones who benefited from affirmative action.
Ted Byers wrote:
> Richard Huxton wrote:
>> http://www.thestar.com/News/article/189175
>>
>> "For instance, in some cases the field for the social insurance
number
>> was instead filled in with a birth date."
>>
>> Unbelievable. Sixty years of electronic computing, fifty years
use in
>> business and the "professionals" who built the tax system for a
>> wealthy
>> democratic country didn't use data types.
>
> This is Unbelievable? This is commonplace.
>
And due at least in part to government (and other institutions
operated by
damned fools) opting for the least expensive provider rather than
paying for
someone who actually knows what they're doing. Just as buying cheap
junk
always comes back to get you, hiring incompetent fools that don't
know their
ass from a hole in the ground will come back to get you too.
Come on, they don't hire incompetent fools. The hire the people
You CAN'T be serious! Have you ever dealt with them or with the
consequences of their incompetence?
they need to fill their quota regardless of how well trained
and experienced they are. I am not saying that non white males
are in any way less competent than white males, but by removing
them from the pool does not make things better. The biggest
problem with quotas is not hiring less qualified staff, it is
that less qualified staff know why they were hired and know that
they are very unlikely to be fired, so they have little incentive
to work hard or attempt to do their best, they can always fail
upwards.
What does this have to do with anything? No one here, except you, has
said anything about the profile of the people involved WRT race,
gender, religion, &c. Nor has anyone said anything about
"qualifications". The only thing that has been said is that, based on
what is seen in the "work", the people responsible for that work must
be incompetent. It is an inference based on what is seen in what has
been done and has nothing to do with any of the prohibited grounds for
discrimination used as excuses for affirmative action. And yes, I
have seen cases where less qualified, even unqualified, people have
been hired as a result of these affirmative action initiatives (and I
have been told, by HR personelle in government, that certain favoured
groups are deemed to be superior to white men, even if the favoured
party has no education nor experience and the latter have earned
doctorates and decades of experience), but no one has said anything
about such people being employed on the projects to which I referred.
But this is an aspect of our present society that is bound to
degenerate into a flame war, launched by the politically correct, so
we ought to say little, or even leave it alone. Those in power tend
to be vicious, especially when there are no effective checks on their
conduct and no consequences for what they do.
Cheers
Ted
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