Wontar's Ramblings

I've spent the last three days in full-day meetings. About what? Automating the job I've been doing as well as teaching others to do for the last twelve years. The goal is to take the "human element" out of the equation. I'm normally all for such things, as I find most humans extremely loud, smelly, and annoying. The problem here is that they're going to use government technology to try and rid the trained human part out of the equation. The large part of the problem isn't the people at work, but the morons who are filling out the forms and don't bother to read the instructions. They write in what they think it should be, instead of reading the instructions and writing in the correct information. Now a whole new system has to be designed to make it as simple a process as possible for the ignorant masses. Yet another example of dubming down a process to accomodate the lowest common denominator.

To paraphrase Jerf: what the hell happened to Darwinism? Survival of the fittest is supposed to be beneficial to a species. What happens to a species when the fittest do their job so well that they suddenly allow the unfit to thrive? It's now survival of the whiners, the annoying, the incompetent, illiterate, uneducated... Those who cry "foul" when they can't do something. It's suddenly "unfair" because they didn't do something as well as the person next to him/her/it. I realize I didn't get an instruction manual, but I really don't recall ever reading anywhere that life is supposed to be fair and vanilla for everyone. The playing field is not supposed to be level. If the people designing airplanes are the same people who are flipping your burgers, then that's a scary freakin' world. (It wouldn't be one filled with hamburger-powered airplanes, either. Planes would be dropping out of the sky because the spatu-props fell off.) Learning that someone is better than you at something is called "life", and we all have to deal with it. Whining about it should get you ridiculed, nothing more.

I guess when I get to design the world, things will be different. Hamburger-powered airplanes for everyone! (Except the cows. That'd be weird.)