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A 26-page Brownie recipe is perfectly fine with me (I have to take advantage of the chance to echo 'Heck of job, Brownie!'). Compare/contrast with the ineffici
by eplanit 16y ago
A 26-page Brownie recipe is perfectly fine with me (I have to take advantage of the chance to echo 'Heck of job, Brownie!'). Compare/contrast with the inefficiencies in communications you see in businesses and organizations everywhere. I've never seen a simple project that, when done in Corporate America, doesn't require 6 months, reams of documents, and hours of meetings.
In other words...in large institutions, nothing is very efficient.
- eli 16y agoTrue to some degree, but it's also about having a level of detail needed for something that many people will rely on. Give a simple brownie recipe to enough people and one them will burn down the house because you never specifically said to turn off the oven when done baking.
- btilly 16y agoBut give a 26 page brownie recipe to enough people and one of them will burn down the house because they missed the instruction saying when to turn off the oven. There is a common organizational failure mode where new instructions are added whenever anyone messes up, ignoring the fact that the complexity of the instructions is leading to lots of mistakes.
- gte910h 16y agoIncorrect. The endeavor itself (making long shelf life brownies/cookies) has a set of requirements which is pretty exacting. The complexity of the instructions will likely be turned into long checklists and procedures for the actual producing plant. And if the plant screws up said brownies, they'll likely be on the hook to replace the whole lot of MREs You're confusing quality/policy issues in corporations with inter-entity contracts between an easy to cheat organization (the military) with a group of people who have a history of cheating (the military contractors).
- derefr 16y ago> The complexity of the instructions will likely be turned into long checklists and procedures for the actual producing plant. It'd be nice if our system of interpreted case law were turned into some form of checklists and procedures; then we wouldn't need lawyers. That is to say, the one "contract" that affects every man, woman and child—federal law—has been screwed up in exactly this way, by providing so much of it that no one has any idea what it says without years of study. There is a difference between clarity and verbosity.
- btilly 16y agoActually the years of study aren't to figure out what it actually says. They are to figure out the many ways you can use it to convince a judge that it says what you want it to say, which can then be used to get whatever result you're being paid to achieve.
- gte910h 16y ago>It'd be nice if our system of interpreted case law were turned into some form of checklists and procedures; then we wouldn't need lawyers. Sure you would, they'd just look a lot more like programmers.
- btilly 16y agoYes, I know the theoretical justification. But the unintended consequence is that the complexity of demonstrating that you are not cheating the military creates enough overhead to make profits easy to hide. Furthermore the overhead is enough to make it unprofitable to be a military contractor unless you are actively exploiting ways to squeeze the system.
- gte910h 16y agoI don't think you see the prices the military pays for things if you think it's unprofitable to be a military contractor (ex -military contractor here)
- 16y ago