The Lego syndrome

I see the British government, in the person of justly-reviled home secretary Jacqui Smith, is to offer ID cards to the people of Manchester. Giving them the priceless opportunity to be the first 'general public' in the country to get their hands on them.

Yeah, I'm sure Mancunians have been clamouring for that privilege. Manchester, I note, is a comforting 114 miles from Ms Smith's own constituency of Redditch.

This isn't going to be another libertarian rant about why ID cards are a bad thing. I'm not going to use words like 'totalitarian'. In fact, I'm hardly going to get political at all. No, this particular editorial is brought to you not by Vet the Sarcastic Liberal, but by Vet the Business Analyst.

I've never seriously imagined that the UK government sees its ID cards as something 'controlling', and nor do most of their electors. That's why neither group 'gets' those criticisms. The oft-painted picture of the UK government as some kind of Orwellian super-state simply doesn't ring true, because we all know they're just not that competent. They couldn't do it, even if they wanted to

(For instance: given all the regulations around airline passenger manifests, ten days after swine flu hit the country, this same government still couldn't get a list of who'd been on the flight that brought it in. That's our experience of the 'surveillance society'.)

That incompetence has always been a vital characteristic of the UK government. And most of the time they acknowledge the fact, with a suitably tactful coating of course. That's why Parliament was invented in the first place - to tell the government when it was going wrong. The entire political system - free press, courts, appeals, the House of Lords, elections, public inquiries, royal commissions, select committees, the whole boiling of it - is based around the central, fundamental assumption that the government will screw up.

It's an assumption that seldom lets us down.

When I look at the ID card story from that viewpoint, there seems a certain familiarity about the - shape, you could call it - of this particular screw-up. The flagrant dishonesty over costs, the eternally shifting justifications, the boneheaded refusal even to acknowledge, much less engage with, contrary arguments, and most importantly of all, the barefaced lying about popularity - oh yes, I've seen this elsewhere...

It's what Joel Spolsky calls "the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make". Governments do just the same thing, and for just the same reason. Everything Joel says of software is equally true of legislation. It's a reason that seems to be a basic law of human nature, the reason why Lego is the most popular children's brand in the world:

Building something new is more fun than tinkering with something old.

The 'something old', in this case, being countless ad-hoc systems, each devised to address a slightly different, though similar, problem. Bankers, publicans, bureaucrats, police officers, border controllers, shopkeepers - each of these has their own, more or less legitimate, reasons for wanting to know someone's identity, and they all have their own systems for doing it. Sadly, some of those systems are no longer up to the job they were designed for. And rather than just tell them to improve what already exists, the weak-minded government yielded to its first and worst impulse, which is - as always - to throw them all out and start over.

The catch being, as Joel points out: "there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time".

All those ad-hoc systems I was talking about just now - they were each 'good enough' for the purpose, and in the environment, they were meant for, but they failed to keep up with changing circumstances. People - nasty, unscrupulous, profit-driven people - looked at the systems that existed, and saw flaws and chinks and weaknesses that no-one had thought of. When that happens, the correct answer is to patch the system so that that particular weakness no longer works.

The wrong answer is to scrap the old thing and start again - in the superstitious belief that this time, it'll be perfect.

"If you had to choose between saving a banker from drowning...

... and taking a prizewinning picture of the event, what resolution should you set your camera to?" - adapted from the classic question of Journalistic Ethics.

What put this into my mind? Extract from a conversation I just had:

"Mr Vet, you're going to need to get an independent valuation on your property before we can give you a mortgage."

...

"Mr Vet? Are you there?"

"Yes, I'm still here. I'm just trying to work out, on a scale of one to ten, how angry I am right now."

"Well, it's because you paid significantly more than the current valuation..."

"I told you, we bought at auction. There were other bidders there willing to pay that much."

"It's very standard practice for banks at the moment, Mr Vet."

"What's the point? That is the market. You can't get a truer valuation than that, that's why it's called 'market value'. What kind of valuer do you think is going to be able to tell you better than the market itself?"

"Well, the valuer is independent, they're trained to estimate very closely the true market value."

...

There are some questions that you will never hear an answer to, no matter how many times or ways you persist in asking them, because the honest answer would be "solely so that we can charge you more money".

In response to my badgering, he eventually promised that the bank would pay part of the cost of the valuation. So far, so good. Now all that remains is for me to bring the rest of my cash over from the UK, to raise the amount of our deposit as necessary so that we don't have to pay any further insurance - and the bank will be a few hundred dollars out of pocket, and they'll end up making less from us than if they'd just shut up and paid up.

I bet some genius banker earned a several-thousand-dollar bonus for working out this policy, which is about to cost his bank, probably, several thousand dollars in lost profit. I really hope that person is now dying painfully somewhere, but I don't have that much faith in karma.

Disasters

Bad things happen in threes.

I'm not quite sure where I picked up that bit of folk idiocy. I suspect my mother is to blame. But anyway, it's bugging me now.

Two weeks ago, I ran the car into a small rock that someone had thoughtfully dropped in the middle of the road. The impact bent the arm of the suspension, and made the car unnecessarily interesting to steer. It cost $400 to fix.

Last week it was the TV. That only cost $100, plus a week of Making Our Own Entertainment.

All this is bad enough, but what's worse now is waiting for the third shoe to drop, if you see what I mean.

Has it already happened? Is it the nice house we saw last weekend, that - by the time we got around to making an offer for it - had already been sold, for less than we were willing to offer? (I blame that one mostly on the bank, but partly on my own incompetence.)

Is it something health-related? Susan is currently struggling with a cold, and I've been fighting an ongoing battle with my innards for longer than I care to tell you.

Or is there something worse, something more dramatic and acute, lurking around the corner to complete the set?

I don't know. If no-one had ever told me that bad things happen in threes, I wouldn't be worrying about it. But on the other hand, I wouldn't have understood all those cultural allusions and references either.

So I can't really blame my mother. Blame myself, rather, for not believing me when I tell myself superstition is bollocks. I'm such an idiot.

How drunk would you have to be...?

Introducing perhaps the dumbest business idea since sliced ketchup: PersonRatings.com.

It's a website where you can rate anyone. Well, any American, anyway. You get to award marks out of five in each of ten categories: smart, sexy, confident, successful, friendly, funny, kind, classy, energetic, trustworthy. The score you see displayed for a person is based on the average rating they've received.

I don't know where to begin - but it doesn't matter, because none of my readers are demented enough to imagine for a microsecond that this sounds like a neat idea. Even the site's founder doesn't want to put his hand up to it: the only contact address given is for a "jerry.smith". Searching for "jerry smith" on PersonRatings turns up - nothing.

So whose brainchild is it? Turns out to belong to one Jeremy Stamper, of Seattle, WA. Mr Stamper, you may be reassured to learn, clocks a solid two out of five stars in each of the ten categories - meaning that, in the aggregate opinion of random people on the 'net, he's "not very" smart, successful, sexy etc.

Possibly Mr Stamper is hoping to capitalise on the Facebook Effect - that once you've got a profile, it's practically impossible to remove it, so you have no choice but to keep maintaining it for as long as the site owner chooses to hold you to ransom. Or possibly it's all some elaborate April Fool's joke that's broken early.

A Google search reveals that Mr Stamper made his first career, and name, in real estate. And now he's gone into publishing. Which, I guess, should be enough to tell us all exactly what I should think of him...

Just a couple of gems from the FAQ:

Why is Anonymous Free Speech important?

We should all be very protective of our right to express our opinions without being required to register with the government or any other entity. After all, why should governments, employers, or anyone else be tracking our personal opinions and beliefs. The American tradition of anonymous free speech is older than the United States itself. In fact, the anonymous publication of the Federalist Papers was vital to the birth of the United States. [And so on, but you get the gist.]

I swear, I'm not making this up. It gets funnier:

I see a post that isn't true. Will you remove it?

It is impossible for us to determine the legitimacy or veracity of posts. Even courts of law are seldom capable of this. With the amount of content that is posted, it is impractical for any service provider to scrutinize user generated content. We appreciate your help in trying to keep the site content legal and on topic. However, Personratings is not the author of posted content and is not obligated to remove content posted by users except in very rare circumstances. We believe that the best response to offensive free speech is not censorship, but instead more free speech. Readers will use their own criteria to evaluate the credibility of posts.

So feel free to visit Mr Stamper's profile and write - anonymously, of course - whatever takes your fancy. With a bit of determination, in six months' time, his name could be synonymous with "noted duck-rapist".

Addendum: Jeremy Stamper has added himself as a follower of this blog. Nice to see you, Jeremy - hope you enjoy it. But it does mean paragraph 3 of the above entry is probably no longer true. All the same, I'm leaving it now for the sake of Historical Integrity, or something.

The vision thing

"The TV keeps turning itself off," complains Susan.

Well, it often does that just after you turn it on. Particularly if you get impatient and try to press the button a second time before it's completely on. But of course, women don't understand technology.

"Be patient", I advise her. She scowls at me impatiently and jabs the button again.

The little LED on the front of the set is blinking, that means it's turning on. The screen lights up. The screen goes black. The silly girl must have pressed the button again. Exuding manly competence, I grab the control and press the button firmly. We wait.

In due time the screen lights up once more. It's showing a pretty but vague rainbow-like pattern, and no sound. Probably a close-up. Then it goes black.

"But I didn't press it!", I whimper. Evidently my technological grasp has slipped again. Susan looks at me pityingly.

Closer investigation shows that pressing the controls on the set itself gives the same result. And there's a suspiciously powerful aroma of ozone, with overtones of molten plastic, from the back of the set.

So now we have a whole new battery of problems. Try to get the TV repaired, or get rid of it? Get a new one, or live without for a while? Decisions, decisions.

Naturally, I know the only sensible thing to do is to get a new TV. But my lib'rul conscience won't let me rest at that point. I have to look into getting the old TV fixed, or failing that, disposing of it properly. In our world of political correctness gone mad, hurling it from the balcony is frowned upon. Especially by the people directly below.

I gather facts, canvas opinions...

"It'll cost $32 to have it recycled, if you deliver it to us - if we have to pick it up, it's $45" - that's the electronics waste disposal experts on the North Shore. They sound nice, and surely $45 is a small price for the smug glow of ecological responsibility.

"$55 to diagnose the fault in three business days. But we'll deduct it from the cost of fixing it. If we can find the parts." - that's the TV repair shop's quote. Before I can ask if it covers disposal costs, I'm interrupted by an estate agent on the other phone.

"Sell it on TradeMe. I got $3 for my broken vacuum cleaner last week." - that's Sarah's suggestion, and it's not a bad one. Get someone to pay to take it away? Ingenious.

Then I start looking into new TVs, and that's when the panic really hits me.

"You need an HDCP connector," says my boss, John the gadget freak. But none of the offerings on Dick Smith's website mention "HDCP" at all. They're all about "HDMI" instead.

Surely the Internet can help me. Someone must know the relationship, if any, between HDCP and HDMI? Sure enough, Wikipedia to the rescue:

"beginning with HDMI CTS 1.3a, any system which implements HDCP must do so in a fully-compliant manner"

Hmm. A little more opaque than I was hoping for, to be honest, but I think it means that a TV with an HDMI connector specified to version 1.3a or later will be able to accept HDCP input.

Back to Dick Smith. What versions of HDMI are implemented on these TVs? Not specified. Not specified. 1.2, that's no good. 1. Just '1'? - good grief, how prehistoric is that, might as well be throwing paint at the wall... Ah, this one's 1.3 - hmm, does that imply "1.3a", or is "a" a step beyond the basic "1.3"? Where did this bloody alphabet soup come from anyway? - whatever happened to the days when you just plugged an aerial lead into the back of your TV?

By now the set has been sitting in the back of my car for almost two days. I'm taking it to the repair shop this afternoon.

A wunch of bankers

(One more rant. I'm sorry. I promise I'll give it a rest - just after I get this off my chest.)

Back home, the Royal Bank of Scotland has announced the biggest corporate loss in British history. That's - my bank, since it swallowed up NatWest early in its greed-fuelled acquisition spree. And last year it lost £24 billion. That's more than General Motors. Its share price has dropped more than 98% in the past two years.

Impressive as these sums are, they're barely the tip of the RBS iceberg. The truly breathtaking number here is the amount of debt that the RBS has asked the British taxpayer to underwrite: £300 billion.

Three hundred billion pounds.

It's an unthinkable amount of money. If we simply printed it out and distributed it equally to every single man, woman and child on earth, they'd each have enough to buy a brand-new DVD player.

Three hundred billion pounds.

To put it in context: it's half the annual government budget of the UK. In other words, enough to give the entire population a six-month tax holiday. It's 20% - one fifth - of the country's entire GDP.

Three hundred billion pounds.

How do you lose that kind of money? How do you get it in the first place? If you're a bank, of course, you don't - you just pretend you've got it, lend it out to other people, and hope nobody asks for actual cash. Then you write the whole thing up in your books as a record profit. Added value? - don't make me laugh. Ponzi schemes look honest by comparison.

Three hundred billion pounds.

That's over US$420 billion - equivalent to more than half of Obama's entire stimulus package, swallowed up by one company. Truly, British banks are world-class. If the British economy were steaming ahead at full throttle, such a blow would probably be enough to put it into recession all by itself. With the economy already in recession...

I shouldn't complain - as an ex-pat, erstwhile depositor with the bank, I'm more beneficiary than payer. I'm just glad I got my money out. No, the losers are people like poor ol' former CEO Sir Fred Goodwin, who finds himself jobless and probably unemployable at the tender age of 50, with nothing but his half-million-a-year pension to fall back on...

Surely - surely - the time has come to abandon the pretence that "banking" is some kind of industry. "Industry" implies a process whereby inputs of land, labour and capital are translated into goods or services of greater value than what goes in. When companies find themselves unable to do that, they go out of business, so that their land, labour and capital become available to someone who has a fucking clue about what they're doing.

None of which, evidently, happens in banking. Taxpayers, it turns out, are underwriting the losses. So where was our share of the profits?

The conventional answer to that was that banking was essential to "fuel" economic growth, which benefits everyone. But what should we conclude, now it turns out that most of that growth for the past ten years has been an illusion - that the banks have "improved" our living standards only by running up our debt? Without asking us?

As far as I'm concerned, there's only one agency that's entitled to spend my money on my behalf without giving me some kind of option to veto each transaction... and that's my government. If banks are going to be doing that, then they need to be openly and accountably run by said government.

I'm not so naïve as to think that will make us any better off. But at least it'll stop Sir Fred and his cronies from being role models. They'll still be robbing us all, and no doubt they'll still get knighted for it, but they'll be seen for the idiotic, wasteful bureaucrats they are.

Three kinds of stupid

You're probably aware of the "Dunning-Kruger effect", although maybe not by that name. It's the psychological effect that shields us all from the ego-devastating realisation of how incompetent we are. It's why we're all, privately, sure that we'd be good at things we know nothing about, like designing websites or running restaurants.

I discovered this the other day while researching incompetence. It's a diverting piece of research. But it's not the kind of incompetence I wanted to write about. As I might have expected of myself, I successfully researched the wrong thing.

Every comic and wannabe from here to eternity has a stock of lines about how some intelligent, articulate, middle-aged professional spends hours trying to figure out their video/voicemail/laptop/Roomba/toaster, while their six-year-old kid only has to sneeze at it to make it sit up and perform tricks that would, in more enlightened times, have got the little brat burned as a witch and serve them right. But only Scott Adams, to my knowledge, has proposed a complete pseudoscientific theory of this widely-observed effect.

Adams (in one of his books, not available online) posited the idea of an "incompetence threshold" - a measure of our own capacity to be defeated by something that's supposed to be simple. This threshold, he says, rises a little with every year of our lives as the world around us grows more complicated, until we reach the point where we're completely flummoxed by tasks that would've seemed trivial to our pre-teenaged selves. And as each new generation grows up in a more complex world, they redesign tasks on the assumption of more complexity, and the "correct" way to complete these tasks slowly grows ever-more-infuriatingly opaque to older people.

Take recycling, for instance. Today's kids seem to have no difficulty at all with the rule that certain types of plastic - identifiable by the number stamped on the base - go into certain bins, and that's the end of it. But me, I can't stop thinking: "How clean does it need to be? Am I supposed to peel the labels off first? How do I know if the lid is the same plastic as the bottle? Can I put the bottles in a bag? What kind of bag?", and when I actually ask about these, or the myriad other questions that no-one seems to have mentioned, I'm made to feel as if I'm personally responsible for muddying the clarity of the basic message.

And so, more and more often, I find myself guessing the answers and hoping for the best. I'm deeply grateful that, for now at least, my wife handles most of the recycling - but, Adams's theory tells me, it's only a matter of time before she's as out of her depth as I am now.

Adams belongs to the Muntz school of philosophy: "people are acting stupid, ha ha". (Although in fairness, he does say that people aren't, on the whole, really stupid - it's just that, in certain circumstances and from certain perspectives, they appear that way.) Another famous blogger, Joel Spolsky, takes a different angle on the same issue. Spolsky, more constructively, tries to explain what it is that makes people seem so stupid, and how to help them.

Spolsky is in a minority. Laughing at people is always more fun than trying to understand or help them. It is, fortunately for us all, an influential minority - because people who think of incompetence as a problem to be solved, rather than a character flaw to be ridiculed, tend to get things done. In politics, however, it doesn't do so well. "Don't laugh, it's not his fault" is an inherently elitist thing to say.

What started me on this train of thought was my own experience, last week, of trying to comment on Nodressrehearsal's blog. Because my valued friend NDR has disabled "anonymous" comments on her blog, you need to sign in either with a LiveJournal account, or with something called "OpenID", which lots of sites, including Blogspot, support.

Now, I already have more Internet service accounts with more people than I can easily count, and I'd really like to minimise the number of these I create. So I decided to create an "OpenID" account, in the hope that it might also serve for other purposes someday.

And this was the task that defeated me. It seems to me that the powers behind "OpenID" haven't read or understood Spolsky's book. In a distracting environment, with lots of things to do at once, the task of signing in to a LiveJournal site with an OpenID proved to be beyond me.

It was quite a shock to learn that my incompetency threshold has reached the point where I am officially incapable of leaving a comment on NDR's blog, but it's just something I have to live with.