Slashdot Mirror
Every British Citizen To Have a Personal Webpage
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is about to announce that within a year everyone in Great Britain will be given a personalized webpage for accessing Government services as part of a plan to save billions of pounds by putting all public services online. The move could see the closure of job centers and physical offices dealing with tax, vehicle licensing, passports and housing benefits within 10 years as services are offered through a single digital gateway. [This] 'saves time for people and it saves money for the Government — the processing of a piece of paper and mailing it back costs many times more than it costs to process something electronically,' says Tim Berners-Lee, an advisor to the Prime Minister. However, the proposals are coming under fire from union leaders who complain that thousands of public sector workers would be made jobless and pointed to the Government's poor record of handling personal data. 'Cutting public services is not only bad for the public who use services but also the economy as we are pushing people who provide valuable services on the dole,' says one union leader."
It also makes us nice and easy to keep an eye on. All our activity now leaves a nice little easy to follow trail. Much nicer for the government to follow than before.
i know not what weapons the next world war will be fought with, but world war IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
so there are thousands of government workers that could easily be replaced by a small pile of silicon chips and a bit of electricity, and they are said to provide "valuable service"? I have an idea, let them go work and provide something of actual value, or let them starve to death. win / win either way.
The amount of paperwork and legwork to get anything government-related done is untolerable in this day and age. We should have been enjoying electronic government for at least 15 years by now. Finally someone up there is getting it.
Now half of the posts here will be about the stupid "personal webpage" phrasing that has nothing to do with the actual idea, and the other half will be about an Orwellian apocalypse. Which may be well-grounded, as British government earned some bad reputation in regards to privacy.
However, I would still argue that this is a step in the right direction, and it is inevitable in the long run. We as a technical community should suggest ways to protect privacy with proper modern protocols, not with the obscurity of 18th century style paperwork.
I also hope that the governments in other countries will follow the example.
let them go work and provide something of actual value, or let them starve to death. win / win either way.
A little harsh, but not a troll. Why should the government be exempt from good stewardship with tax revenue?
I've heard it said that schools exist so the teachers have jobs. Toll booths remain open, even though they only support the employees and bring in no further revenue.
There is no reason the government should be allowed to waste money just so someone has a job. Might as well pay one person to dig a hole and another to fill it back up. But that would only make sense if it was a union job.
In the private sector, a leech who doesn't care about his customers quickly goes out of business. In the public sector, a leech who doesn't care about his customers forms a union.
I'm not sure that your examples of doctors, and military are actually as distinct from the IT experience as one might like.
When some system has gone casters-up, users screaming, immediate crisis, people are happy to talk to(and typically blame) IT. Similarly, when somebody staggers into the ER, they usually obey the doctor, whether actively or de-facto because they aren't conscious enough to do anything else. When a shooting war erupts, the military commonly acquires substantial clout, and control over operations.
However, far fewer people are interested in listening to IT people give long boring talks about all the money and time they will need to build a system that actually functions. They are, in fact, almost exactly as willing to do that as they are to listen to, and follow, their doctor's advice on boring stuff like diet and exercise(and god help the poor epidemiologist who gives politically unpalatable advice like "Y'know, a food system based on subsidizing corn-syrup is turning us into lardasses" or "No, we shouldn't squander valuable antibiotics in order to make meat incrementally cheaper" or "Guess how many excess deaths the pollution from $FAVORED_LOCAL_INDUSTRY causes every year?"). On the military side, armies are commonly handled conflicts created and defined by outside political conditions, equipped with whatever hardware had the most persuasive vendor, and expected to achieve a politically satisfactory objective.
The details vary, of course, from situation to situation; but I'd say that all of those areas suffer from the common problem of having high short-term clout(once the shit has hit the fan, people generally cling to the experts who might save their sorry asses as though they were drowning babies); but far too little systemic clout to head off the problems that they can easily see coming(nobody wants to hear IT whine about vulnerabilities that might be exploited, they want to act surprised when they do get exploited. Nobody wants to reform their diet and exercise because of some doctor's mumbo-jumbo about cholesterol counts; but they are surprisingly willing to let the same doctor chop them open and do emergency maintenance when they keel over. During wartime, you can get excoriated for not supporting the troops hard enough; but that doesn't mean that you have to listen to their assesments of the situation on the ground, or even bother to order the hardware that they say they need.)
'Cutting public services is not only bad for the public who use services but also the economy as we are pushing people who provide valuable services on the dole,' says one union leader
Hey, let's engineer a couple of oil-spills, too! Jobs for thousands of people, and those people will be performing valuable services!
Yeah, who cares about the jobs lost? Those jobs are shit jobs. I mean, who wants to preserve a job that is retyping something that someone else wrote? Screw that. Free people up. Let them actually think about things. I bump into this all the time. I just had a conversation with a friend of mine in IT and we were standing on the street corner shouting this same thing into the air. If the computer can do it, then it's repetitive and boring. Stupid, stupid work. There are hard things that people do well that actually is worth something. People just do not think when they worry about protecting this sort of job.
Sadly, there are a lot of people who are simply incapable of performing any job that requires original or creative thought. Call me an elitist if you will, but you know it's true. There are only so many burgers that need to be flipped, floors that need to be mopped, etc.
Put someone into a job that's beyond their capacity they'll do it poorly, be miserable while doing it, and make everyone everyone miserable in the process.
A casual acquaintance from high school has been working for the last 25 years cleaning up roadkill for the county, and he's as happy as a pig in slop doing what most people here would consider a shit job. He'd consider any job that involved more math than tallying up how many critters he scraped off the pavement to be the "shit job".
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I'm not even sure I want to even visit the UK anymore
And I would really like to go to the USA again. The problems are getting there, getting in and being safe.
Getting there, we are forced to go through a ridiculous amount of control and surveillance - and that is from a Brit.
Getting in involves getting past your (in)famous immigration. I will get asked questions, may have my property confiscated and may even get jailed for hitting some drone on the fist with my face.
Safe? In the USA? According to the media, everyone carries - law abiding, police, bankers and other criminals.
I once went in uniform. Got to the base and was issued an M16. Next time, I want an M1 Abrams!
Police state? Yes we had someone shot by them here once - Jean Charles De Menezes in 2005. He was unusual. Normally, you need to at least pretend or carry a chair leg or something. Your police are described as a little more trigger happy.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Yeah, who cares about the jobs lost? Those jobs are shit jobs. I mean, who wants to preserve a job that is retyping something that someone else wrote? Screw that. Free people up. Let them actually think about things.
It is the last part that is an issue. Where pencil and paper, and where telephones are concerned, the person at the other end in the UK still has some leeway to use their own common sense. For example, there are many tax issues to which the solution is "write a letter explaining the situation to your local tax office" (or phone them up and talk to someone). Where web forms are concerned, the fixed Java code at the other end doesn't really care a toss about any letters you write. You might moan about "inflexible bureaucrats", but automatic processing is even less flexible than that. Welcome to the world of "computer says no".
There is also always an overestimation of the amount of money saved. Not only because governments are bad at estimates (though they are) but because the government is the only employer that gets about a third of whatever it pays straight back in tax (more if you count the flow-on effects that they also tax everyone you buy anything from, so get a fair whack of your "after tax" income too).
Sadly, there are a lot of people who are simply incapable of performing any job that requires original or creative thought. Call me an elitist if you will, but you know it's true. There are only so many burgers that need to be flipped, floors that need to be mopped, etc.
Put someone into a job that's beyond their capacity they'll do it poorly, be miserable while doing it, and make everyone everyone miserable in the process.
The majority of people who work shit jobs do not them because that is the job they are best suited for. People are much more capable than what the current system allows them to be. I started doing physics not because I thought I was smarter than other kids (I wasn't), and I've come to find that most scientists aren't either. They simply took the classes, did the things they were supposed to, and stayed the course. I say let the boring jobs disappear. We will adapt.