Well, the Lib Vs. Con battle is a faux war that is only destroying our collective sense of the death of objective AND investigative AND diverse journalism.
Journalism started to die off in great masses of professionals in the early 1990s. Today, I can hardly use the term "journalism" since that thing is essentially dead. Many important stories are simply ignored for purely political reasons by men who should know better. And another fat slice of the population finds itself being spoon-fed intellectual pap that leads to a greater fantasy view of the world... which they are passing on to their kids, etc.
American journalism is now not liberal or conservative. It's corporate. More precisely, it's 90% corporate, 5% liberal, and 5% conservative. It's a triumph of American Imperialism. Each news outlet is a retail store that sells the viewpoint of the Empire constantly.
I can only refer to you to the book "Into the Buzzsaw" about the death of objective, investigative and diverse journalism. Combine that book with the economic and corporate criticisms in the books "When Corporations Rule the World" and "Perfectly Legal", and there's no way you'll exist afterward saying the word journalism without getting choked up and having tears spring up in your eyes.
It's not liberal, it's not conservative. It's just dead. Thank god for the Internet, or I'd be a completely ignorant person from what TV, radio and newspapers would deliver to me.
Nobody else was worrying about the Taliban at the time, either.
Well, gee, with the collusion of apathy and cheerleading amongst news sources, it becomes difficult for the common man to become educated enough about things like future Talibans in order to become concerned.
The American CIA is similarly insulated from public worry. People commonly go about their lives utterly unconcerned about the documented offenses of this agency. In part, that's because of the press blackout.
The old sentiments are quite correct on this matter: Without a free (or diverse) press, our democracies simply cannot function.
the bank's new overlords and masters in Minnesota [...] said the problem was that we were all to [sic] provincial to understand the brave new world of banking
Sadly, they were right. Bad treatment is now the new banking paradigm. You WERE too provincial in thinking that the (obviously growing) bank was supposed to care for their customers. Banks now serve their institutional stockholders (individual stockholders are merely along for the ride) and executives. Everyone else can just take their banking business elsewhere... which explains the explosive growth in check-cashing places, methinks.
Banks have been getting rid of the small customer for years. You're just another expense for them (i.e. your accounts divided by customer support is too small a number). The real money is in serving the wealthy, and every bank wants in on that action. In this frenzied scrabbling for loot, common customer service is often lost... and since there really aren't enough wealthy people to support a fat slice of every bank's profit margins, this just leads to all kinds of agony.
Some guy destroys his marriage from playing too many video games.
I call this a "personality deficiency".
You say this is "a very dangerous thing to do"?
I will not avoid criticism of such behavior, nor will I go down the road of tossing such behaviors into the laps of those elitist fuckwits known as pill-dispensing psychologists.
I often feel horny. But I don't then jump on the next woman I see. If I can keep myself under control, then so can these "personality deficient" types. After using shame and force, perhaps then we can then consider that some "medical" reason lays behind it all.
Stop demonizing social controls. Your medical care system is as morally bankrupt an organization as we can imagine. Those who rely on it are just stupid.
Probably much in line with all addictions, I wouldn't call it an epidemic. That it is widespread, is true. That is affects too many people, is false.
Also in line with many addictions, the victims or participants are handicapping their lives in serious ways. But we can always draw a parallel between excessive game playing and excessive working or schooling. After all, there's nothing more pathetic than working long hours for the money to buy things you have no time to enjoy.
This addiction is running its course. Marriages are being destroyed as we speak from immersed gamers... but these marriages would have been destroyed by alcoholism, cheating, or money arguments instead. The heart of the matter is a personality deficiency. Gaming is just one more outlet for this deficiency to express itself.
It certainly is ironic that the city housing the US Constitution has unconstitutionally banned the private keeping and bearing of arms. This in no way makes it a good idea to spread this unconstitutional behavior. And if you haven't caught on yet: what DC did is fucking unconstitutional.
To put it another way, a successful murder in one area isn't a model for committing murder in another. It's still immoral, and it's still illegal.
DC needs to be corrected. What is lacking here is a popular will in the DC area to assert the law of the land over DC.
I'm against guns outside of specialist forces. Sure, I know criminals will be able to get their guns illegally. I just take my chances with that.
Doesn't it ever occur to you that your taking chances for yourself doesn't logically extend to others?
At any rate, if you don't like the fact of private ownership of a variety of weapons in the United States, all you really have to do is have your Congressional Representative start the process of amending the US Constitution. Once the effort leaves the Congress, it can then be voted on by the States. Once 38 States vote for it, your wish will come true.
Anything other than that is an unconstitutional daydream.
A space telescope is not a consumer item like a car. People get rid of cars for reasons hardly related to how out-dated it is, since you really can't out-date the ability to travel down a road on 4 wheels.
The only thing which makes the Hubble out-dated is that investment in ground-based scopes is producing capabilities at least as good as the Hubble. We can question the amounts of those investments, sure, but they are being made.
The Hubble space telescope that should have been built would have been at least 10 times as expensive, but no 'scope on Earth would have matched it for the foreseeable future. As usual, NASA underwent compromises and austerity measures, and we ended up with the present Hubble.
I'm sure the next space telescope (James Webb?) will be laden with the same bureaucratic weights that will relegate it to obsolescence far before it's actual space lifetime.
Being told "we're stuck" and "it does no good to complain" is getting old.
If the Congress denies the funding, the soldiers will have to leave Iraq... unless they feel like sticking around without being paid and firing shrinking stocks of ammo from hummers they can't drive for a lack of fuel.
Also, call it "anti-Bush rhetoric" all you want, but he's still a Fascist, and it's still Viet Nam all over again. The Viet Nam war was morally wrong and we "should not" be in it again.
All you can do is mod our stuff down... but you can't shut it up.
Not to support a Fascist like Bush, but whatever he's doing, he's just following the elitist plans long laid out. You could easily choose the Carter era for all the misappropriation of Social Security funds... which every President and Congress has dipped into since. You could easily choose the Reagan era, with all the deregulation and reduction of wealth taxes... which every President and Congress has supported since. You could easily choose the Clinton era, with all the industrial-capital flight from the country, and all the financial scams... which every President, Presidental candidiate and Congress has supported since.
There's nothing that Bush is doing that Hillary Clinton won't continue in one form or another in 2008 when she runs as the Dem Party candidate for President.
They're all crooks. They're all millionaire globalists looking to make their next million off the suffering of the American common worker. They hate the working class. They look out of their office towers, mansions and limos and sneer with contempt at the trudging animals on America's streets.
But we elect and re-elect them like fucking morons. You may well be right that what's coming for Americans is good, like an amputation of a gangrenous limb is good.
This all depends upon the character of "richest country". You can choose to be so wealthy by a cooperative prosperity, or by frenzied looting. Since much of the American economy is transforming itself into the "frenzied looting" type, then it becomes obvious that socialized medicine doesn't have a place in it.
Since 2000, over 97% of voting America chose to support the candidates for the American Corporate War Party. The ACWP is Fascist: the merging of state and corporate power, using violent nationalism. Affordability and access to medical care are nowhere to be found in the platform of this party.
So, Amtrak and other corporate and business entities will continue to receive support, and will find themselves availed of access and affordability to all kinds of things, while certain individuals can just die under bridges in winter or something.
This is what happens when money becomes a nation's religion. This is what happens when everyone wants to become a paper millionaire. The end result is an obviously bad one since in the final analysis, you can't eat money.
For that matter, what size is overall health care in America? The last figures I heard placed the American health industry at hundreds of billions, making it at least one of the top 5 businesses in the country.
Health care is a serious issue for a First World nation. It seems right for it to be an enormous industry, socialized or not. FW nations should value their citizens and be committed to delivering long and healthy lives. That's expensive... and well worth it.
Speaking as a man who finds socialized medicine worthy of starting in the USA (at least in the form of state-by-state experiments), I still find it troubling that people would solely harp on costs. Cost, availability and overall quality are the things which should concern us.
During the 1990s, I lived in Massachusetts. I had plenty of occasions to visit Ohio then, and I returned to Ohio in 1997 to the present day. I know exactly what's going on. Weapon confiscation was only right around the corner. Since then, the people have been taking back their right to keep and bear, and now Ohio has a concealed carry law that frankly annoyed the people in the state capitol... as if I gave a flying fuck. As for Mass., I'm sure they still have their big signs along the turnpike stating that bringing a gun into the state is a felony... again, as if I gave a shit, but it only demonstrates how little Massholes cared about the US Constitution.
And don't hold up Texas as some sort of shining state. What are the statistics of police seizures in Texas? Nationally, seizure went through the fucking roof for the entire nation. Texas has police with budgets too, and I'm sure they just loved the income from seizing people's properties. For instance, in Texas, if you're caught with drugs in your car, what happens to your car when you're arrested? In Ohio, the same event results in the Gestapo simply taking your car and then auctioning it off, which is unreasonable seizure by any measure.
Spoken like a true desk-job inhabitant. Let's put you and all these teachers through manual labor and see how much you'll appreciate your cushy jobs when you return to them. It's winter, jackass. Look outside. I see people doing work. It's fucking awful for them. Compared to them, and the raft of people who are now condemned to manual labor without job security, A TEACHING JOB IS COMPLETELY CUSHY.
Now go suffer in the corner, covering your whack-job head and moaning at how difficult your desk job is. And get a fucking sense of perspective, yuppie bitch. You could be getting a forklift dropping a 1800LB crate on your leg. I don't see too many pieces of heavy and dangerous machinery in the average office.
The 2nd Amendment is a poster child for the practice of conducting a popularity contest about parts of the US Constitution. As you noted, there is a widespread feeling that that amendment no longer applies. Isn't it funny, though, that it's still there in the document, and hasn't been amended away by a clearly defined process of change that has been used in several other instances?
I have no problem with people attempting to get rid of the 2nd Amendment. The trouble is, they have no stomach for the actual process of change, which involves the US Congress, and then must pass at least 38 of the 50 states. When people refuse to obey the law of the land, it really is time to unlock the rifle and let them know the consequences of such contempt.
My schooling experience up to and including high school was a vast vacuum of actual civics training. This is also why people don't know what cops can and can't do when they are detained by them. Nobody knows, so when faced with a guy with a gun, you simply tend to obey. Why wouldn't the State love this kind of thing?
I do believe there is an insidiousness to it all, in which knowledge is power, hence anyone can see that a public school system in a Republic-cum-Empire is not apt to actually educate about civics. But the faults go really deeper than that. I can see in retrospect that my teachers themselves were lousy citizens, and that passes on the same malaise.
With the advent of Fox News as an outright propaganda arm of the Republican Party, children really are under assault by anti-Republic forces in the vicious climb of the Imperial ladder. Knowledge of the US Constitution is now dangerous (which was already a well developed philosophy in the 1990s, what with people blatantly ignoring the freedom to own weapons, and the freedom from unreasonable search/seizure)... hence, we shouldn't expect anyone to risk their relatively cushy teaching jobs to actually teach American youth about the basis of the legal system. Now we let things devolve to a popularity contest, depending on which depraved faction of retards inhabits the majority party of the Congress and the White House.
The Imperial fall is coming right on schedule. The children are apparently so signed-on to this that I consider it inevitable.
I can name one: the way the American government SHOULD be. Don't go around and excuse corruption and injustice just because you think your government is the best there is.
No, that was "manifest destiny" or something equally self-serving. Our Western history books are the ones that won. Too bad this has little to do with truth and justice, but... ah, nuts.
Well, I'm sure some sort of IT infrastructure will be necessary. I'm equally sure it will nothing like what the First World enjoys. The lack of electricity alone will demand a very distributed and offline form of a network.
All that doesn't matter as long as managers can submit progress reports. The appearance of being productive has long overtaken actual productivity in government. After all, an appearance is not as risky as actual production. In anecdote after anecdote, I hear this happen all the time. Results are risky since someone has to make real changes and then take responsibility for them. It's much better from the manager standpoint to keep the organizational waters muddy enough until they can retire. Since many managers do this, success in IT projects is almost unattainable.
It would take a really rare top manager to get something done, on time, on budget, and finally, working roughly as designed to fulfill real needs. This rare manager would need extreme organizational skills as well as the ability to shatter endless obstructions.
You can't just leave things alone since the hardware eventually becomes too expensive or impossible to maintain. Still, moving to new hardware shouldn't involve all the changes you alluded to. A hardware migration today should provide a software layer that makes it seamless. No doubt your management hit upon the idea they'd "modernize", hence they changed too much (hardware, software, and in fact the entire system design basis) and you are all now paying the price.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the Lib Vs. Con battle is a faux war that is only destroying our collective sense of the death of objective AND investigative AND diverse journalism.
... which they are passing on to their kids, etc.
Journalism started to die off in great masses of professionals in the early 1990s. Today, I can hardly use the term "journalism" since that thing is essentially dead. Many important stories are simply ignored for purely political reasons by men who should know better. And another fat slice of the population finds itself being spoon-fed intellectual pap that leads to a greater fantasy view of the world
American journalism is now not liberal or conservative. It's corporate. More precisely, it's 90% corporate, 5% liberal, and 5% conservative. It's a triumph of American Imperialism. Each news outlet is a retail store that sells the viewpoint of the Empire constantly.
I can only refer to you to the book "Into the Buzzsaw" about the death of objective, investigative and diverse journalism. Combine that book with the economic and corporate criticisms in the books "When Corporations Rule the World" and "Perfectly Legal", and there's no way you'll exist afterward saying the word journalism without getting choked up and having tears spring up in your eyes.
It's not liberal, it's not conservative. It's just dead. Thank god for the Internet, or I'd be a completely ignorant person from what TV, radio and newspapers would deliver to me.
Nobody else was worrying about the Taliban at the time, either.
Well, gee, with the collusion of apathy and cheerleading amongst news sources, it becomes difficult for the common man to become educated enough about things like future Talibans in order to become concerned.
The American CIA is similarly insulated from public worry. People commonly go about their lives utterly unconcerned about the documented offenses of this agency. In part, that's because of the press blackout.
The old sentiments are quite correct on this matter: Without a free (or diverse) press, our democracies simply cannot function.
the bank's new overlords and masters in Minnesota [...] said the problem was that we were all to [sic] provincial to understand the brave new world of banking
... which explains the explosive growth in check-cashing places, methinks.
... and since there really aren't enough wealthy people to support a fat slice of every bank's profit margins, this just leads to all kinds of agony.
Sadly, they were right. Bad treatment is now the new banking paradigm. You WERE too provincial in thinking that the (obviously growing) bank was supposed to care for their customers. Banks now serve their institutional stockholders (individual stockholders are merely along for the ride) and executives. Everyone else can just take their banking business elsewhere
Banks have been getting rid of the small customer for years. You're just another expense for them (i.e. your accounts divided by customer support is too small a number). The real money is in serving the wealthy, and every bank wants in on that action. In this frenzied scrabbling for loot, common customer service is often lost
- Some guy destroys his marriage from playing too many video games.
- I call this a "personality deficiency".
- You say this is "a very dangerous thing to do"?
I will not avoid criticism of such behavior, nor will I go down the road of tossing such behaviors into the laps of those elitist fuckwits known as pill-dispensing psychologists.I often feel horny. But I don't then jump on the next woman I see. If I can keep myself under control, then so can these "personality deficient" types. After using shame and force, perhaps then we can then consider that some "medical" reason lays behind it all.
Stop demonizing social controls. Your medical care system is as morally bankrupt an organization as we can imagine. Those who rely on it are just stupid.
Probably much in line with all addictions, I wouldn't call it an epidemic. That it is widespread, is true. That is affects too many people, is false.
... but these marriages would have been destroyed by alcoholism, cheating, or money arguments instead. The heart of the matter is a personality deficiency. Gaming is just one more outlet for this deficiency to express itself.
Also in line with many addictions, the victims or participants are handicapping their lives in serious ways. But we can always draw a parallel between excessive game playing and excessive working or schooling. After all, there's nothing more pathetic than working long hours for the money to buy things you have no time to enjoy.
This addiction is running its course. Marriages are being destroyed as we speak from immersed gamers
It certainly is ironic that the city housing the US Constitution has unconstitutionally banned the private keeping and bearing of arms. This in no way makes it a good idea to spread this unconstitutional behavior. And if you haven't caught on yet: what DC did is fucking unconstitutional.
To put it another way, a successful murder in one area isn't a model for committing murder in another. It's still immoral, and it's still illegal.
DC needs to be corrected. What is lacking here is a popular will in the DC area to assert the law of the land over DC.
I'm against guns outside of specialist forces. Sure, I know criminals will be able to get their guns illegally. I just take my chances with that.
Doesn't it ever occur to you that your taking chances for yourself doesn't logically extend to others?
At any rate, if you don't like the fact of private ownership of a variety of weapons in the United States, all you really have to do is have your Congressional Representative start the process of amending the US Constitution. Once the effort leaves the Congress, it can then be voted on by the States. Once 38 States vote for it, your wish will come true.
Anything other than that is an unconstitutional daydream.
Computers don't swap files.
Dead people do.
A space telescope is not a consumer item like a car. People get rid of cars for reasons hardly related to how out-dated it is, since you really can't out-date the ability to travel down a road on 4 wheels.
The only thing which makes the Hubble out-dated is that investment in ground-based scopes is producing capabilities at least as good as the Hubble. We can question the amounts of those investments, sure, but they are being made. The Hubble space telescope that should have been built would have been at least 10 times as expensive, but no 'scope on Earth would have matched it for the foreseeable future. As usual, NASA underwent compromises and austerity measures, and we ended up with the present Hubble.
I'm sure the next space telescope (James Webb?) will be laden with the same bureaucratic weights that will relegate it to obsolescence far before it's actual space lifetime.
Note: In my area (Ohio, USA), it is illegal for a TV repair shop to install used parts. Hence, the price of a repair is artificially higher.
Being told "we're stuck" and "it does no good to complain" is getting old.
... unless they feel like sticking around without being paid and firing shrinking stocks of ammo from hummers they can't drive for a lack of fuel.
... but you can't shut it up.
If the Congress denies the funding, the soldiers will have to leave Iraq
Also, call it "anti-Bush rhetoric" all you want, but he's still a Fascist, and it's still Viet Nam all over again. The Viet Nam war was morally wrong and we "should not" be in it again.
All you can do is mod our stuff down
Not to support a Fascist like Bush, but whatever he's doing, he's just following the elitist plans long laid out. You could easily choose the Carter era for all the misappropriation of Social Security funds ... which every President and Congress has dipped into since. You could easily choose the Reagan era, with all the deregulation and reduction of wealth taxes ... which every President and Congress has supported since. You could easily choose the Clinton era, with all the industrial-capital flight from the country, and all the financial scams ... which every President, Presidental candidiate and Congress has supported since.
There's nothing that Bush is doing that Hillary Clinton won't continue in one form or another in 2008 when she runs as the Dem Party candidate for President.
They're all crooks. They're all millionaire globalists looking to make their next million off the suffering of the American common worker. They hate the working class. They look out of their office towers, mansions and limos and sneer with contempt at the trudging animals on America's streets.
But we elect and re-elect them like fucking morons. You may well be right that what's coming for Americans is good, like an amputation of a gangrenous limb is good.
This all depends upon the character of "richest country". You can choose to be so wealthy by a cooperative prosperity, or by frenzied looting. Since much of the American economy is transforming itself into the "frenzied looting" type, then it becomes obvious that socialized medicine doesn't have a place in it.
Since 2000, over 97% of voting America chose to support the candidates for the American Corporate War Party. The ACWP is Fascist: the merging of state and corporate power, using violent nationalism. Affordability and access to medical care are nowhere to be found in the platform of this party.
So, Amtrak and other corporate and business entities will continue to receive support, and will find themselves availed of access and affordability to all kinds of things, while certain individuals can just die under bridges in winter or something.
This is what happens when money becomes a nation's religion. This is what happens when everyone wants to become a paper millionaire. The end result is an obviously bad one since in the final analysis, you can't eat money.
For that matter, what size is overall health care in America? The last figures I heard placed the American health industry at hundreds of billions, making it at least one of the top 5 businesses in the country.
... and well worth it.
Health care is a serious issue for a First World nation. It seems right for it to be an enormous industry, socialized or not. FW nations should value their citizens and be committed to delivering long and healthy lives. That's expensive
Speaking as a man who finds socialized medicine worthy of starting in the USA (at least in the form of state-by-state experiments), I still find it troubling that people would solely harp on costs. Cost, availability and overall quality are the things which should concern us.
During the 1990s, I lived in Massachusetts. I had plenty of occasions to visit Ohio then, and I returned to Ohio in 1997 to the present day. I know exactly what's going on. Weapon confiscation was only right around the corner. Since then, the people have been taking back their right to keep and bear, and now Ohio has a concealed carry law that frankly annoyed the people in the state capitol ... as if I gave a flying fuck. As for Mass., I'm sure they still have their big signs along the turnpike stating that bringing a gun into the state is a felony ... again, as if I gave a shit, but it only demonstrates how little Massholes cared about the US Constitution.
And don't hold up Texas as some sort of shining state. What are the statistics of police seizures in Texas? Nationally, seizure went through the fucking roof for the entire nation. Texas has police with budgets too, and I'm sure they just loved the income from seizing people's properties. For instance, in Texas, if you're caught with drugs in your car, what happens to your car when you're arrested? In Ohio, the same event results in the Gestapo simply taking your car and then auctioning it off, which is unreasonable seizure by any measure.
Spoken like a true desk-job inhabitant. Let's put you and all these teachers through manual labor and see how much you'll appreciate your cushy jobs when you return to them. It's winter, jackass. Look outside. I see people doing work. It's fucking awful for them. Compared to them, and the raft of people who are now condemned to manual labor without job security, A TEACHING JOB IS COMPLETELY CUSHY.
Now go suffer in the corner, covering your whack-job head and moaning at how difficult your desk job is. And get a fucking sense of perspective, yuppie bitch. You could be getting a forklift dropping a 1800LB crate on your leg. I don't see too many pieces of heavy and dangerous machinery in the average office.
The 2nd Amendment is a poster child for the practice of conducting a popularity contest about parts of the US Constitution. As you noted, there is a widespread feeling that that amendment no longer applies. Isn't it funny, though, that it's still there in the document, and hasn't been amended away by a clearly defined process of change that has been used in several other instances?
I have no problem with people attempting to get rid of the 2nd Amendment. The trouble is, they have no stomach for the actual process of change, which involves the US Congress, and then must pass at least 38 of the 50 states. When people refuse to obey the law of the land, it really is time to unlock the rifle and let them know the consequences of such contempt.
My schooling experience up to and including high school was a vast vacuum of actual civics training. This is also why people don't know what cops can and can't do when they are detained by them. Nobody knows, so when faced with a guy with a gun, you simply tend to obey. Why wouldn't the State love this kind of thing?
... hence, we shouldn't expect anyone to risk their relatively cushy teaching jobs to actually teach American youth about the basis of the legal system. Now we let things devolve to a popularity contest, depending on which depraved faction of retards inhabits the majority party of the Congress and the White House.
I do believe there is an insidiousness to it all, in which knowledge is power, hence anyone can see that a public school system in a Republic-cum-Empire is not apt to actually educate about civics. But the faults go really deeper than that. I can see in retrospect that my teachers themselves were lousy citizens, and that passes on the same malaise.
With the advent of Fox News as an outright propaganda arm of the Republican Party, children really are under assault by anti-Republic forces in the vicious climb of the Imperial ladder. Knowledge of the US Constitution is now dangerous (which was already a well developed philosophy in the 1990s, what with people blatantly ignoring the freedom to own weapons, and the freedom from unreasonable search/seizure)
The Imperial fall is coming right on schedule. The children are apparently so signed-on to this that I consider it inevitable.
I can name one: the way the American government SHOULD be. Don't go around and excuse corruption and injustice just because you think your government is the best there is.
What responsibilities will be honored in a state that is not just?
No, that was "manifest destiny" or something equally self-serving. Our Western history books are the ones that won. Too bad this has little to do with truth and justice, but ... ah, nuts.
Well, I'm sure some sort of IT infrastructure will be necessary. I'm equally sure it will nothing like what the First World enjoys. The lack of electricity alone will demand a very distributed and offline form of a network.
All that doesn't matter as long as managers can submit progress reports. The appearance of being productive has long overtaken actual productivity in government. After all, an appearance is not as risky as actual production. In anecdote after anecdote, I hear this happen all the time. Results are risky since someone has to make real changes and then take responsibility for them. It's much better from the manager standpoint to keep the organizational waters muddy enough until they can retire. Since many managers do this, success in IT projects is almost unattainable.
It would take a really rare top manager to get something done, on time, on budget, and finally, working roughly as designed to fulfill real needs. This rare manager would need extreme organizational skills as well as the ability to shatter endless obstructions.
You can't just leave things alone since the hardware eventually becomes too expensive or impossible to maintain. Still, moving to new hardware shouldn't involve all the changes you alluded to. A hardware migration today should provide a software layer that makes it seamless. No doubt your management hit upon the idea they'd "modernize", hence they changed too much (hardware, software, and in fact the entire system design basis) and you are all now paying the price.