@Tupp_ed Agreed. Resilience to surprise events e.g. COVID, Ukraine war, Afghan withdrawal is essential. However, the Tories seem to think everything has to be market tested/ contracted out. The end result - slow/ poor responses, higher costs, profiteering and a worse outcome for the country.

@Tupp_ed It also creates the conditions for innovation and improvement. Someone who's struggling to get through their daily work doesn't have time to sit back and think about ways the team could run more efficiently, or experiment with different ways of working to see which yields the best results.

@Tupp_ed And definitely true for housing too. Natural disasters like flooding or windstorms require housing for the suddenly homeless. An inability to house homeless in non-emergency situations should make everyone worried.

@Tupp_ed Yes. The mathematics of this is called Queueing Theory. You need "spare" resources to stop the queue growing. I don't have a link to the source, so take this with a grain of salt, but a few years ago a colleague demonstrated this with public health in the UK; there were 43 vets checking out Brit cow herds at 100% "efficiency". They needed 3 more to avoid a backlog growing. The result was billions of pounds wasted because they didn't stop mad cow disease in time.

@Tupp_ed
Yes, this.
And we would have more than enough potential tax revenue to pay for it, if we just taxed properly.

@Tupp_ed I like your take.

@Tupp_ed This.

@Tupp_ed but the state is just there to enforce capitalism.
That's why we should work to #KillCapitalism -- because #CapitalismKills us on purpose with bombs and cops, and just as a part of doing business what with 'accidents' and 'economy'

@Tupp_ed

This is what traditionally engineers called 'redundancy' . It is also a property of systems such as electricity supply.

@Tupp_ed

If you have too many employed by the state you are heading into the arms of the IMF for rescue...... and enforced mass layoffs & tax hikes

There is a happy medium

@Tupp_ed
100% right.
JIT inventory (or Pull rather than push) doesn’t work anymore, it stopped working for products in 2020 & it has never really worked with people because we have too many variables compared to a walmart product on a shelf.

@Tupp_ed 💯. There is this short-sighted, linear thinking paranoia ingrained across the public service that they cannot provide adequate funding for any project from the start as this will be viewed by tax payers (via the media) as waste. The irony is that they end up having to spend even more as they need to hire contractors on short notice who end up patching up all the inevitable problems created by penny pinching, lack of flexibility, thin requirements & terrible planning caused at the start.

@Tupp_ed RIGHT?

@Tupp_ed
20 years ago the GP Surgery I went to had 3 practices. All of them had 3 Doctors on permanant staff along with 1 locum. Each practice also had 3 nurses on site, one of which was a midwife.
Now, patient numbers have almost doubled, all 3 have merged into 1. There are 2 locum doctors and 2 nurses to serve the whole building.
Midwifery is now only available in the main hospital 10 miles away.

@Tupp_ed to be more precise 20 to 30 % oversupply with similar oversupply of facilities, is probably enough to prevent increasing waiting lists.

@Tupp_ed I wanted to see a GP in Australia. Phoned up. "When can I see a doctor?" The answer? "Just come along whenever you like, we're not very busy today."

@Tupp_ed To do this their mindset would have to change completely. At the moment their thinking is that they can't provide too many services in case they might be used. 😖

@Tupp_ed
The cry for “more efficiency” in services is hard for voters to reject, since it sounds like a good thing; who wouldn’t like to pay less for the same result? But you’re absolutely correct: most systems get large efficiency gains only at the expense of robustness, quality, or convenience.

@Tupp_ed this is NOT running government like a business! 😱

@Tupp_ed I would argue those same staffing rules apply to most businesses as well... There should be too many sales reps on the floor waiting to greet customers and give them the time it takes to solve their problems. It projects an air of professionalism, competence, care, and prosperity that you don't see in most "lean" companies today.

@Tupp_ed "just in time" logistics makes some jackass a fat bonus for 'saving money' but makes a system extremely brittle.

@Tupp_ed @pluralistic We should be so lucky that 100% suffices.
The ongoing overtime ban of a Swedish healthcare union has been called a menace to society, disregarding the annual cuts ("hyvling"/planing a board) that have brought us to this point.
https://www.thelocal.se/20240425/swedish-healthcare-strike-what-nurses-and-midwives-overtime-ban-means-for-you

@Tupp_ed But that flows counter to the MBA set who insist on just-in-time lean services, everyone must be working with the bare minimum of both time and money!

@Tupp_ed Corruption and focus on monetary gain have been the real drivers of the 'conomies for over half a century.
The viewpoint you have is reasonable. There are those who wish to trade reason for whatever the heck they are whining about curently in their toothpick-houses-of-reason that they've had to buld because the professional conmen have stolen all the glass to build their fragile glass-houses-of-unreason with.
People aren't waking up from this nightmare fast enough. 😓

@Tupp_ed @donaldball It seems our entire society has adopted the "just-in-time" model of Kanban, but without the other side of the process, which is supposed to be that any time you run into a problem that causes the line to break, you improve the system so it can never happen again.

@Tupp_ed

I would strongly disagree because afaik many people are lonely and talkative and use very $ GP time as chat time

@Tupp_ed

When he was pastor of the largest church in Brooklyn NY, Ward Beecher said:
If I have a job that absolutely has to get done, I ask the busiest man in my parish to do it

@Tupp_ed This is just basic 'common sense' from a retention of knowledge and skills perspective. If everyone is working at 100% capacity all of the time, then there's no capacity left to properly train new staff when your more experienced employees leave. This leads to an inevitable degradation because new staff never gain all the knowledge they need. Rinse and repeat for a few cycles and your organisation is now in crisis because people no longer know how to do the basics properly.

@Tupp_ed
This is a good rule for all types of professionals.

@Tupp_ed Basics of queueing theory should be thought in schools.

@Tupp_ed Since 1979 the UK is astonished that the NHS has more infections, injuries due to falls from ice and Christmas parties, food poisoning from poorly cooked turkeys etc. Every winter.
Every. Year.

@Tupp_ed people with MBAs are the biggest threat to government services.

@Tupp_ed This is true for any group that does upkeep and emergency response - including in IT. If they are busy 100% of every day, you do not have enough people on that team. And tbh they're definitely miserable.

@Tupp_ed
Love this. I mean, obviously we don't want tons of folks just waiting around to doctor or teach, but let's make (the already possible) abundance the baseline.

@Tupp_ed 🤔 I've been one of the teachers they couldn't find room for. Those of us with transferable skills either went overseas or to other jobs. Some people, like me, lingered in short-term contracts with no benefits and no paid prep time before finally getting out.

What was talked about at the time, and would benefit students as well as teachers, would be a hop-on hop-off scenario where you could stay or leave as needed, working elsewhere in between.

@Tupp_ed

".. enough to deliver at 100%"

It would be great to have at least that instead of "whatever the lowest number is that generates maximum profit and shareholder return".

@Tupp_ed This is why people who think businessmen make good politicians makes me so angry. Government should be the opposite of business.

@Tupp_ed
yes, it turns everything into a massive, wasteful joke, we spend and work to do a thing, but not really, not fully. We could spend a billion and fix it all, or we could spend nine hundred million and leave some of it broken so that the nine tenths of a billion was a waste and what is broken can continue to break.
.
Capitalism is a dollar store where nothing is real.

@Tupp_ed yes, would be so nice to have something left over after the day is done. We blew through the days of 'the greater good' a ways back and I don't know if we'll ever see them again.

@Tupp_ed this isn't entirely a capitalism problem. Most people also want to get back to their chosen entertainment venue. That being netflix, tiktok, youtube, video games, etc.

@Tupp_ed once worked with someone who wanted Michael O'leary to run the country like ryanair.... 😐

@Tupp_ed The USA learned that during the pandemic. Well... SHOULD HAVE learned that.

@Tupp_ed pretty much all of the hospitals in Australia are 100%+ capacity today. On the first day of winter and with a mild respiratory infection season so far.

We're going to be so screwed in August. @daedalus

@Tupp_ed @scottmatter let’s tax some billionaires, and bring it!

@Tupp_ed efficiency is by definition fragile. Infrastructure of any kind (hard or human) has to plan for peak demand, not average demand. Yes it's less efficient! Efficiency is what breaks supply lines when there's a disaster, because there's no flexibility or redundancy.

@Tupp_ed @kagan

I think this bears repeating - and more generally.

If you have JUST enough staff to deliver - at 100% - then you do NOT have enough staff.

@Tupp_ed @Pkbwood And don’t be mad when buses are empty. A turn-up-and-go service means it’s there when you DON’T need it — not just when you do.

The same people wouldn’t complain about empty roads — if a street spends 5 minutes, or 5 hours without a traffic jam, is it “too big”?

No, because we’ve been educated by a certain industry to accept nothing less. (By spending our own money on it, not theirs, of course).

@Tupp_ed But that's not financially efficient so we won't be able to deliver value for our shareholders!

@Tupp_ed Not having adequate slack in a services or social system means running on crisis management which feeds on the myth of individual consciousness. One result is no adequate evaluation. Without evaluation and analysis of statistics, patterns, trends, planning strategies depend increasingly on biases, whimsy and desperation instead of best practices or even common sense. Capitalism and militarism exploit crisis management.
#evaluation #bestpractices

@Tupp_ed this is currently most evident in the UKs national health service. We have, for many years, tried to run this at near 100% capacity, both in terms of staff time and beds and equipment. This when demand is clearly seasonal. Basic queuing theory shows that when you push anywhere near 100% you end up with a permanent queue, which is what we see. Add in unexpected crises, like COVID, and the queues explode and staff end up totally exhausted and many quit, which makes it worse.