Thoughts of a carer

I don't know how often you visit your GP surgery. I go every couple of weeks, to drop off a prescription or somesuch. I've been registered at five surgeries in the last dozen or so years, and the walls and windows at each seem to have been peppered somewhat randomly with signs. Most are badly produced on a PC, and fixed up with Blu-tack. The spelling, grammar and design of these is uniformly awful.  Yesterday I visited our surgery and noticed a sign that I hadn't seen before, although my partner of those dozen years said has been there for some time: Most people probably don't notice anything special about this. But why? I've read that the NHS costs the country three grand for each of us, every man, woman and child. Surely to God, for that we are entitled to expect the staff employed there to know the difference between 'assistance' and 'assisted'.   Worse still, some manager (of whom there are plenty in the NHS) will have sanctioned the spend of, pe...

I've been thinking about my post on 21st June, and I've come to the conclusion that there are many fields other than IT where we, mankind, are failing to take note of our past errors. The consequences of this are all around us: things are more difficult than they should be, as customers we don't get the service we should, our health is worse than it should be, and sometimes our leaders look really, really stupid. One contact I had in my scientific days - that is, the 1980s - reckoned that mankind had reached its technological zenith around 1970 - the moon landings, supersonic flight, and IT systems were all developed during the sixties. By the mid-eighties we hadn't really moved on. And we still haven't: we may have satellite TV, and mobile phones that fit in your pocket and have (lots) more computing power than an IBM 360/158 (which filled  a room), but we haven't really advanced technologically. This has continued for the last forty or so years. Why?   My con...