Thoughts of a carer

  There have recently (August 2024) been protests and indeed violent disturbances apparently because of issues involving migrants. I’m not going to delve into the issues that the mainstream media, and politicians, have been discussing; Viv and I have personal, recent, experience of the effectiveness of overseas recruits working in close contact with the public in England.   I have revised this post in case anything I had initially written could possibly have been misunderstood. That I should feel it necessary to do this at 3.30 on a Saturday morning is a sad reflection on modern society.   + + + For years we’ve heard of a ‘social care crisis’: there aren’t enough care workers to fulfil demand; hospitals won’t discharge patients unless care is arranged for them, and the health and care aspect of the welfare state is gradually grinding to a halt. Viv and I have been ‘service users’ (that’s what they call beneficiaries of social care) on and off for the last seven years, all...

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...