For the services provided they are still to high.
Hey now
somebody has to pay for those guys playing cards, er, changing the oil in the snowplows, down at the county shops
You have mentioned the guys down at the shop a couple of times. Something you would like to share?
Have I? I daresay you pay more attention to my posts than I do, which is, on the one hand, gratifying, and on the other a bit stress inducing. I shall have to endeavor to do better.
To answer your question, it is a personal euphemism I have adopted to describe the very much manifest trend of incompetent, lazy, public sector employees slopping away at the public trough.
It does not take too many interactions with state functionaries to realize that many are working where they are because they simply can't cut it in a competitive work environment, or really any job where outcomes matter.
From the global; I still remember a radio interview with a bemused Human Genome Project scientist, having been badly outplayed by the private Celera Genomics effort, declaring that he and his colleagues had all figured that they would retire on the project, to the local; where in my municipality the public utility has been reduced to removing our smart meters and going back to meter readers because they have been so badly legally outmaneuvered by private ISPs that they rent bandwidth to that they have lost access to the fiber optic network THAT WE BUILT AT PUBLIC EXPENSE FOR THAT VERY PURPOSE.
Hairy, I share many of your progressive values, but this sort of thing deeply offends me. I work for a living. I have endured years of misery, privation and risk while these freeloaders have marched in place, marking time till their bloated public pensions absent any threat of accountability. They are not contributing according to their ability, and are taking beyond their need.
Worse, all too often these parasites are in positions to exercise power over actual producers. I tell you what; being told by some flabby, slack jawed bureaucrat in what manner I might utilize my own property or when and where I might be allowed to work is very nearly enough to set me to mixing petrol bombs in the basement.
Is that sufficient sharing for now?
Thank you for sharing.
I do wonder whether the selling off of the fiber access rights was within the control of the utility, or whether it was the brainwave of a State level politician who was the public shareholder of the utility. I have had occasion to work with people who run government owned electrical utilities and they are not stupid people. That isn’t the sort of thing that would slip past them.
My experience of public sector employees are friends who deliver what you might call socialized medicine. They are well paid, but they also work long hours (12 hour shifts) including night shifts. They literally save people’s lives. Some get assaulted by drug users when they bring them back from their drug induced coma.
I have seen some terrible graft in the public service over the years, but by and large that sort of thing has been stomped out in the last decade or so - at least in the areas that I have access to. That doesn’t mean there isn’t wastage and corruption elsewhere in the system as I only see a small part. And the Conservatives are fighting tooth and nail against additional anti-corruption measures because they don’t want the rocks kicked over, for fear of their little rorts being uncovered.
Yes I can understand why regulation is a pain, especially when it interferes with use of your land. But let me give you an example. Land clearing of native vegetation is illegal in Australia. But farmers violently object to being told what they can do with their land. A farmer recently murdered a land clearing inspector with a rifle, and intimidation of these bureaucrats by landholders is widespread. The ruling Conservative Party has a large farming lobby and so the current government does its best to obstruct these bureaucrats in protecting the land, so they cop it from both ends and can’t carry out their role.
The reason is by converting grazing land for cattle to crop farming for grain, you raise the land value from $2,000 a hectare to $4,000 a hectare. That’s a lot of money when you consider the size of farms in Australia. Some Australian farms are bigger than Belgium. But guess what. There is a drought. Again. Just like the last one. And all the top soil is now blowing away in dust storms. And no one will buy land without water rights. And these fucking stupid farmers who illegally cleared their land two years ago go broke and walk off the land and leave behind desert, where there used to be a native ecosystem. There is no water to support broad acre farming but they are destroying their land on a gamble trying to make a quick pay off. And the regulations to stop them are failing because of muh liberties. So I don’t have much sympathy for people who destroy their own livelihoods and their family properties handed down for generations because of their own selfishness.
It doesn’t help that farmers don’t believe in climate change because they watch the local version of Fox News. Even though the droughts are coming closer and closer together, so much that they are becoming permanent. Part of the psychology is they don’t want to believe that their farming practices are unviable in dry land and they have to change the way they work their land. It’s easier to believe climate change is just a liberal conspiracy.
So balance in all things.
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