(no subject)

[randomness]

People who think of technology as a panacea tend to be confused and irritated by expenses for training and maintenance.

Technology does not replace training or maintenance. Higher technology requires better trained staff to operate it and more expense for its maintenance. This will continue to be true until we reach the "say a magic word and it happens" level of technology. (Although, even then, training will still have to include teaching people which magic words to say, and when.)

Comments

[sea-bound.livejournal.com]

Hence the intense frustration felt by people who *do* understand the need for training and maintenance. Jordan will become the 3rd largest USAID recipient, behind Afghanistan and Iraq, at 600 million USD per year. This is for a country with a population of 6 million people. The money gets poured into water infrastructure--hardware--that no one is trained how to use or maintain, so it literally sits here and rusts. My friends who are engineers constantly rant about the waste (and rightly so--god forbid that money ever comes with conditions, such as the restructuring of a corrupt government system. Must be nice to be strategically important).

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

This is, alas, all too typical. Incentives matter. In this and in many other cases, there's a lot more incentive to pay for shiny hardware than on boring training and maintenance.