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CeeBs

@callumbellwriter.bsky.social

Social media is a busted flush Random musings: https://callumbellwriter.substack.com Book(s): https://www.panswed.co.uk

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Tom Forth@tomforth.co.uk · last mo.

One of the most exciting infrastructure projects in Britain right now. If we could build tunnels like the Norwegians we could build new motorways and railways so cheaply that they could be self-funding. The biggest prize is Manchester to Sheffield. www.thetimes.com/uk/transport...

Explosives could deliver northern boom via cheaper Pennines tunnel

Start-up says Scandinavian tunnelling methods could cut the cost of a proposed dual carriageway connecting Sheffield and Manchester by as much as 90 per cent

thetimes.com

Anthony Moser@anthonymoser.com · 5mo ago

This part is sharp and important: bureaucracy inherently requires discretion but can't acknowledge that because it derives its legitimacy from being objective Meaning it has an unresolvable tension at its core

Organisations that run on formal procedure need someone inside the process to interpret rules, notice exceptions, recognise when the categories no longer fit the case. If the organisation concedes that its outcomes depend on the discretion of the people executing it, then the procedure is not a procedure but a suggestion, and the authority the organisation derives from appearing rule-governed collapses. So the judgment has to happen, and it has to look like something else. It has to look like following the procedure rather than interpreting it. I’ve come to think of this as the “bureaucratic double bind” – the organisation cannot function without the judgment, and it cannot acknowledge the judgment without undermining itself and being seen as “political”. One solution to this problem is to replace the judgment with a number. In his 1995 book Trust in Numbers, the historian of science Theodore Porter argued that organisations adopt quantitative rules not because numbers are more accurate but because they are more defensible. Judgment is politically vulnerable. Rules are not. The procedure exists to make discretion disappear, or seem to. The system’s actual flexibility lives entirely in this unacknowledged interpretive work, which means it can be removed by anyone who mistakes it for inefficiency.
CeeBs@callumbellwriter.bsky.social · 10mo ago

#micronovel Boom! Splat! War that kills hundreds of millions. Survivor1: "We must never, ever let something this terrible and stupid ever happen again" Survivor2: "Yes. But sadly, people from the future aren't here to learn the lesson" The end.