All of those things you've listed as examples should also be managed by someone with a technical understanding of them.
I wouldn't want someone with no understand of the concept of inflation for example in charge of interest rates.
Equally I wouldn't want someone in charge of nuclear weapons that doesn't understand that if you let of a bomb in the next country you'll get covered in your own fallout.
it's harder to micro bullshit (be hands on) than macro (feign competence using "models") bullshit. If you are clueless about infosec or the hardware it relates to (using a computer) why are you a leader in the ministry of said field for a country?
Yes, always. A minister of a diplomatic department should have diplomacy experience. A minister of a justice department should have justice experience. Anything else is ludicrous.
> "But Mr Sakurada responded that other officials had the necessary experience and he was confident there would not be a problem."
A minister is a manager. We don't expect our managers to be good at programming, because that's what they hired us for. I expect them to be good at managing their ministry and relegating to their subject knowledge and specific members' experiences on subject matter.
I suspect you will continue to be disappointed with that expectation. Management of resources, motivating employees, and political savvy are all very distinct skills from writing code.
I don't think it's possible to motivate somebody in a discipline that you have never tried. If anything, it is hugely demotivational.
It reminds me of a dialogue I had once with a manager of technical writers. She said that she wanted to be a manager because she was bored as a technical writer, in order to motivate people. Really? She couldn't even motivate herself to stay!
So, feel free to claim that managers need different skills. But to motivate people, who can do something you don't know or don't like? Don't kid yourself, please.
Same for me, all my managers so far have had engineering knowledge or held computer science degrees. It's not always been pure coding, but at least compsci.
A minister isn't a pure people manager though. They also make important decisions. And how are they supposed to know which of their staff to delegate to if they have no subject area expertise?
I think there’s a delta between “good at X” and “reasonably familiar with and knowledgeable about X.” If you know nothing about X, you can’t speak the same language as the people you’re managing, nor understand the issues they’re tackling, reasonable priorities, reasonable obstacles, etc.
You don’t have to be an excellent pulmonologist to manage pulmonologists, but if you have no experience in healthcare, you’re going to make terrible decisions. You won’t know what’s realistic and what isn’t.
But a Scrum master can do scrums without knowing anything detailed about the project.
I was for a project ( some backend server stuff ) in a company. The scrum master was a former gardner who did a scrum course. He was good, could solve a lot of issues and keep us on track. But he had no idea of the technologies and IT in general.
> But he had no idea of the technologies and IT in general.
Leaders must have the respect of the team in order to be effective. With no knowledge or experience, earning this respect from the team is a tall order.
Date: Norman? This is Mr. Eddie Vedder, from accounting. I just had a power surge here at home that wiped out a file I was working on. Listen, I'm in big trouble, do you know anything about computers?
Norm: Uhhmmm... uh gee, uh...
Dade: Right, well my BLT drive on my computer just went AWOL, and I've got this big project due tomorrow for Mr. Kawasaki, and if I don't get it in, he's gonna ask me to commit Hari Kari...
Dade proceeds to get Norm to read him the number off of a modem at the TV station
One can argue that it is possible to successfully delegate what one cannot understand. But organizations in which managers have an understanding of the problem they are delegating are always going to have an advantage over organizations with managers who do not.
This is just a bad idea. It's a pretty massive part of what's mostly wrong in the world today. The idea that people who are functionally incompetent should be managing people who are is just pretty fucked in the head.
You don't need to be expert, but at least be related to the thing you head... Would it be ok for minister of finance to say "Never went to a bank, never had an account. I have staff and secretaries they somehow get me things I want"?
Usually, ministry posting is about politics, not competency: a minister post would be proposed to political allies in exchange for support during the campaign. It's how, in France, we ended up with Taubira as minister of justice (here called "guarde des sceaux") under president Hollande, in exchange for the support of her radical left party during the 2012 elections. And she was mostly incompetent in that role, since she had no prior qualification, other than being a politician.
Should a project manager of a technology project know something about the technology? I had one once (in place where PMs were essentially dictators) who said "I don't need to know technology, I manage people"--and then made all the technology decisions without input.
Agreed, hands-on experience does not equate to understanding.
Should architects necessarily be skilled bricklayers, etc? Let alone housing-policy advisors.
And as others have pointed out, politicians are not known to be the most careful users of computers, so perhaps he is rather wise to abstain.
For the architect metaphor to work out he'd need to be a programmer, which I doubt because he'd likely mention that if he was. Also hard to be a programmer if you've never used a computer.
No, people are being silly. Often people are kept away from their 'home turf' in an effort to make sure that when they absorb the brief (which they're usually given by political and civil advisors) it is in a way which is appropriate to the level they're working at. They're executives, not (eg) healthcare workers or train drivers etc. Their job is not to have a technical grasp of how to perform operations or drive trains, their job is to understand how to measure and influence the system they inherit.
In principle, this might not actually require that much pre-existing domain knowledge.
It doesn't hurt to have hands-on experience, but it definitely isn't necessary.
The job of a department head is to navigate government bureaucracy and attain the budget, gather resources and hire experts for his department's needs.
The value of a minister of anything is his contacts/professional network, knowledge of government bureaucracy and his ability to marshal them for his department's needs.
It's why in the US, we've had Secretary of Defense who have never fired a gun or been in the military. Obviously most have had military experience, but it isn't a requirement.
People are mistakenly thinking that a minister of cybersecurity is a cybersecurity job. It isn't. It is a government bureaucratic job.
Given a choice between a cybersecurity expert ( with no bureaucratic experience ) and a bureaucratic expert ( with no computer experience ), it's a no brainer to go with the latter as minister of cybersecurity. Ideally, you want bureaucratic expert who is also a cybersecurity expert. But you only have 24 hours in a day.
Yes! A hundred times yes! Don’t let the fact that it’s common hide the fact that it’s absurd to have people with no relevant experience run departments (of governments and businesses).
He doesn't need to be an expert, but NEVER having used a computer, and not knowing what a USB drive is, is notably below what the average citizen knows.
This is akin to the minister of defence not knowing what a bullet is for. It's okay if he's never used a gun, but not knowing what a bullet is, is just way too much.
The theatre of the Absurd has reached New Heights. If you don't understand something, you shouldn't be running the department that focuses on it. The legislature should have vetted his expertise before even proposing him as a candidate.
It’s pretty rare, and has been for a long time, for a domain expert to be in charge of a government department. Like St Mattis is the first SecDef in a long while and it still took an act of Congress to get his appointment in.
I don't think it matters because ministers are so very rarely subject experts on the department they run.
What annoys me more is when specialists give governments expert advice and then the government still goes off and does the complete opposite because of some predefined agenda they had. Or worse still, because of coercion from lobbyists.
I remember the hearings after the problems with the Obamacare web site where the lady who ran Health and Human Services made it clear she was a believer in getting health care to people but seemed to think there was nothing she could do to make a software project succeed and that's completely untrue.
(Turns out the editor of my college newspaper was a project manager on that one... An astrophysics professor told me not to get involved in a 'science-in-politics' program that he did and look what happened to him...)
clearly the head of cyber security should be someone who understands the risk of computers. and anyone who truly does would never use one, so perhaps it's a fit after all.
It was a fantastic tv show, written by insiders. One of the few shows about politics where you can actually learn something. And I have been told real stories from french ministries that mirror exactly what the show depicts in british ministries.
Ha-Ha-Only-Serious response: I've actually been told that ministers are explicitly selected to portfolios that they know nothing about so that they an be an impartial filter for the people working in that area. You don't choose an Information Minister because they're an IT guru, you choose them because they have no knowledge of the subject (and hence no personal preference or bias) and they will just go with whatever the actual experts working 'below' them say.
My understanding is that in a parliamentary system, ministers are selected from parliament. (The US equivalent would be something like making a rule where every cabinet secretary had to also be an elected member of the House of Representatives.) So the expert would have to first run for parliament and be elected.
In the parliamentary system here, only the Prime Minister is selected from parliament. The other ministers are selected by the PM, and don't have to be (and usually aren't) members of parliament.
In all parliamentary systems I know (Spain, France, Morocco) ministers do not have to be selected from the parliament. Parliament is legislative while ministers are executive.
What I meant is that if there's no consensus and the third, the fourth, the fifth... also either have a different proposition/idea or are divided somewhat equally into both sides.
> - Then why not directly make one of those experts actually the Minister?
If you watch Yes, Minister (and Yes, Prime Minister), the show's thesis is that the system is mostly set up so that the civil service can run things regardless of whatever policies the politicians are trying to implement.
To take the blame, mostly, as far as the show is concerned. Hacker even says it in one episode, I think the one about the civil service pay rise (or maybe the one about civil service honors). Going from memory:
Sir Humphrey: Civil servants are paid but a modest wage.
Hacker: Modest? You make more than me. Compared to who?
Sir Humphrey: Comparable positions in industry.
Hacker: In industry, when you do something wrong, you get the boot. In civil service, when you do something wrong, I get the boot.
Its not unrealistic .. western society has generally gotten less mature, not more. In my 20's I did stuff that none of the kids of today even consider feasible ..
1980 median house price: $47,200 = 15,225 hours of labor
2018 average out of college wage per hour: $20
2018 median house price: $320,000 = 12,800 hours of labor
—
Rough calculations with numbers plucked off google, if one wants to quibble over the numbers/data source/proportion of taxes in the calculation/importance of state where one resides/cost of university/etc. we certainly go that route; but the numbers certainly do not seem that dramatically far apart.
People like him blow my mind. How do you make others believe that you are a great leader, a mastermind at things you do when in reality you don't know a thing.
Someone sent me this link with the description "Japan's cyber-security minister doesn't use computers" and I thought it was some elaborate way to prevent being hackable... boy I didn't expect this.
Appreciate this is to a pretty ridiculous degree, but isn't this pretty much the story across the board?
Anecdotally I heard about some of the conversations with the government and adult industry regarding the UK porn filter. It was something along the lines of:
Industry: "OK, we get you want to put a block in front of adult sites. But what about all the porn Twitter?"
Govt: "There's porn on Twitter?"
When we're all getting angry about encryption and privacy and backdoors (and whatever else), it's probably prudent to remember these are the kind of people we're dealing with.
I know and work with a lot of millionaires and a couple billionaires, once you get to that level of eliteness they view using a computer as a boring chore for a technician, like fixing the plumbing or paying the bills, something they are far too important for and delegate to staff.
Surprisingly, this seems to be true regardless of age
Had an opportunity to labour for 1 year for a "start up" ran by a 40 years old guy with rich papa when I was back in Canada. The dude opened the company with 7 mln cash out of his pocket, hired lots of big name consultants as directors, and never been seen since, until the company flopped.
The man was said to employ a personal typist.
Since then, saw the very same thing everywhere you can expect it; rich and powerful men I knew personally rarely even had a cellphone, and they didn't read news.
With regard of that, I think stories of officials from 3rd world countries claiming to be learning more about their own countries from words of foreign diplomats, or when they flee to the West themselves, don't sound so unbelievable anymore.
There is a lot of "don't read the news" comments in typical self-help books/speeches. I am divided. I have "not read the news" before, and I was totally out of the loop in a lot of conversations. On the other hand, 99% of what I read in the news isn't helpful in any way that is directly evident.
Most "rich" people I know are religious, "family", sort-of-upper-class-rednecks. They usually run small businesses worth several million, donate to the Church, and focus on their family life. It's hilarious how poorly I fit in here. Anyway, they do all get intricately involved with the technical details, even if they don't understand all of it.
These people aren't really "rich" though, just very well-off.
Don't know any really "rich" or "wealthy" people. Have never even talked to one.
rich and powerful men I knew personally rarely even had a cellphone, and they didn't read news.
Why do you use your cellphone or read the news? Probably for entertainment or gain knowledge about current events. Rich and powerful men can do stuff way more entertaining than what a cellphone can provide and honestly, don't need to be up on current events.
If I had the option of never having to check another email in my life, I’d go without internet for sure. I imagine there is a great deal of calm and focus when you unplug.
Not that exotic. I've met a couple of billionaires myself (although I haven't worked for them). Just live somewhere that billionaires are (ie Silicon Valley) and do work they find valuable.
Is it because you expect to make more than a billion dollars using your computer, or because you value lifetime computer usage at over a billion dollars.
I love computers and I absolutely would. Do you really think computers are improving your life that much? Think of all the skiing you could do instead.
I don't think you can separate it from age, because having a lot of money and having an elite position are both highly correlated with being near retirement age.
There was an earlier generation that had secretaries to type things for them, and computer operators were essentially the same thing to them, before or after PCs were invented.
My mother was a computer programmer in the 50s through the 70s, and she started out as an engineering assistant. It was considered a low level position compared to an actual engineer.
Ministers are all about government functions. As long as he has the right people below him and is able to listen to them and exercise judgment, that's what really counts.
What's weird though is "never" having used a computer. I mean, doesn't everyone write/edit with a computer these days? Do people at that level just verbally stream-of-consciousness dictate their memos and secretaries enter them? THAT is weird.
You can't really exercise judgement about a context you can't fathom.
It'd be like a person who's never been to Japan, never studied Japanese, and only read about Japan in popular magazines or seen news reports on tv exercising judgement about how Japanese society should be run.
Sure, he'd have the right people below him. But he'd have no idea if what they're telling him makes any sense, and often his intuition about what he's hearing would be wrong, because he'd be using analogies that don't/can't fit.
That's how you get into "internet is a series of tubes" territory.
> But he'd have no idea if what they're telling him makes any sense, and often his intuition about what he's hearing would be wrong, because he'd be using analogies that don't/can't fit.
That all depends on how much trust and responsibility he puts into the hands of his subordinates.
In a way, it's like dividing a role into several people. He handles the government-side, the domain experts handle their sides. A micro-manager, of course, would be a disaster in such a position but it can work with the right people and organizational structures.
> As long as he has the right people below him and is able to listen to them and exercise judgment, that's what really counts.
So he's a puppet then? Different people just pull on different strings and he makes a call arbitrarily?
While nobody expects the minister in charge of e.g. nuclear power to be a nuclear engineer, we do expect them to understand how the plants basically operate, and common failure conditions.
In this case we have someone expected to make calls about computer security who not only lacks expertise in that area, but even in the broader area of computing. The issue isn't that they aren't a subject matter expert, the issue is that they lack such core foundation that they cannot listen to different subject matter experts and contextualize that information.
I'm all for less technical managers as a concept but there are degrees. If the manager cannot even understand the context, that's a legitimate problem.
> Different people just pull on different strings and he makes a call arbitrarily?
I wouldn't say it was "arbitrary", but yes, he would have to assign responsibility to others for decisions and then trust them. It's not that uncommon.
Assuming we're talking about a functional department (and not a Trump-cabinet-like dysfunctional mess), I think we can safely assume the guy understands the concepts, problems and capability of computers and more importantly how these relate to government.
I once worked with a physics postdoc who LITERALLY never used a computer for his role in the Russian institute in which he worked back in the early 90's. All computer work was allocated out to computing professionals and he just relied on them to do the work in consultation with him. It was kind of strange, but I would say he "understood" computers very well. A similar thing could apply here.
In a brief encounter with a very high profile executive of a 5000+ employee company, I was explained that the more he got closer to the top, the less he caries on him, to the point that currently he only brings his wallet, his phone, a pen and a mini notepad.
Bringing more than that for him meant something went wrong.
This is the end result of the 'old boy network', where the aged rise to the top on the basis of how many ticks they have groomed off the fur of the silverback's fur, in the USA/Japan, with no fur, it is the ass licks ledger that counts.
Sadly, this is fully operational in the USA military, where billions are spent on old weaponry whose life in a modern war will be measured in minutes when they meet modern drones. (by drones, I mean land based drone attack tanks etc, with costs only 5-10% of the cost of the manned equivalents, air based drones, surface water drones as well as submarine drones)
We see China and Russia unfettered by this old boy network that are allowing their brains unfettered freedom to make modern stuff.
This has happened before, when the blitzkrieg fought horse drawn gun carts at the start of WW2, when allied armies in Europe were prime examples of the old
boy network.
Why do we have it? We have a bribery and feedback mechanism in Congress that quantifies bribery and ass licking to perfection. An elected representative HAS NO SECRET BALLOT!!.
We can all see how he votes, as can all the bribers, who can call him to account.
We say this exists to allow the voters to see that there rep did their bidding YADA-YADA-YADA - we all know it allow the bribery effectiveness to be watched and measured, so you can threaten to cut them off if they do not dance to the briber's tune.
RANT/ How to get a better way? Empower all, with online voting of all eligible voters, in the style of the original Greek democracy. Pay people for their votes, hold back tax refunds for people who do not vote etc. This needs to be fine tuned.
Chance of success = zero, as all the well bribed elected officials do not want their gravy train to end. /RANT
> (by drones, I mean land based drone attack tanks etc, with costs only 5-10% of the cost of the manned equivalents, air based drones, surface water drones as well as submarine drones)
Don't you mean guided missiles and torpedoes?
The whole unmanned weapon concept is much older than toy quadcopters.
> We see China and Russia unfettered by this old boy network that are allowing their brains unfettered freedom to make modern stuff.
What? Are you familiar with the terms "oligarch" and "guanxi"?
> Empower all, with online voting of all eligible voters
Online voting is a bad idea. It's far more easily and cheaply subverted than most paper-based analog voting systems.
Wel, AI guided and long loitering capabilities, more or less evolutionary from current designs - butb Russia is ahead in many respects.
We tend to forget that Russia focusses their education on applied engineering to a higher degree than in the USA = more engineers per capitac and their level is quite high on average
Just to pick one point, the allied forces in WWII were led by men who had fought in WWI, just a generation earlier. WWI was a technological arms race that moved along just as fast as technology moves today. For example, warships built less than a decade before WWI were obsolete, unable to compete range-wise with ship artillery built just a few years later. Technologies like tanks got introduced midway through the war, and the most important technology was arguably barbed wire.
Why use horse-drawn artillery in WWII? Because it was there. Because they still had it, and they weren't fully recovered from WWI yet. Because cars and trucks and tracked vehicles were unreliable and dependent on imported fuel - fuel that everyone remembered would be very hard to get once war blockades started. Because they needed every gun they could get.
The blitzkrieg was the result of very modern technology, and new strategic and tactical thinking to go with the technology. A couple of years later, it was obsolete...
It's a little funny how we have this picture of the Wehrmacht as blitzkrieg and super-nazis in Panther tanks, crushing everything in lighting advances. Most of the german army slogged along on foot, with the same Mauser 98k bolt-action rifles that their fathers carried, with horse-drawn artillery and supplies. Motorized equipment was concentrated in the elite Panzer and Panzergrenadiere formations, of which there were never many.
Right. Elite units did "blitzkrieg" and quickly broke holes in defensive lines, and then the regular army poured through those holes. Fundamentally, it wasn't that different from how armies used mounted cavalry units centuries earlier.
They had the same problem in WW1, the name tank was a code word for a mobile steel bunker, and it broke the trench stalemate. After WW1, the old boys ruled. Hitler broke this mold and pioneered new mobile armored warfare. We are lucky that most of the German army was the old style
Ministers are figureheads; they take national policy and filter it down through their departments then report results back to the top.
Taking the UK as an example our health minister isn't a doctor and our education sec. isn't a professor. The executive branch of government acts no differently to any other large company.
I've seen ministers put in place with expertise in the actual area (doctor becoming minister of health for example) and it makes no difference. They're just managers after all, the "real work" is done by the civil servants.
For a minister of defense/secretary of defense type role you would hope they had been a career military person, specifically an officer. Officers, at least in the United States, are taught many things from tactics to military history, they understand command structure, they understand procedure and policy, as a career officer they would have years of experience in various commands serving in various capacities.
If you take John Smith from ABC Corp that got a degree from Harvard and is your golfing buddy and give him control over it, sure he's great at handling the civilians and the fobbits but he has no understanding of how a military operates. When generals/admirals tell him things he has no good context.
At face value it seems ridiculous, but really, what benefits would it bring had he been a run of the mill e-mail and web user?
Assuming he's generally a competent person, he will now be forced to listen to and be informed by smart people in his department instead of putting his foot down and saying "I've used outlook all my life, so obviously I'm an expert. I've never been hacked, so policy is now that everyone should use Outlook."
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadGranted, it's Russian and not American, but I'd be surprised if other intelligence agencies weren't taking similar measures
I wouldn't want someone with no understand of the concept of inflation for example in charge of interest rates.
Equally I wouldn't want someone in charge of nuclear weapons that doesn't understand that if you let of a bomb in the next country you'll get covered in your own fallout.
> "But Mr Sakurada responded that other officials had the necessary experience and he was confident there would not be a problem."
Then why is he the one taking the job?
So far I haven't been disappointed.
I don't think it's possible to motivate somebody in a discipline that you have never tried. If anything, it is hugely demotivational.
It reminds me of a dialogue I had once with a manager of technical writers. She said that she wanted to be a manager because she was bored as a technical writer, in order to motivate people. Really? She couldn't even motivate herself to stay!
So, feel free to claim that managers need different skills. But to motivate people, who can do something you don't know or don't like? Don't kid yourself, please.
Same for me, all my managers so far have had engineering knowledge or held computer science degrees. It's not always been pure coding, but at least compsci.
You don’t have to be an excellent pulmonologist to manage pulmonologists, but if you have no experience in healthcare, you’re going to make terrible decisions. You won’t know what’s realistic and what isn’t.
I was for a project ( some backend server stuff ) in a company. The scrum master was a former gardner who did a scrum course. He was good, could solve a lot of issues and keep us on track. But he had no idea of the technologies and IT in general.
Leaders must have the respect of the team in order to be effective. With no knowledge or experience, earning this respect from the team is a tall order.
Security guard answers phone: Security, uh Norm, Norm speaking.
Date: Norman? This is Mr. Eddie Vedder, from accounting. I just had a power surge here at home that wiped out a file I was working on. Listen, I'm in big trouble, do you know anything about computers?
Norm: Uhhmmm... uh gee, uh...
Dade: Right, well my BLT drive on my computer just went AWOL, and I've got this big project due tomorrow for Mr. Kawasaki, and if I don't get it in, he's gonna ask me to commit Hari Kari...
Dade proceeds to get Norm to read him the number off of a modem at the TV station
Usually, ministry posting is about politics, not competency: a minister post would be proposed to political allies in exchange for support during the campaign. It's how, in France, we ended up with Taubira as minister of justice (here called "guarde des sceaux") under president Hollande, in exchange for the support of her radical left party during the 2012 elections. And she was mostly incompetent in that role, since she had no prior qualification, other than being a politician.
And as others have pointed out, politicians are not known to be the most careful users of computers, so perhaps he is rather wise to abstain.
For finance minster: "What's a bank?"
For science minister: "I don't need to be able to read, staff can read for me"
For healthcare minister: "Homeopathy all the way, forget everything else".
In principle, this might not actually require that much pre-existing domain knowledge.
The job of a department head is to navigate government bureaucracy and attain the budget, gather resources and hire experts for his department's needs.
The value of a minister of anything is his contacts/professional network, knowledge of government bureaucracy and his ability to marshal them for his department's needs.
It's why in the US, we've had Secretary of Defense who have never fired a gun or been in the military. Obviously most have had military experience, but it isn't a requirement.
People are mistakenly thinking that a minister of cybersecurity is a cybersecurity job. It isn't. It is a government bureaucratic job.
Given a choice between a cybersecurity expert ( with no bureaucratic experience ) and a bureaucratic expert ( with no computer experience ), it's a no brainer to go with the latter as minister of cybersecurity. Ideally, you want bureaucratic expert who is also a cybersecurity expert. But you only have 24 hours in a day.
This is akin to the minister of defence not knowing what a bullet is for. It's okay if he's never used a gun, but not knowing what a bullet is, is just way too much.
In comparison this is just a minor issue.
What annoys me more is when specialists give governments expert advice and then the government still goes off and does the complete opposite because of some predefined agenda they had. Or worse still, because of coercion from lobbyists.
I remember the hearings after the problems with the Obamacare web site where the lady who ran Health and Human Services made it clear she was a believer in getting health care to people but seemed to think there was nothing she could do to make a software project succeed and that's completely untrue.
(Turns out the editor of my college newspaper was a project manager on that one... An astrophysics professor told me not to get involved in a 'science-in-politics' program that he did and look what happened to him...)
There's a fascinating article on how it was rescued here: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-s...
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/08/abbott_pc_support_s...
Sir Humphrey: Well, what is he interested in? Does he watch television?
Jim Hacker: He hasn't even got a set.
Sir Humphrey: Fine, make him a Governor of the BBC."
-- Yes, Prime Minister
Honestly, that series has a reference for pretty much most scenarios, politics or otherwise, even today, especially these days. What a show.
- What if 2 "below" experts have 2 different opinions? Is the Minister supposed to choose randomly?
In Japan it's a legal requirement that the majority of the cabinet be elected reps, but not all of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_Japan
Consult (or more likely, have one's staff consult) a third (and fourth, and fifth...) and figure out what the consensus is?
If you watch Yes, Minister (and Yes, Prime Minister), the show's thesis is that the system is mostly set up so that the civil service can run things regardless of whatever policies the politicians are trying to implement.
Sir Humphrey: Civil servants are paid but a modest wage. Hacker: Modest? You make more than me. Compared to who? Sir Humphrey: Comparable positions in industry. Hacker: In industry, when you do something wrong, you get the boot. In civil service, when you do something wrong, I get the boot.
What golden cage was this man born in that he had a staff and secretaries at 25?
Remember; a Denny's waitress in 1980 has as much or more spending power than the medium salary with a college degree in 2018.
1980 median house price: $47,200 = 15,225 hours of labor
2018 average out of college wage per hour: $20
2018 median house price: $320,000 = 12,800 hours of labor
—
Rough calculations with numbers plucked off google, if one wants to quibble over the numbers/data source/proportion of taxes in the calculation/importance of state where one resides/cost of university/etc. we certainly go that route; but the numbers certainly do not seem that dramatically far apart.
To handle sending and receiving all of their email? Yes.
Following the normal path he’d have been slaving away at a large corporation.
Anecdotally I heard about some of the conversations with the government and adult industry regarding the UK porn filter. It was something along the lines of: Industry: "OK, we get you want to put a block in front of adult sites. But what about all the porn Twitter?" Govt: "There's porn on Twitter?"
When we're all getting angry about encryption and privacy and backdoors (and whatever else), it's probably prudent to remember these are the kind of people we're dealing with.
Surprisingly, this seems to be true regardless of age
The man was said to employ a personal typist.
Since then, saw the very same thing everywhere you can expect it; rich and powerful men I knew personally rarely even had a cellphone, and they didn't read news.
With regard of that, I think stories of officials from 3rd world countries claiming to be learning more about their own countries from words of foreign diplomats, or when they flee to the West themselves, don't sound so unbelievable anymore.
I built my company from nothing - and still clean the toilet as part of the team.
I however don't give out my cell phone number as 99% of the time the resulting conversation would not be the best use of my time.
Most "rich" people I know are religious, "family", sort-of-upper-class-rednecks. They usually run small businesses worth several million, donate to the Church, and focus on their family life. It's hilarious how poorly I fit in here. Anyway, they do all get intricately involved with the technical details, even if they don't understand all of it.
These people aren't really "rich" though, just very well-off.
Don't know any really "rich" or "wealthy" people. Have never even talked to one.
Why do you use your cellphone or read the news? Probably for entertainment or gain knowledge about current events. Rich and powerful men can do stuff way more entertaining than what a cellphone can provide and honestly, don't need to be up on current events.
Yeah.. ok. [citation needed]
There was an earlier generation that had secretaries to type things for them, and computer operators were essentially the same thing to them, before or after PCs were invented.
My mother was a computer programmer in the 50s through the 70s, and she started out as an engineering assistant. It was considered a low level position compared to an actual engineer.
I think that Yoshitaka Sakurada lie: he used PC in school before he was 25 years old!
/thread
At the age of 15, in 1965
What's weird though is "never" having used a computer. I mean, doesn't everyone write/edit with a computer these days? Do people at that level just verbally stream-of-consciousness dictate their memos and secretaries enter them? THAT is weird.
It'd be like a person who's never been to Japan, never studied Japanese, and only read about Japan in popular magazines or seen news reports on tv exercising judgement about how Japanese society should be run.
Sure, he'd have the right people below him. But he'd have no idea if what they're telling him makes any sense, and often his intuition about what he's hearing would be wrong, because he'd be using analogies that don't/can't fit.
That's how you get into "internet is a series of tubes" territory.
In a way, it's like dividing a role into several people. He handles the government-side, the domain experts handle their sides. A micro-manager, of course, would be a disaster in such a position but it can work with the right people and organizational structures.
This is specifically the part he will probably struggle with if he is responsible for cybersecurity but has never used a computer.
Sometimes things sounds crazy simply because they really are.
So he's a puppet then? Different people just pull on different strings and he makes a call arbitrarily?
While nobody expects the minister in charge of e.g. nuclear power to be a nuclear engineer, we do expect them to understand how the plants basically operate, and common failure conditions.
In this case we have someone expected to make calls about computer security who not only lacks expertise in that area, but even in the broader area of computing. The issue isn't that they aren't a subject matter expert, the issue is that they lack such core foundation that they cannot listen to different subject matter experts and contextualize that information.
I'm all for less technical managers as a concept but there are degrees. If the manager cannot even understand the context, that's a legitimate problem.
Assuming we're talking about a functional department (and not a Trump-cabinet-like dysfunctional mess), I think we can safely assume the guy understands the concepts, problems and capability of computers and more importantly how these relate to government.
I once worked with a physics postdoc who LITERALLY never used a computer for his role in the Russian institute in which he worked back in the early 90's. All computer work was allocated out to computing professionals and he just relied on them to do the work in consultation with him. It was kind of strange, but I would say he "understood" computers very well. A similar thing could apply here.
Bringing more than that for him meant something went wrong.
Why do we have it? We have a bribery and feedback mechanism in Congress that quantifies bribery and ass licking to perfection. An elected representative HAS NO SECRET BALLOT!!. We can all see how he votes, as can all the bribers, who can call him to account. We say this exists to allow the voters to see that there rep did their bidding YADA-YADA-YADA - we all know it allow the bribery effectiveness to be watched and measured, so you can threaten to cut them off if they do not dance to the briber's tune. RANT/ How to get a better way? Empower all, with online voting of all eligible voters, in the style of the original Greek democracy. Pay people for their votes, hold back tax refunds for people who do not vote etc. This needs to be fine tuned. Chance of success = zero, as all the well bribed elected officials do not want their gravy train to end. /RANT
Don't you mean guided missiles and torpedoes?
The whole unmanned weapon concept is much older than toy quadcopters.
> We see China and Russia unfettered by this old boy network that are allowing their brains unfettered freedom to make modern stuff.
What? Are you familiar with the terms "oligarch" and "guanxi"?
> Empower all, with online voting of all eligible voters
Online voting is a bad idea. It's far more easily and cheaply subverted than most paper-based analog voting systems.
Just to pick one point, the allied forces in WWII were led by men who had fought in WWI, just a generation earlier. WWI was a technological arms race that moved along just as fast as technology moves today. For example, warships built less than a decade before WWI were obsolete, unable to compete range-wise with ship artillery built just a few years later. Technologies like tanks got introduced midway through the war, and the most important technology was arguably barbed wire.
Why use horse-drawn artillery in WWII? Because it was there. Because they still had it, and they weren't fully recovered from WWI yet. Because cars and trucks and tracked vehicles were unreliable and dependent on imported fuel - fuel that everyone remembered would be very hard to get once war blockades started. Because they needed every gun they could get.
The blitzkrieg was the result of very modern technology, and new strategic and tactical thinking to go with the technology. A couple of years later, it was obsolete...
Awesome name, tho.
Taking the UK as an example our health minister isn't a doctor and our education sec. isn't a professor. The executive branch of government acts no differently to any other large company.
Really? Why so?
I've seen ministers put in place with expertise in the actual area (doctor becoming minister of health for example) and it makes no difference. They're just managers after all, the "real work" is done by the civil servants.
For a minister of defense/secretary of defense type role you would hope they had been a career military person, specifically an officer. Officers, at least in the United States, are taught many things from tactics to military history, they understand command structure, they understand procedure and policy, as a career officer they would have years of experience in various commands serving in various capacities.
If you take John Smith from ABC Corp that got a degree from Harvard and is your golfing buddy and give him control over it, sure he's great at handling the civilians and the fobbits but he has no understanding of how a military operates. When generals/admirals tell him things he has no good context.
Assuming he's generally a competent person, he will now be forced to listen to and be informed by smart people in his department instead of putting his foot down and saying "I've used outlook all my life, so obviously I'm an expert. I've never been hacked, so policy is now that everyone should use Outlook."