Government and Technology

A few days ago reading the paper I was struck by something I read about inspecting the oil rigs. Apparently there are not enough inspectors for the number of rigs. As a result, according to the government there are not enough inspectors to make sure the roil rigs are operating properly.

That wasn’t all, it appears that they cannot even determine the history of fines and violations each company and rig has gotten. This is due to the fact that the computer system they use is 40 years old, and few, if any, employees and inspectors even know how to use it.

Let’s think about this for a second.

The government, which states its there to protect the people, is relying on technology 40 years old to keep track of violations and more.

Um, what?

I find such problems to be one of the reasons for the problems in government. It fails to adapt to new technology.

Really? How much is a new laptop these days?

A quick look at the Best Buy website shows laptops going for as little as $300. Putting these violations into a spreadsheet, and MS Office is about $100 or so, and you have less than $500. Do this for the some 130 or so inspectors, add in another 100 people in the department or so call it 250 people and it comes to $125,000 to update to modern technology. Spend some more for some techies to transfer the data from the old mainframe to the new spreadsheets and you could do this for less than a million.

But the government being what they are, will instead complain about what is going on. How little resources they have, and how things are doing downhill.

This is a perfect example of how government works and why it should be feared.

Inspecting oil rigs is supposed to be a big deal. I mean we have all this hoopla over the Keystone project and the environment. The Dakota protests and a lot of people still recall other bigger disasters.

Do I trust the companies to maintain the oil rigs safely, to an extent. They are there to make money and will cut corners if no one is watching. Its their nature and one we have to watch.

But the government can’t even pull up history of past violations. It makes me question if they can even keep tabs on the current violations. If the system is so bad, then its only a matter of time before we have another major problem.

And the left-wing snowflakes will do what they always do. Bad oil and we need more government rules and regulations. They fail to see what happened and how to really fix such problems. They have their narratives they want to push and nothing else matters.

This isn’t the only division in the government which seems to suffer from technology. They seem stuck with old technology which actually costs us more money than if they actually upgraded.

Of course, if you upgrade someone in the government might lose their job. And that, the left can’t have.

So we are stuck with old technology and hope nothing happens.