In lights of my future parenthood, we are trying at home to prepare everything to make our baby legal.
We decided to have a baby in Russia while living there temporarily and being Lithuanian and Spanish. That may cause some problems, as you can imagine, and the past few days we have tried to call our different embassies and consulates to understand what will be needed from us to make the governments understand that the baby is ours, that therefore he has a right to be Spanish and Lithuanian, and to obtain a passport so he can legally be in Russia.
I guess it comes as no surprise to anybody that the result is a clusterfuck of idiocy, papers, lack of logic, incompetence, bureaucracy and so on...
It seems terribly hard to comprehend for authorities of any country that you are actually you. I understand that if it was easy to pretend to be someone, there would be a lot of associated problems to that. I also understand that in the dark ages, the only way to proof that you're "You" would be to bring numerous amount of papers and documentation, together with signatures and even some witnesses.
However, for he past few years, there's this little thing called "electronic ID" or "electronic passport", that we have been using. If you know a little bit about cryptography, you can easily see the point...if you don't, trust me on this: A digital signature can be INCREDIBLY hard to falsify, compared to what can you do using dark photos, good handwriting skills and make up. Specially if the digital signature is authenticating stuff like your actual picture and your digital prints.
Given these facts, all paperwork should only require such a digital signature, the same one that is already used in lots of passports and IDs, like my Spanish ID or my Spanish passport. (I mean, these things are already used regularly, we're not talking about science-fiction stuff you can only find in MIT labs).
Anyway, these facts and my latest interactions with certain personnel has reminded me about a core problem that, I believe, is an important cause of such clusterfucks, and also an important cause of corruption, idiocy, outdated systems and other such things in Spain (and other countries): We need to fire people.
Now, this is a controversial statement. Plenty of times I've indicated that the Spanish problem is otherwise, how easy has it become to fire people. This is also true, so let's specify: We should be able to fire people that are really incompetent or useless on purpose, regardless of position or organization. I hope this clears it more. I can think of 3 groups that would require more firing options.
First, there's public administration workers. Public workers, at least in Spain (maybe in some countries it's different), cannot be fired, ever, except in extreme circumstances (as in, peeing over customers may cause them to be fired. Short of that, it's a rather hard thing to happen).
I know public workers that are great people and good at their job. Just these days I've talked with very competent people. However, I've also talked with really idiotic people, who clearly were bothered by the fact that they had to work now, after a question!.
For some reason, it is very hard to fire public workers, and that's a big problem, because we all need a certain amount of "fear" to perform a good job.
Liberal theories tend to support the idea of companies having lots of freedom when dealing with workers. One of the ideas behind this is that, otherwise, workers are not productive enough and the company will fail. Social theories indicate that company bosses, if given enough freedom, will exploit workers as much as they can, making society a much worse place. Both theories, however, sometimes seem to fail to ignore a more basic principle: We people are, in general, bastards that sacrifice someone's else well-being and freedom if it means we get to have some benefit out of it. It is not true of everybody, but given the chance to do something "bad" that brings a benefit to you, a large amount of us will take the benefit.
If you apply this principle to bosses, you can see that most of them (not all) will exploit workers if they have the chance. However, applied to the workers, it also says that most workers (not all) will actually be not productive at all if given the chance.
Therefore, we need an equilibrium of worker rights and company rights. This equilibrium would mean that the company cannot exploit workers and fire them at will, while workers need to actually work or be fired.
In the public administration we do not have this equilibrium, and without the fear of being fired some people simply refuse to work. I was told by a public administrator that when someone works normally, not overdoing it but not taking unnecessary constant breaks, lots of other public workers usually complain because it makes them look bad.
It has reached a point where I believe that some people try to enter public administration to avoid work whatsoever. This is unacceptable, and it´s one of the causes of the administration clusterfuck we usually suffer.You may be regular at your job, and then you should not be fired. But when you´re consciously doing nothing most of the time, to the point where yearly evaluations could show how little you are really doing, it should be possible to fire you.
There's lots of possible jobs in the world, and there's always something you can be good enough at to be able to work on that, or something that interests you. Even if you cannot work in something that you´re really passionate about, you can always work at some place and do some regular, good enough, job. The problem is when you´re not even doing that...
The second group that could use more firing is the "kings of the hill". As in Firefly: "Sad little king of a sad little hill". Self-important pricks.
There's lots of people in administration and in different organizations that has some position and believes themselves to be very important. And maybe inside that organization they are important, we're not denying that. However, they act as if everybody everywhere should give them respect just because of that.
A classic example is the typical case of an on-line community, where its creator and moderator, instead of taking a more passive approach or attitude, participates a lot and with hot opinions. Regardless of right or wrong, some of these community creators act as gods, banning people who disagree with them, giving extra benefits to the people who are nice to them, and all that.
Applied to something more serious, the big political parties all work kind of like this. Some public organisations also work like this, and the reason sometimes paperwork takes so long is because these people, by how important they are, need to stamp everything with their signature before it can be approved...while being too busy to do that very often, of course (several of these overlap with the first group).
The end result is that administration and some other organizations are full of very very stupid steps that do not help, do not give anything, and in this day and age can be easily made more secure and easier to perform by technology.
Therefore, we could improve things by firing some of these positions that are rather obsolete, while also getting rid of very annoying behaviours and attitudes that accompany such people plenty of times.
The final group that we need to be able to fire in an easier way are governmental officials and similar high positions. I'd talk about them, but there's no need: To prove why do we need that, we can always check today's circus at the Spanish parliament, the conclusions of which are that the current rulers will deny doing anything wrong ever, and if you voted for them that's too bad, if you want to change any tiny little aspect of their policies you'll need to wait until next elections.
We decided to have a baby in Russia while living there temporarily and being Lithuanian and Spanish. That may cause some problems, as you can imagine, and the past few days we have tried to call our different embassies and consulates to understand what will be needed from us to make the governments understand that the baby is ours, that therefore he has a right to be Spanish and Lithuanian, and to obtain a passport so he can legally be in Russia.
I guess it comes as no surprise to anybody that the result is a clusterfuck of idiocy, papers, lack of logic, incompetence, bureaucracy and so on...
It seems terribly hard to comprehend for authorities of any country that you are actually you. I understand that if it was easy to pretend to be someone, there would be a lot of associated problems to that. I also understand that in the dark ages, the only way to proof that you're "You" would be to bring numerous amount of papers and documentation, together with signatures and even some witnesses.
However, for he past few years, there's this little thing called "electronic ID" or "electronic passport", that we have been using. If you know a little bit about cryptography, you can easily see the point...if you don't, trust me on this: A digital signature can be INCREDIBLY hard to falsify, compared to what can you do using dark photos, good handwriting skills and make up. Specially if the digital signature is authenticating stuff like your actual picture and your digital prints.
Given these facts, all paperwork should only require such a digital signature, the same one that is already used in lots of passports and IDs, like my Spanish ID or my Spanish passport. (I mean, these things are already used regularly, we're not talking about science-fiction stuff you can only find in MIT labs).
Anyway, these facts and my latest interactions with certain personnel has reminded me about a core problem that, I believe, is an important cause of such clusterfucks, and also an important cause of corruption, idiocy, outdated systems and other such things in Spain (and other countries): We need to fire people.
Now, this is a controversial statement. Plenty of times I've indicated that the Spanish problem is otherwise, how easy has it become to fire people. This is also true, so let's specify: We should be able to fire people that are really incompetent or useless on purpose, regardless of position or organization. I hope this clears it more. I can think of 3 groups that would require more firing options.
First, there's public administration workers. Public workers, at least in Spain (maybe in some countries it's different), cannot be fired, ever, except in extreme circumstances (as in, peeing over customers may cause them to be fired. Short of that, it's a rather hard thing to happen).
I know public workers that are great people and good at their job. Just these days I've talked with very competent people. However, I've also talked with really idiotic people, who clearly were bothered by the fact that they had to work now, after a question!.
For some reason, it is very hard to fire public workers, and that's a big problem, because we all need a certain amount of "fear" to perform a good job.
Liberal theories tend to support the idea of companies having lots of freedom when dealing with workers. One of the ideas behind this is that, otherwise, workers are not productive enough and the company will fail. Social theories indicate that company bosses, if given enough freedom, will exploit workers as much as they can, making society a much worse place. Both theories, however, sometimes seem to fail to ignore a more basic principle: We people are, in general, bastards that sacrifice someone's else well-being and freedom if it means we get to have some benefit out of it. It is not true of everybody, but given the chance to do something "bad" that brings a benefit to you, a large amount of us will take the benefit.
If you apply this principle to bosses, you can see that most of them (not all) will exploit workers if they have the chance. However, applied to the workers, it also says that most workers (not all) will actually be not productive at all if given the chance.
Therefore, we need an equilibrium of worker rights and company rights. This equilibrium would mean that the company cannot exploit workers and fire them at will, while workers need to actually work or be fired.
In the public administration we do not have this equilibrium, and without the fear of being fired some people simply refuse to work. I was told by a public administrator that when someone works normally, not overdoing it but not taking unnecessary constant breaks, lots of other public workers usually complain because it makes them look bad.
It has reached a point where I believe that some people try to enter public administration to avoid work whatsoever. This is unacceptable, and it´s one of the causes of the administration clusterfuck we usually suffer.You may be regular at your job, and then you should not be fired. But when you´re consciously doing nothing most of the time, to the point where yearly evaluations could show how little you are really doing, it should be possible to fire you.
There's lots of possible jobs in the world, and there's always something you can be good enough at to be able to work on that, or something that interests you. Even if you cannot work in something that you´re really passionate about, you can always work at some place and do some regular, good enough, job. The problem is when you´re not even doing that...
The second group that could use more firing is the "kings of the hill". As in Firefly: "Sad little king of a sad little hill". Self-important pricks.
There's lots of people in administration and in different organizations that has some position and believes themselves to be very important. And maybe inside that organization they are important, we're not denying that. However, they act as if everybody everywhere should give them respect just because of that.
A classic example is the typical case of an on-line community, where its creator and moderator, instead of taking a more passive approach or attitude, participates a lot and with hot opinions. Regardless of right or wrong, some of these community creators act as gods, banning people who disagree with them, giving extra benefits to the people who are nice to them, and all that.
Applied to something more serious, the big political parties all work kind of like this. Some public organisations also work like this, and the reason sometimes paperwork takes so long is because these people, by how important they are, need to stamp everything with their signature before it can be approved...while being too busy to do that very often, of course (several of these overlap with the first group).
The end result is that administration and some other organizations are full of very very stupid steps that do not help, do not give anything, and in this day and age can be easily made more secure and easier to perform by technology.
Therefore, we could improve things by firing some of these positions that are rather obsolete, while also getting rid of very annoying behaviours and attitudes that accompany such people plenty of times.
The final group that we need to be able to fire in an easier way are governmental officials and similar high positions. I'd talk about them, but there's no need: To prove why do we need that, we can always check today's circus at the Spanish parliament, the conclusions of which are that the current rulers will deny doing anything wrong ever, and if you voted for them that's too bad, if you want to change any tiny little aspect of their policies you'll need to wait until next elections.
good luck my friends !
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