Time to admit defeat, scrap the navy?

greencap

maybe theres been a cultural shift in the last couple of decades which prioritizes only the productive capacity of a job. the intellectual part. the part which might render the most profit, or facilitate the most profit within the industrial system.

and dismisses the aspect of graft, discomfort, danger, toil, necessity. so that people doing important jobs, yet not necessarily profitable jobs, jobs which dont require high end qualifications can just be dismissed. Maybe the rule is 'doesn't increase industrial output, doesn't boost the bottom line, therefore ''unskilled'' therefore little respect'.

i dunno, just saw that comment about the cascade of pay demands if sailors pay is increased. it sounds like the root cause of such a logjam may be a sort of conceit, like this job doesn't require much in the way of professional qualification therefore its worth sht. because literally nothing else counts other than your education level. you have to live at sea? doesn't matter. you have to brave the elements, sorry doesn't affect net profit, therefore it can't matter.

how quickly the essential workers thing was forgotten.

just my sat night 2 beer brainfart.

i slump to be corrected.

Firblog

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121090764#Comment_121090764

Bye Bye

Manic Moran

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121090444#Comment_121090444

There comes a point where you get, in effect, a sustained reaction. It's not quite 'economy of scale', it doesn't really work that way, but it's a certain amount of expenditure that you actually get some good value for your money. I will agree with you that as it sits right now, the State's return is more ethereal than practical. However, it is not non-existent. The current situation at least maintains institutional knowledge and core capability. There are certain capabilities which remain needed if you have one ship or twenty. The paymasters, the procurement folks, the contract administrators, the hydrographers, naval engineers, logisticians, headquarters staff, whatever. This is, well, not constant, but scales on a sort of reverse exponential level. Going from 1 ship to 2 will cost proportionally more than going from 2 to 3, which is greatly more than going from 6 to 7 and so on.

However, terminating the naval staff because right now the Navy can crew few ships is a decision which is extremely hard to reverse, and would be extremely expensive to do so both in terms of dollar value and, importantly, time, which no practical amount of money can remedy. It is very arguably better to keep paying to keep the machinery ticking over so that value can be obtained by a slightly larger expenditure in the near future than to succumb to the false economy of letting the personnel go now in the hopes of some form of reversal of fortune in the distant future.