Considering that there seems to be a 1:1 ad-paragraph relationship in BI’s article’s, I can’t disagree. Anymore BI links, and I’m going to have to water-cool my Pi-Hole.
This is very, very funny. Pathetic too, of course. But mostly very funny. Has it ever delivered much more than boiler-plate consultancy packaged in buzzwords at the best of times? Now with added slop!
Accenture is more like a body shop or software factory than a traditional consultancy.
Their business model is based on the fact that most non-tech companies have a deeply seated prejudice against paying software and system engineers high salaries and that most of their software engineering senior leadership is hopelessly out of date in technology, but are well-connected with the rest of the leadership team, and can't be replaced directly by more competent, younger people.
So they spend vastly more money to outsource things to Accenture than they would do paying good salaries to engineers. But then, the idiots at Wall Street are allergic to any dollar spent on salaries, while always thinking dollar wasted on companies like accenture is "investment" and thus "a good thing".
I came to the conclusion the most executives in big non-tech enterprises fear an overly powerful IT and actively take decisions that have the goal of making IT less powerful.
It is not very different from ancient Roman Emperors making sure generals that were too successful or popular ended up suffering some funny fatal accident.
Actually, back in the day Andersens (and EDS) were some of the few companies that could deliver really big systems (for all their faults) e.g. https://accountancyage.com/2000/03/16/andersen-consulting-to... . Each year a number of analysts had nervous breakdowns, I worked with one of them.
I worked on some very large very emergency contact tracing, disease surveillance, and vaccine management implementations during covid. Someone on one of my teams ended up in an inpatient facility after a breakdown. Having senior leadership break down in tears on calls was unusual but not unheard of during that time either. Analysts and others at that level went from ok to very not ok in about 90 days. No one cares about consultants, they get ground to dust and then replaced with another team. I was paid well but it was a tough time.
Accenture is a big place, it has a “nice part of town” where there’s genuinely good people who do good things. There’s also the boring part of town where they just “turn the crank and go home”. There’s also “the wrong side of the tracks” that’s just career nightmare fuel.
I'm not sure I agree with you. The only widely cited quantitative guess at this scenario I could find in a brief trawl puts the chance of any "climate-driven existential catastrophe" this century at about 0.1 percent [1].
"Extinction" is a stricter outcome than “existential catastrophe", so I would imagine the odds this century are even lower than 0.1 percent. In other words: don't resign yourself to the extinction of humanity in your lifetime - it's highly unlikely, and you're just going to be feeding the defeatism that is so tempting when external events are so seemingly negative.
As sibling commenter to this post notes though, I would imagine that mass unrest, famines, death etc. in less-developed parts of the world will occur, with knock-on effects for the developed world.
A better approach is scissors (cut the cord) or don't buy "smart" anything --- unless it actually costs *less* and can be easily used in a "dumb" mode (TV for example).
"Smart" means it intends to take advantage of "dumb" users. Any "smarts" will eventually be used against you by the manufacturer. They simply can't resist the extra $.
I have a 50 inch "smart" TV that serves as a dumb display and nothing more.
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