Bill Belichick Throws in the Tablet

There's a lot of money lying on the table such that processes and systems are already going to be running on the border of human comprehension... can I see the signal in this noise?

Meanwhile projects that do something new tend to be successful and profitable, but mere reimplementation digitally tends to result in BS being added to the process as noise until the signal to noise ratio has dropped once again to what was, after all, acceptable before automation. "Well now you got all the time in the world to really stick it to the XYZ department so here's the new requirements" then they fire back causing lower productivity that if nothing were tried to begin with.

You have to realize automation is old, and our ancestors were ignorant not stupid. If you could increase the odds of winning a game by 5% using a million bucks of IBM 7094 mainframes and a million LoC in COBOL then gramps would have done it and made a profit to boot and maybe you can make a couple dimes by modernizing the hardware, but I assure you the algorithms and constraints are baked into the business logic cake and the win/loss percentage won't change.

One way to automate that does succeed is fixing something mgmt didn't realize is broken. I never knew there was a way to do that. I never knew we as a company blew X thousand labor-hours per week on hidden task Y.

IF football never tried statistics and record keeping, then a new system probably using contemporary tablets could really rock. But this isn't the case.

A good, although semi-controversial example, is moving from verbally asking for records over the radio to mobile data terminals to whatever cops use now (probably "cop space app" on their phones or something) has many effects, some even good, but catching criminals isn't one. Fundamentally you've changed who spends five minutes dorking around looking for warrants and dramatically changed how they spend those five minutes, but you haven't really changed anything in terms of end results, although intermediate metrics can be gamed (like dispatcher labor hour minimization).

Tablets make very poor band-aids.

So we're watching a TV episode my mythtv recorded and heavy rain always knocks out the OTA PBS signal so there's some digital breakup and the kids are like "skip it, its broken" because they are from an era of infinite youtube entertainment where something as good or better is always a "next" button away. They have no pity or empathy bad content is to be euthanized with aggressive application of the "next" button. Meanwhile I'm an old timer and I have invested in this episode of The Woodwrights Shop and I want to watch this damn episode even if I only get to see half of it between the signal breaking up. When I grew up an episode of Star Trek cost like $40 and was purchased on a VHS (or Beta) video tape and content was incredible valuable as the minimum wage was like $3/hr; for my kids content is infinite always available and totally worthless. You can always hit next and find something free that's probably better.

They are about the same with apps and games. Unless a game operates in what old timers would call newbie mode where its impossible to fail and you get little skinner box rewards every 10 seconds, they just delete it and find something "better". The game crashed? Don't restart, delete and reload. Oh well, for better or worse every game has 500 clones on ITMS to load on the ipad. Maybe clone #283 will be better than this one!

I also see a behavior with old people where TVs used to cost like a months salary so you replace them like windows, either roughly never, or when they break. How do I explain this to grannie that I can argue all day but when the CRT emission and therefore brightness drops in the amount of time I've spent arguing with grannie I could have earned enough money to buy a TV better than what she'd be throwing out, but great depression this and that and surely a smart electrician like me can replace a vacuum tube in her TV like uncle so and so did in 1962 and it would be all better and ugh ugh ugh so once again old people have a touch of early adopter syndrome and even junk is not to be thrown away, not realizing that modern stuff is both disposable and cheap. The only thing worse than arguing with an elderly relative about their 1980s magnavox TV is arguing with another old relative about their $100 2012 model thats already burned out the backlight because old people watch 18 hours per day of TV.