Old Technology and Lack of Competence

New York is currently going through another power black out. I have seen many over the years but I can make some observations having seen this up close a few times. ConEd is a classic old company of well paid employees many of whom in my opinion and my experience would find employment hard to get in a truly competitive environment.

Add to this the fact that the technology used and those developing, deploying, and managing this ancient technology have little interest or competence in bringing it to the 20th century if not the 21st. The only entity worse is of course Amtrak. But I defer on raging on this one.

The problem: not network management and not alternate routing. No adaptive network flow, no backup systems, and worse they seem clueless as to numbers. They first said 20,000 people but when all is done it is easily well over 250,000. Any competent person would have known that in the first few seconds.

Now imagine this were Government run health care. Yes folks, consider it Medicare for All, not the Medicare now but the Medicare after the same crowd that brings you Amtrak and ConEd. But I degrees dear reader.

Let me return to network management. The power grid is a network. It has failure modes and recovery modes. A good network management system is designed to recover the network quickly and to generate and communicate information promptly and correctly. That is not the case with ConEd nor frankly with any of the power companies. Just think, when was the last high tech IPO in the power world? Edison in the 19th century! What are the top universities educating and training our leaders? I am certain there are a few, but not in the top five tiers. In fact it is hard to find courses in power. Even fifty five years ago when I was studying there were none!

So who goes into these companies? It appears by their performance not our nations best. Pity.