The Blame Game

Pointing fingers is something we tend to do a lot more often these days. With the economy taking such a nasty downturn the past two years, the community would love nothing more than to point the finger at somebody, make someone responsible, have someone fess up and explain why we are going through the roughest of times lately. Healthcare, housing, jobs and automobile industry, have been the topics of discussion all over the United States. Wall Street has been labelled as the big green monster eating away at our hard earned money and a lot of us are just not trusting our government and where our money is going.

The automobile industry has really had a difficult time because they have been a part of that collapse of Wall Street, when major auto company owners were exposed for living the good life while their employees and companies were tragically failing. Consumer confidence was at an all time low and more than the Internet is to blame, I think that is the main issue at hand. Families where the primary provider has lost their job, cannot afford to make expensive car payments as they are trying to keep their homes, therefore, nobody is going out buying buying buying and instead are trying to save save save, which is a culture unknown to our generation. Another reason is also, a very significant, new wave of "green" consumers. From celebrities to common folk, everyone seems to have been bitten by the bug, consumers, especially younger generation that are easily influenced, are looking for more cost effective, environmentally friendly vehicles that fit with their new lifestyles and when automakers could not meet these demands, sales ended up taking a slump.

Therefore I think the attitude of saving, being environmentally conscious, and having to make the tough choice between shelter and transportation have all lead to the consumer lack of trust in auto companies have all lead to the demise of the automobile industry. And did I mention the sky high gas prices?????

Till then......toodles!

8-12 Weeks

The rise of the digital age affects every component of our lives. It is only expected that our governments would eventually have to follow suite and join in on the party. Graduates of today are more “technologically aware” than our parents generation. In order for the government to keep up and change with the times, they have had to change the way they communicate with their people, they’ve also had to  convert a lot of their services to online format in order to still be relevant to their citizens, some more than others.

On the social aspect of things, countries like North Korea, have strict governance over internet content within their borders. They monitor almost everything its’ citizens view on the internet, content is filtered and they pretty much have a “big brother” system in place. Anything that is deemed harmful to the country’s reputation or president will not be accessible to view. Because the internet is so flooded with all types of views and opinions, it must be a very very difficult process to monitor and filter all this content and as a citizen of that country, your views are therefore very biased.

In the United States, we have seen a lot of content that were previously deemed as “sensitive information” digitalized. From making appointments at the local DMV for your ID to filing your taxes, to applying for a passport or immigration status, a lot of these processes can now be done from the comfort of your living room sitting in front of a screen. The waiting lines at government agencies and endless paperwork to fill out has drastically decreased because of this conversion. The problem I have is the time it takes for information to be processed once you enter it into the system. From the time you enter your private information in a “safe” portal to the time you receive feedback, the waiting period is extremely long usually 8-12 weeks for response. The very limited or lack thereof face-face connection has become very limited and vague. When you call these agencies for an update on your application, you usually get a generic response of “your application is still being processed”. This of course makes sense due to the vast amount of data that has to be processed, the manpower to do all this almost nonexistent as the government are not the biggest hirers in the economy.  Yet they still encourage you to apply online as it is “faster” and “more convenient”...for whom?  All the while the time passes by, your information is passed off  from department to department, computer screen to computer screen, system to system, there has to be some loss of privacy and sensitivity to your personal  information and by the time it reaches the actual hands of a person, all you are is a case number.

I am optimistic that in the future, it is evitable that more and more processes will be converted online, and frankly that is fine with me, as I am part of the computer generation. My only issue is how they intend to improve on the lag time of information processing and response to citizens because when most of us are contacting the government for something, it is not an issue we can wait 8-12 weeks for.

Till then….toodles!