Dear Log,
I am wrestling with ISO. Words fail to convey how annoying this currently is, and always is. But I just wrote this to a friend:
It always a fresh horror when European idealism stops being about solving problems with straightforward ideas, and starts being about procedure for its own sake. It has all the pathos and bathos of watching lawyers applying superstring theory and octal numerology to Common Agricultural Policy.I think of ISO as "IETF goes to MIT and opens a sharia-based engineering law school".
Getting ISO to ever do anything means you have to prove to them that doing what you want is the best and only way to do it, is based entirely on past precedent, establishes no precedents that could ever conceivably be misused (as if there were barbarians at the gates, ready to swarm in and flood ISO with requests for Official Designators for 7-sided non-metric lugnuts), and to furnish proof that that not only is the problem within their domain, but also that no-one (sane or not) could ever construe the problem as being outside their domain. It is all very Austro-Hungarian Empire.
It is a small thing, but it is enough to make one despair for the future of the entire eastern hemisphere.
I have always harbored the theory that the foundation of modern economies is makework, and clearly endless committee cogitation is very effective at making work for people; but surely something more pleasant could be found for people to do with their time than sit around and bicker at eachother.
