@cstross Let's add a little sauce to that: outsourcing as a form of preferential reward to favoured shareholders and directors with an undisclosed financial interest in the parasitic outsourcing provider.
Or even a disclosed interest, in a sufficiently corrupt economy.
Couldn't possibly happen in the UK utilities sector, though: everyone's a paragon of rectitude and the outsourcing contracts are all written with watertight performance metrics and rigorously-applied penalty clauses.
cstross
wordshaper