In most elevators around the world, there are buttons to keep the doors open and also to get them to close. I've only seen symbols on them. Once, however, in the US, one gentleman got in, and instead of pressing the close button, pressed on the open button. So the doors, which were just going to close, opened again.
He complained - Why do they have these symbols, why can't they they just write Open and Close?
I've wondered about this every since - is it an American thing to have an expectation to have text everywhere? I have never heard anyone complain about those symbols before or since!
Call me crazy, but those icons are not different enough to be quickly readable. If the open and close icons on the elevator were distinct from one another words wouldn't be necessary, but the exact same icons rotated 180 degrees are indeciperable at a glance.
It takes noticeable processing time to know which is which. Especially with a button that you need to hit as quickly as possible to hold the door for someone, those icons should be widely different from one another. I can't count the number of times I've meant to hit the open button to hold the elevator for someone only to accidentally hit the close button just in time to make eye contact with the person we've left behind.
The open button looks like closed doors and the close button looks like open doors. I have to look at the symbols carefully and interpret the arrows every time. Or tell myself that the buttons do the opposite of what they look like at a glance. "open" and "close" would be easier.
> These changes were driven by a long-standing belief—pushed hard by the American Trucking Associations (ATA)—that the U.S. faces a permanent truck-driver shortage. The ATA’s solution was to lobby Congress and FMCSA to lower every barrier to entry, convinced that new drivers would flow to large ATA-member fleets rather than small operators.
> That assumption was rooted in an old reality: twenty years ago, only the biggest carriers offered real-time tracking, electronic tendering, and direct shipper relationships. Small carriers and brokers were stuck with phone, fax, and leftover freight.
> That world no longer exists.
Coming from the software industry, I've seen similar things happen when decisions are made which turn out misplaced in the longer term.
And I've always wondered - why can't the management respond fast enough to the new scenario?
What I've noticed is that as long as the same management team is there which had made that decision, it becomes extremely difficult for them to admit and make that change. Change only happens when either things get really critical, or when the management changes.
I wonder whether something similar is involved here.
Yes, I think when you work in implementation, it's obvious that you made a bad decision (to yourself before others see it) and you are quick to say "I made a mistake, let's fix it before the mess gets worse". Your skillset in this hypothetical I'm creating is "implementation". You decided on the implementation but that's only part of the entire thing you are responsible for (plan, build, maintain).
For execs they are responsible for monitoring key indicators and deciding on what to do.
When things go wrong it could be they weren't monitoring the right things and missed it or the direction the took initially was wrong (either right away or as things changed and they didn't see it).
That's their entire job, more or less. Not trivializing it. The stakes are high pretty often.
Fwiw if you want a simple pastebin, I've been running pinnwand for a couple years without any issues off of a single short docker compose file, I think running it on host also shouldn't be complicated
There seems to he a good chunk of them here these days - I guess they are easier than ever to make. I just down vote them and flag them and hope that disuades them creators.
What makes it propaganda? I haven’t read any of Ayn Rands work but have had some exposure to objectivism its general axioms seem to be pretty consistent.
You'll find a consistent set of axioms in most bigger theories. The question is if their model maps well onto the real world (which is fuzzy and inconsistent) or if it needs a lot of "if we only do a little more of X, it might finally work".
My problem with Ayn Rand is that she starts the description of her world view with agreeable statements like "A is A and therefore one can see truth (or draw objective conclusions) just by looking" (which disregards the problem of missing information). But then goes on to draw a moral from that idea which basically negates the whole point of objectivity by making the subject the center of the world. But that's not yet what makes her work propaganda.
What makes her work propaganda is that she, from there "induced" that, since there's only the individual that matters, it is only moral that one tries to maximize one's own happiness and that a fully capitalist society without any regulations whatsoever were we worship the then-to-be-godlike individual entrepreneur would be the only way to achieve said happiness. This also implies that while is is only moral to strive for one's own happiness, there is only a certain kind of individual who actually deserves it. The rest is there to worship or just be screwed over and over again, because there can be only a few winners.
So we've come a long way from making seemingly agreeable statements to justifying a system that dehumanizes most of its subjects (pun not intended) and makes them nothing more but a fleshy mass to the disposal of a select few winners. And that's just what propaganda does: drawing conclusions from a seemingly agreeable standpoint in a way that seems to be logical, but in its essence ignores the fuzziness and incompleteness of the world for the sake of some sense of purity. Don't be fooled by that. There's always complexity hiding somewhere. And while A might seem to be A, you just don't know, how large the hidden b is, yet.
In practice, I'd recommend to look for mental tools that help you analyze but always leave room to deal with the inconsistency of reality. Outside of formal science, consistency is a trap. Building a world view from a set of basic axioms works for mathematics, but not for the extremely complex network that is human relations. I had to learn that the hard way. I'd recommend thinking in networks, path dependencies, path probabilities and network centrality (power) instead. It leads you down a path that allows you to form a much clearer critique than you ever could by adopting Ayn Rand's way of thinking.
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