Some hunters have elders rather than dedicated full time priests, and they can veer more rabbinical; they've got the stories and pass down the classics as food for thought and discussion.
On a superstition v superstition basis it's hard to get a photo finish between them and a Bishop.
Religion is not exclusive to agrarian societies. Indeed, much of proto-indo-European religion (ie the OG “sky father” [1]) was developed on the steppes in a pastoral lifestyle.
An observation here that wasn't quite made but in my opinion is supported by the narrative.
If you raise enough capital (whether social or financial) to run for 3 years then you can run for 3 years. If your bets are paying off 2 years in you can stick with the plan - no one will care how you used the capital in year 1 and 2 if there is a payoff in year 3.
There is another risk: you run for 2 years and prevent a major problem that would bite the company in year 3 or 4. However because the problem never happened nobody knows how much you saved everyone and so you don't replace all that capital you used up.
Every company I've worked for has regular meetings where they honor the people who stayed late to get the release out the door (I work in embedded systems where upgrades often mean flying someone with a USB stick to a remote location without cell service - thus bug free releases are important since upgrades are expensive). I can't help thinking every time that if the rewarded person had just done their job 6 months ago they wouldn't have had the bug in the first place.
I guess it takes a visionary management to recognize the value of disasters that were prevented.
Who is worth more? The person that quietly removes scrub brush and other fuel on the ground in the years before the forest fire starts, or the person that comes in once the fire starts and using lots of equipment and effort puts the fire out. Often the latter person gets the accolades, the former is a thankless task.
If a company lacks visionary leaders like that, then one must wonder if the company has much of a future anyway.
> I guess it takes a visionary management to recognize the value of disasters that were prevented.
I think you should change “visionary” with “competent” here.
This industry has been talking about how bad it is to have “hero devs” for decades, maybe since it’s ENIAC beginnings. After a few decades, you’d think this would filter up to management.
If you change your example from brush clearing to garbage removal it becomes pretty clear: who should get more accolades, the guy who takes out the trash or the guy who stays up all night treating the infections? Both. It’s management that fired the custodial staff who should be canned.
Management knows in the abstract. However they also know the value of awards and shipping - both of which can be in conflict. They do not know how to resolve this conflict.
Everyone says the thing they're working on is critically important. Who's right?
More work gets done for less if you wait until the 11th hour and fix the real problems last minute rather than fix everything ahead of time, much of which will turn out to not have needed fixing.
Yeah there's risks involved but at the limit it makes some sense.
Who is right is the wrong question here (not that your point is wrong - it is correct in some situations but not the one I'm talking about). This is a case where the features we need for the release were planned in advance and management signed off on them - by definition getting the feature done is right (even if it turns out customers don't want it, at this point we have committed as a company). However there are always a few bugs that become last minute stop ship issues that should have been prevented long ago.
I forget the exact details, but we had a bug that prevented logging in to the app for a large subset of users.
The engineer that caused the bug ended up staying late and fixing it. He was treated like an absolute hero by management, even though it was his fault in the first place. (Don't worry, we all fully understood it wasn't just his fault. The whole system failed and he wouldn't have been harshly judged for the problem.)
From then on we joked about adding bugs on purpose so that we could all get similar treatment.
They're pretty common, yeah. 10% of the continental US, 90% of Alaska, most major bodies of water (70% of Earth), etc. When you factor in spotty service rather than 0 service (e.g., enough noise and contention that you can't load a text-only search result page in a normal browser for 90% of the day) the situation is much worse.
It's definitely a high risk high reward strategy but if you have the context from being the space for years and you've done your due diligence by speaking to your customers before you build things, you reduce the risk significantly.
Of course the risk can never be zero though and luck definitely played a role in past successes.
Most likely it costs a lot because there isn't enough frequency of demand for it for more than one company to offer the service thus there is no supply. However, as it is a regulatory requirement the severity of demand when it appears is near infinite.
Having done UL certification before, this is exactly how it is.
During the process we forgot/missed that the product serial needed a single letter appended to the end to denote that it was the UL compliant version. We caught this after paying $15k for just recertification with new parts, no testing, only paperwork.
We went back to UL and told them about the mistake. They charged us $5k to open a new case just to append a "-5" to the name of the product on a handful of documents.
> so that decisions about the railways we use are made closer to us
I believe this is a mistranslation of "so that decisions about the railways we use are made by me" or more precisely "so that decisions about the railways we use are made by the sort of people that like attending committee meetings and working their way up the inside of political parties"
The privatisation was very likely botched, however, it was not as if it was done in a secret - the "fire sale" only happened at "rock bottom prices" with hindsight. The nationalisation itself was fairly botched and it is hardly as if the decimation of Britain's railways implemented following the Breeching Report (completed on a nationalised rail system) was particularly effective.
> For most of the industrial era, you could assume that any large physical operation, like a warehouse, would need a certain number of human bodies to move boxes and drive forklifts.
Were there forklifts for most of the industrial era? Given they were invented in 1917 (according to ChatGPT), No.
Unfortunately, I don't think it is "playing by the rules" to get a career specific education.
And the crazy thing is that while outlook is my life it's also unbelievably bad. Why can't I have the calendar and email client open at the same time? Why don't newly received email addresses appear in the valid auto complete for sending out calendar invites? Why is search practically useless?
This allows the formation of a priest class that can tell you what the sky father wants you to do.
They may have had to but it need not be because it led to more calories for them.
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