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Challenges – politicalbetting.com
Challenges – politicalbetting.com
“They slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”
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Challenges – politicalbetting.com
“They slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”
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Politicians need a way to dodge questions so there's a whole industry to support. Cynical, parasitical lawyers and consultants have to eat somehow and useless judges need some form of retirement income - God forbid they should rely on their gold-plated pensions.
The inquiry industry also explains why building new infrastructure costs four times what it should and gives us ridiculous bat tunnels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raMmRKGkGD4
Feynman also discovered, however, that Nasa managers did not properly understand the concept of safety factors, leading to fatal miscalculations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report
No sooner had I fired up my St Petersburg seedbox and got on the dark web to look for firmware images when I found a slip of paper in the box that told the new owner what code to put in to unlock full power. It's that easy. Fucking LOL. It's a Xmas Miracle!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/k6WO6PmpuUg
Vengeance Most Fowl was the only TV I watched all day and the first non-news BBC content I've seen for a very long time. It was rather good.
Oh, and if you haven't yet do give the Undercutters F1 podcast, by me, a look. Hoping to get the third episode, Most Memorable Moments of 2024, done between now and New Year, but we'll see.
https://undercutters.podbean.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkoY477b-FI
@Cyclefree, thanks for another hard-hitting article. This was the stand-out sentence for me:
''For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Not only applicable for successful technologies.
And cheers for the constructive criticism, I appreciate it.
It is the departure from reality that is most worrying about the recent surge of populist politics. Pretending climate change isn’t real won’t stop its effects. Pretending vaccines are dangerous will kill. And so on.
I now find it wasn't.
Plus he had another one ranting about evil left wing judges.
With any other person we'd be talking not just about the 25th but about him being sectioned. Trump is clearly off his head.
In his last administration he was malign, lazy, dishonest, corrupt, displayed truly shocking judgement and a very thin skin and was totally incompetent but he was not actually insane. Nor did he have untrammelled power as he now does.
The big worry, and this is why he should never have been nominated, is that he's surrounded by sycophants who won't do what is necessary to either constrain or remove him.
When America lurches from crisis to crisis over the next four years Republicans (and the Supreme Court) have only themselves to blame, but I'm willing to bet that like NASA they will blame everyone else first.
As someone for whom the Challenger disaster was one of his earliest news memories, aged eight at the time, the inquiry and reporting on the incident have always struck a nerve. It only took a couple of days before the playground jokes started about NASA being an acronym for Need Another Seven Astronauts, but only later when reading the material on the disaster (incuding Adam Higginbotham’s excellent book) did it dawn on me just how much it was a human failure rather than a technological one, on that cold January day.
Almost everyone involved in the project knew that it wasn’t safe to launch the Shuttle in freezing ambient temperatures, yet somehow they all convinced each other it was going to be fine, because it was more important to keep going than to be the one who called stop when it needed to be stopped. The O-rings in the boosters had almost failed before, and a disaster had been averted more by luck than by judgement. They’d delayed STS-51-L several times already, and the senior management at NASA were very keen to avoid further delays to the mission.
Making things worse on the day, was that one of the mission tasks was an outreach programme to American schoolchildren about spaceflight, called the Teacher In Space project. Astronaut Christa McAucliffe was to be the first teacher in space, having won a national competition, and would be giving lessons from orbit. For this reason millions of American kids watched the disaster unfold live, on televisions brought into classrooms and assembly halls across the country. Thousands of teachers had to explain to the children what had just happened, minutes after the event.
Reagan’s address to the Nation that evening was a masterclass in communication, something from which today’s politicians can learn a lot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa7icmqgsow
I’m sure that, like the rest of us, he was absolutely furious when he discovered what had actually happened in the lead up to the decision to fly. Nixon had pre-recorded several addresses to be broadcast in the event of the Apollo 11 mission failing, because he said that he couldn’t have coped with having to do it live. Reagan’s words that day, incuding the extract from John Magee’s poem that’s been read at the funerals of many aviators over the decades, perfectly captured the mood of the public at the time.
There’s obviously so much that can be learned from the disaster, from the treatment of whistleblowers to the need for timely investigations into incidents, but sadly NASA needed yet another seven astronauts only a few years later, after Shuttle Columbia succumbed to yet another well-known issue that the system failed to properly address before a disaster occurred.
Right, now back to the LEGO.
In that case, karma did have a modest walk on part - the SoS for Air was among the dead.
Bit hard on the other 47 victims though.
Clearly his thesis is pertinent to a range of topical scandals including many covered in leads by our own Sig.ra Ciclolibero. Despite our thirst for holding individuals involved in such scandals to account afterwards, the reality is that you could swap out all the people and run the simulation again, and get exactly the same outcome, because it’s the system design that drives how the people within it are behaving.
Step forward in 2025 President Vance.
Then there are the other side of the equation: people who are willing to do wrong just for the shits and giggles. Those with no societal mores, who do not care one bit about the consequences of their actions. If people die, so what? And they even post to brag about their actions.
Happy Doxing Day...
They could of course just get rid of Trump. Unexplained heart attack, maybe?
Have a brilliant 2025. You deserve it.
When I joined what was then the Post Office, later Royal Mail, as a graduate entrant, I was struck by how almost everyone was simply following policies or instructions, with even people at senior level averse to changing anything, because it was always safer not to take the risk. This was magnified in a business that was essentially doing the same thing every day with no real scope for excellence - either everything went to plan, as was expected, or a cock-up had led to the fiasco of an office full of late mail.
Later through politics, I saw how my naive student view of a world where the higher you might rise in any field, the closer you got to the real decision-making power at the top, doesn’t match a reality where everyone is hemmed in by constraints, sometimes practical but more often arising from the vested interests of stakeholders, such that the people who are nominally powerful spend much of their time explaining why they can’t do the things they started out wanting to.
I’m half way through the book at the moment, but his argument that the real power is wielded in practice by the system designers and policy writers, who aren’t accountable since a flaw - typically by omission rather than error - in a policy or procedure may not come to light until years later and policy owners are anyway rarely punished for not having thought of everything in advance - is an interesting one, to someone who didn’t make it to the top of any particular tree but spent much of my life writing policies and meddling with structures and process redesign.
Vance was on the ticket. America knew who would step up if Trump fell down.
Thing is, there's not much evidence Vance is any saner.
I want to broaden the focus on it. We all know how private industry gets into this kind of mess. This is our truth because we all say it. But this is endemic in government as well - especially local government.
Industry usually hires the best people for the job and often promotes the worst people - who then hire people just like them. National and local government? Too often we elect the worst people - those crazy enough to actually want to be politicians in this 24/7 social media scrutiny environment. That's not everyone, but increasingly the good people (regardless of party) aren't the people who end up running things.
Combine the worst people with systems and structures designed to stifle creativity and dampen expectations? Its no wonder that we are so deep into the mess we are in. At least with private industry there is the potential to hire someone from the outside who takes an axe to the terrible and turns things around. How do we turn around the Treasury? Or the local planning department?
Unfortunately Trump has declared his intention to fire the sane people and promote lunatics.
Vance is the ultimate political chameleon, changing colour to fit the ambiance. A Hillbilly when it suits, a Harvard Lawyer when it suits, a Never-Trumper when it suits and a Trumper when that suits. It's only when he reaches the ultimate position that we will see him become his own person.
"Midnight In Chernobyl" by the same author is equally as superb.
Well, you're the one with the medical degree.
I think the turgid beaurocracy that we have created is in large part down to excessive zeal in trying to prevent future mistakes by policy, legalese and regulation. While that works to a degree, it stifles initiative and innovation. It may well be that we need to be more tolerant of mistakes and less judgemental if we want to escape the red tape.
Many of the issues regarding engineering failures comes down to penny pinching. Engineers know what they are doing.
Every cloud etc.
It's probably easier and simpler to impeach DJT if they want to get rid as more Dems will vote for that.
That said, the graph of commercial aviation accidents over time is utterly astonishing. Modern planes just don’t crash any more, unless they’re shot down.
Party politics dictates that our team are great and the other team are crap. So we end up with idiot savants sat in notional charge of major services thinking they must be good because their side is right. It's no wonder that we end up trapped by a turgid bureaucracy.
I heard an interview with the Polish foreign minister who talked about how they had defeated the pop-right - he said you have to go do stuff. Starmer is at least trying to go after the migration crisis - he's deported an awful lot of people in a relatively small amount of time.
His problem? They aren't shouting it from the rafters. Had Farage become PM and started deporting people it would be *everywhere*. But that is the only thing Starmer is doing. There's an obvious list of stuff to target and Labour are in denial about chunks of them...
There are a few exceptions to this but not many
I am now going to indulge in shameless self-promotion. I have spent much of the past few months writing a book on scandals and investigations: why the former happens, why they reasons they happen are the same - no matter what the sector - and why the inquiries and their usually sensible recommendations are ignored so that we can repeat the mistakes and tragedies over and over again.
Would you believe there was a sensible inquiry into and report on public inquiries some 4 years which made a lot of useful recommendations to stop them being so long and expensive? It has been ignored and so another report has just come out saying the same things again and Please Do them THIS TIME.
The book is probably rubbish, certainly needs considerable pruning and editing and may be of no commercial interest to anyone. But it has clarified my thoughts and so I will answer some of your questions.
THE reason why inquiries are so long is that we allow scandals to go on for far too long. If we only investigated things properly right at the first signs of trouble they could be done and dusted in weeks or months. And there'd be no need for the whole panoply of inquiries etc. But this failure to investigate is endemic and is the one thing we get wrong over and over again.
The PO disaster for instance could have been resolved in 2001 when concerns were first raised by Alan Bates or again in 2003. And it would not have needed a public inquiry to do so. Just bloody good fearless investigators and the will to do find out. It's the latter which is lacking.
The same could be said of blood contamination, pretty much every financial scandal, Grenfell, many NHS ones, the BBC and Savile and the Panorama programme on Diana, the British Museum, and on and on and on.
Good early investigation is the key to stopping a problem turning into a crisis.
For some, he can literally do no wrong. They just reinterpret.
The notorious example in schools was when we used to pour absurd amounts of resource- the most experienced staff, books and website subscriptions, motivational away days- into the small slice of year 11 who were on track for 4 GCSE passes. Because the success criterion was the proportion who got 5.
My suspicion is that, if we don't like the current setup, part of the answer is to make organisations that do stuff- whether business or government- smaller and less centralised than they currently are. Partly to allow smaller, lower risk experiments, but also to improve the chances that those giving the orders know what they're talking about.
But there must be non-malign reasons why we ended up here.
Understanding risks properly is key to managing them effectively. True in lots of sectors: the financial world has given us a masterclass over decades on how poorly it understands the risks it is taking. I was surprised by NASA's failures on this, though.
Transport accidents pretty much stopped happening because the NTSB (in the UK the AAIB and RIAB) investigates every incident and accident, and makes recommendations aimed at preventing the next one.
We can all learn from that approach, of looking at causes of incidents rather than rushing to apportion blame. No-blame culture works, ask the Mercedes F1 team who won seven championships in a row using just that approach.
We're (broadly) progressive. That means we care and we know it. My diagnosis isn't specific to my party or my previous party, it's a criticism of "the left". We're too nice.
What is our most recent innovation in economic policy? The OBR marking the Treasury's and Bank of England's homework, all based on the same thinking and the same models and the same dodgy statistics. Devised by George Osborne as an anti-Labour trap, it stopped Conservatives too. Most infrastructure spending is deemed too expensive, especially outside the M25.
At least idiot savants occasionally build something, whether it be Amazon or Tesla or the Sinclair ZX80.
good article though
But the longer you wait the greater the desire to find someone to blame and the greater the risk that you ignore what really needs fixing.
Watching the same happen in my company right now...we at the less rarefied heights have told them why what they are asking for won't work, forecast the raft of things that will go wrong. Month by month we are ticking off all the things we predicted would happen as they occur in the project yet every month they tell the whole company how well the project is going.
I don't know why I thought that.....
Is it surprising that many voters have decided that the serious centrists as well as the oligarchs don't actually mean what they say?
This is what happens when you stop pretending: If the science is right, then what it forsees is going to happen because there is no global will to stop it.
The only chances: Mitigation; preparedness; tech solutions; hope for and look for the upside to be greater than the downside; hope the science is wrong.
Here’s a graph of commercial aviation fatalities, which has now basically trended to zero even as the number of flights has risen exponentially. If you want a model of an industry utterly dedicated to eliminating accidents, this is it.
Source: https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2023-10/statsum_summary_2022.pdf
Basically, the people on the shop floor sniffed the air and came out with something like "it will blow up about 1 time in 100", whereas management had a reassuringly complex calculation that put the risk of failure much lower. Unfortunately, that calculation was based on numbers that must have been essentially made up.
As for why this happens, I suspect that bureaucratic layers and "what do you want the answer to be?" culture don't help.
The harder question is whether that is still preferable to the "whimsical despot" model of someone like Musk.
But when they can cover for the President being totally doolally, is it any surprise that they can cover for a Congresswoman?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/26/defra-scraps-england-deadline-to-register-thousands-of-miles-of-rights-of-way
Populist anger can point at different targets: e.g., the reaction to Luigi Mangione shooting Brian Thompson in the US. Johnsonian populism got kicked out by the UK electorate.
I'm involved in such a saga at the moment. There is a wear plate on a vehicle bogie designed in the 1950s and still used in a substantial infrastructure maintenance fleet. It's a rectangular plate held in place by five fixings, with four arranged as a square and one in the middle at the end. There have been consistent problems with them coming lose in use, starting at the end with the single fixing. At some point, someone has obviously done the logical thing to fix this, so there are a few sets around with a bonus pair of fixing holes.
We're doing a pile of rebuild and renewal work. We've had meetings and demos costing thousands just about these stupid wear plates. Can we upgrade to use 6/7 holes on these wear plates? No. The original drawings say five holes. Thou shalt not change from thy original drawings.
Is there anything else we can do to stop them dropping to bits? Not really.
Everybody is agreed that the extra fixings will fix the problem, but no one is willing to pay for the whole bogie design review required - not least as I think most of us think the whole bogie probably won't conform to modern safety factors, so probably won't pass a review anyway.
Repeat this sort of thing thousands and thousands of times, and one begins to see why the railway network is so expensive.
But what the PO Inquiry has done - very well to my mind, though it shames my profession to have to say this but it needs saying, indeed shouting from the rooftops - is show that it is not in reality an IT scandal at all but a legal one. That was not clear until the inquiry and was one reason why the story took so long to gain traction.
What happened was created by lawyers, perpetrated by lawyers and covered up by lawyers. The IT system was merely the mechanism. Every part of the legal profession has been shown wanting. It is like the GFC for the legal profession in every part of the U.K., from the Ministry of Justice and Attorney-General down. The fact that there have been heroic lawyers working to put it right does not change this depressing fact. Even now I don't think that the legal profession as a whole has understood the very great harm this scandal has done it. Nor the amount of hard work which is needed to put it right.
The Inquiry has shed a harsh light on the legal profession's dirty little secrets: that fact too many of those working in it are second and third rate, too many focus on clever tactics or clever answers to limited questions, too many ignore the essential ethical underpinnings of their work, too many forget that there is a difference between what the client wants and what the client needs and that a good lawyer needs to understand that difference especially when working in-house and too many are unwilling to call out bad behaviour. There are too many well remunerated cowards in the upper reaches of the profession and we saw some of them on show in the Inquiry.
It has also focused very much on the human impact of the tragedy and has put the subpostmasters and their stories at the heart of the evidence. That was a deliberate decision by the judge and inquiry counsel and very much to their credit. It happened too long before the ITV drama.
What it has also shown - though less obviously- is how the state abandoned its responsibilities for the criminal justice system. I have written a whole chapter on this re the PO and how it has happened elsewhere too. It is a theme - the same retreat from essential state obligations leads to great harm to citizens (Grenfell/ blood contamination) and the state then does everything it can to wash its hands of any responsibility for putting matters right or helping those affected.
This political retreat from essential state responsibilities is so corrosive of trust in the state and in politics. It is to my mind the most important political issue to put right and no-one in politics seems to have the first idea how to do this or even how big a problem it is. If anything their actions make it worse. Destroy trust and society starts failing (and politics becomes unworkable).
He's lead counsel for Greater Manchester Police in the Malkinson Inquiry and he's going to look like an utter shit for trying to defend the utterly indefensible