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Accountability Sinks

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Re: Accountability Sinks

#51

Post by switch007 »

oleggromov wrote: post #37

I once booked a plane ticket from my home town airport to another country. The purchase notification said something like "PVA" instead of "POV". I looked it up and turned out, the newly built airport that had this exact code was about to open. In a week or so, so I assumed that I'm indeed flying from the new one and forgot about it. The purchase was made through a booking aggregator similar to Expedia. On the day of…

> There was no way I could convince her that it wasn't my fault. Perhaps there was a rigid process in place that disallowed her from helping, even though I'd make it to the second flight on time.

Yeah they generally have the capability to prevent that auto cancellation of your segments (within a certain time frame) but in this case unfortunately they were unwilling or it was too late to catch it.

It's generally to protect revenue because buying A-B-C instead of B-C can be cheaper, and hoards of people used to just segments to save money. So they just assume everyone is trying to cheat them.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#52

Post by Muromec »

scotty79 wrote: post #14

Another major accountability sink is employment. Employee is shielded from financial responsibility for the damage he incurs while working. While he may be punished for disobeying orders or acting criminally, he's not financially responsible for the fallout (especially if he was only doing the things he was ordered to do and/or reasonable things). Doing a job is inherently risky behavior. If you are doing it in a con…

>If you are doing it in a context of financial amplifier (a company) in a regulated society that can quickly hunt you down and destroy your life if you misstep

Sir, it's the year 2025 of our Lord. Nobody is out there to destroy your life most of the time.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#53

Post by [deleted] »

dijit wrote: post #45
throwanem wrote: post #35

I'd say he loves the sound of his own voice, but everything worthwhile here is in a blockquote. Oh well, even a poor collator has value as such.

And what value did this comment create? While we’re being unnecessarily rude, and discussing people who enjoy the sounds of their own voice and lacking substance.

[deleted]

Re: Accountability Sinks

#54

Post by Muromec »

blueflow wrote: post #6
immibis wrote: post #4

It's interesting we always talked about the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials when talking about accountability, as if similar atrocities aren't currently happening. It's because breaking an accountability sink of people who are long dead doesn't have any impact other than the explanation itself. Breaking an accountability sink of currently living people and currently active wars is much more dangerous.

Did you imply that there is another Holocaust currently ongoing?

There are proceeding at the ICC against at least two countries on the accusations of genocide right now.

Whether it's worse or better than Holocaust is debatable and you can bring up a metric. Did Gaza reach 10% of the Holocaust? At what rate we count abducted children against murdered adults? Do we count deaths or suffering too? Do the circumstances of death with genocidal intent contribute to the metric?

What can we learn from the quantitative comparison of one with another?

Re: Accountability Sinks

#55

Post by oleggromov »

switch007 wrote: post #51
oleggromov wrote: post #37

I once booked a plane ticket from my home town airport to another country. The purchase notification said something like "PVA" instead of "POV". I looked it up and turned out, the newly built airport that had this exact code was about to open. In a week or so, so I assumed that I'm indeed flying from the new one and forgot about it. The purchase was made through a booking aggregator similar to Expedia. On the day of…

> There was no way I could convince her that it wasn't my fault. Perhaps there was a rigid process in place that disallowed her from helping, even though I'd make it to the second flight on time. Yeah they generally have the capability to prevent that auto cancellation of your segments (within a certain time frame) but in this case unfortunately they were unwilling or it was too late to catch it. It's generally to pr…

> It's generally to protect revenue because buying A-B-C instead of B-C can be cheaper, and hoards of people used to just segments to save money. So they just assume everyone is trying to cheat them.

Isn't it ridiculous in the first place that flying A-B-C is less expensive than B-C? These are the pricing games airlines deliberately play to make more money out of nothing.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#56

Post by throwanem »

dijit wrote: post #45
throwanem wrote: post #35

I'd say he loves the sound of his own voice, but everything worthwhile here is in a blockquote. Oh well, even a poor collator has value as such.

And what value did this comment create? While we’re being unnecessarily rude, and discussing people who enjoy the sounds of their own voice and lacking substance.

"Unnecessarily?"

And hon, unlike most in this dawning age of LLM slop replacing human speech, I deserve to enjoy the sound of my own voice. People tell me as much almost every day! Think of me as Wittgenstein's lion. Don't expect to be able to make sense of me.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#57

Post by n_ary »

bflesch wrote: post #20

The reader can feel a glimpse of the author's ego the moment he explains his skills as a Google Site Reliabiliy Engineer and his glorious work on improving gmail post-mortems right after the section where a hospital team saves various people in a mass casuality situation by empowering nurses to perform formally doctor-only tasks. Only with a healthy dose of cynicism I can understand where he's going. While the topic…

> he explains his skills as a Google Site Reliabiliy Engineer and his glorious work on improving gmail post-mortems right after the section where a hospital team saves various people in a mass casuality situation by empowering nurses to perform formally doctor-only tasks.

Isn’t this the practice we do to sell ourselves during interview about quantifying our work and value?

I firmly believe that the author is the perfect interview candidate who will pass an engineering interview with flying colors. For rest of us, “so erm… I fixed a bug which allowed my employer to scale quicker globally during natural disasters and erm… allow emergency response teams to coordinate. My manager tells me it saves billions of life but I do not have access to actual numbers but the number of promotion each of my managers get when I fix a bug tells me, my contribution has good values”.

P.S. Off-topic.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#58

Post by Pamar »

oleggromov wrote: post #48
Pamar wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, sorry for your problem but no-shows automatically invalidate everything else. If you decide to cancel part of a trip due to unexpected events, train strikes or whatever that is not directly under control of the airline itself you must contact them and make sure they will not cancel the rest (including the return flight).

Leaving aside the no-show rule, which doesn't make much sense to me, this situation is a good example of an accountability sink. The intermediary I booked the tickets with made an obvious mistake and showed the wrong airport code. Maybe the airport opening was meant to happen earlier, and the intermediary had already updated their emails or something like that. They refused to do anything meaningful and did not even…

I was not trying to dispute the accountability part. Btw my company was hit by the delayed opening of BER airport. Colleagues had to rebook thousands of tickets because the BER iata code had to be "retconned" to use TXL again... so I am more than happy to sympathetic with your problem, trust me.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#59

Post by euroderf »

xg15 wrote: post #49

One example that's missing from the list is the TV series 24. A recurring plot point was that, yes, of course torture is bad and it's against the rules and we don't do it, etc etc, but it just so happens that here is such an exceptional, unprecedented, deeply urgent emergency situation where we need to have the information now or horrible things will happen, we need the hero who breaks the rules and goes on torturing…

Wasn't 24 cited by Cheney when he was defending USA-as-torturer ?
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