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Accountability Sinks

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Re: Accountability Sinks

#321

Post by zhivota »

ethbr1 wrote: post #224
yusina wrote: post #221

The squirrel example sounds terrible, but people don't realize the danger that moving pathogen-carrying specimen across ecosystems poses. Introducing a disease into your local environment can have devastating consquences for wildlife or farming or both. Example: Dairy farms have strict rules about not letting anybody in who was abroad within the last 48 hours because of possible spread of foot-and-mouth disease. Ther…

The acute guilt levied wasn't about following orders and exterminating the ground squirrels... ... but using an industrial shredder to do it. (on 440 of them) For reference, this is an industrial shredder: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/I15kCJyl6po Anyone who did that to a live animal deserves to be in prison, orders or no. There are innumerable compassionate, humane ways to kill animals, if it's necessary.

When you think about it, it's probably not actually that easy to kill 440 squirrels in a way that doesn't give everyone involved PTSD, if said people are not already used to doing such a task and already have methods and equipment to do it.

The shredder though, I'd rather do anything but that, that's really insane.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#322

Post by antithesizer »

t_luke wrote: post #153

The conclusion of Davies' second extract — about e.g. being bumped off a flight — is recognisable but the conclusions are actually wrong. The situation in these cases is actually more subtle. The person you're speaking to does normally have some capacity to escalate in exceptional cases. But they can't do it as a matter of course, and have to maintain publicly that it's actually impossible. The people who get what th…

This has become the norm in customer service. That is why a taboo has been invoked by companies against being a "Karen". That's how they get you. The ugliest thing you can be today is a customer who knows they're right and won't roll over.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#323

Post by blueflow »

immibis wrote: post #176
pyrale wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That way of saying that the holocaust is a thing of its own, that can be compared to nothing else is simply a way of separating genocide victims into first-class and second-class victims. The only outcome would be to weaken the collective "Never again" outcry against barbary.

That's what they do in Germany. They teach it as a unique thing that can never happen again... which leads people to never question whether it could happen again... which may lead to it happening again, because any sign that it was happening again would be dismissed, because "it can't happen again" is drilled into people. The default attitude of any human is to support the status quo, but you'd think Germany in parti…

I went through German school, did the mandatory trip to Buchenwald, met Pavel Kohn in person and i think you are making shit up.

What if US people are less hesitant to make those comparisons because they know less about it?

Re: Accountability Sinks

#324

Post by vemom »

scotty79 wrote: post #316
barrucadu wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meat isn't tasty. If it was you wouldn't always eat it fried almost to a char with salt and spices. Allow me to introduce you to the concept of "steak".

Buy your steak, toss in a pot of unsalted water. Cook for a while to make it edible. Eat it when hungry. Tell me again how tasty the meat is. Do the same with rice, potatoes or lentils and you'll have completely different experience. Pick any fruit. There's even no need to boil. Tasty from the get go.

Rare steak is nice.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#325

Post by codeulike »

franze wrote: post #47

I'm now in a stage of my consulting career where I sometimes really get called into big organisation just to find out, that whatever they need to do is already panned out and they all want to do it! Still they call me cause ... it's a big decision and the "higher ups" (which quite often are not even part of the workshop/session then) want an external expert voice. cause the responsibility for this decision lies with…

This is no secret, most of "big 4" consulting is about telling directors what they want to hear anyway (eg layoffs) but wrapping that in a glossy report with a logo on it

Re: Accountability Sinks

#326

Post by crazygringo »

ethbr1 wrote: post #224
yusina wrote: post #221

The squirrel example sounds terrible, but people don't realize the danger that moving pathogen-carrying specimen across ecosystems poses. Introducing a disease into your local environment can have devastating consquences for wildlife or farming or both. Example: Dairy farms have strict rules about not letting anybody in who was abroad within the last 48 hours because of possible spread of foot-and-mouth disease. Ther…

The acute guilt levied wasn't about following orders and exterminating the ground squirrels... ... but using an industrial shredder to do it. (on 440 of them) For reference, this is an industrial shredder: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/I15kCJyl6po Anyone who did that to a live animal deserves to be in prison, orders or no. There are innumerable compassionate, humane ways to kill animals, if it's necessary.

I'm genuinely curious now.

If you have 440 squirrels to kill, in an airport, that are legally not allowed to leave the airport... how the heck would you do it humanely?

It feels extremely non-obvious to me. Are there extra-large portable CO2 chambers the size of a whole room or something you can rent? And whose budget is that coming out of? I'm assuming nobody's going to try to inject them all individually with something.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#327

Post by Ekaros »

lucianbr wrote: post #155
TeMPOraL wrote: post #66

My go-to example of a whole mesh of "accountability sinks" is... cybersecurity. In the real world, this field is really not about the tech and math and crypto - almost all of it is about distributing and dispersing liability through contractual means. That's why you install endpoint security tools. That's why you're forced to fulfill all kinds of requirements, some of them nonsensical or counterproductive, but necess…

I wonder what the difference is between cybersecurity and civil aviation safety. At a glance they both have a lot of processes and requirements. Somehow on one side they are as you said, a way to deal with liability without necessarily increasing security, while on the other safety is actually significantly increased.

There is lot less aircraft models as well. About 17 in current production(although more variants), 3 in planning, 26 "out-of-production" and some more historical.

In the end there is just not that many products overall.

Now compare that to amount of software being worked on. And number of companies involved just on buying bespoke ones or developing for own use...

Re: Accountability Sinks

#329

Post by achierius »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #175
lucianbr wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the difference is between cybersecurity and civil aviation safety. At a glance they both have a lot of processes and requirements. Somehow on one side they are as you said, a way to deal with liability without necessarily increasing security, while on the other safety is actually significantly increased.

I think a big part of it is that failures in aviation safety cost lives, often dozens or hundreds per incident, in quite immediate, public and visceral fashion. There also isn't much gradation - an issues either causes massive loss of life, or could cause it if not caught early, or... it's not relevant to safety. On top of that, any incident is hugely impactful on the entire industry - most people are fully aware how…

I do think you're broadly right -- the lack of immediate and obvious impact creates a perception that there is no impact. But even your first example -- data breaches -- does have an impact. It might not have happened to you, it might not have happened to me, but people do get their identities stolen, and recovering from that is a nightmare. And nobody is going to 'paper over' John Doe's missing retirement fund or ruined credit score, that harm is permanent.

> this never happened

This is also wrong. Russia has employed cyberwarfare against Ukraine multiple times -- e.g. in 2016 when they took large chunks of the grid for an hour, or more pointedly in 2022 when it was used to disrupt infrastructure and digital operations across the country as part of an invasion. Stuxnet and Triton were also pretty serious -- unlikely to kill millions, but they did have a real effect. If you're bringing this up to explain why people don't care as much as they should, then I agree -- but I would think that it's misguided to suggest that "this has never happened" actually implies that it never will. It took 20 years after the advent of commercial airlines for someone to bomb one, but clearly that is now a major and continuing concern.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#330

Post by AStonesThrow »

palmotea wrote: post #291
amluto wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an exception to the exception, a lot of automated telephone systems have a tree of options, and they try really hard to avoid giving you a real person, and none of the options are helpful. But some of them are programmed to detect swearing and direct users to a representative. So a valid strategy is to swear at the automated system and then be polite to the real human that you get.

> As an exception to the exception, a lot of automated telephone systems have a tree of options, and they try really hard to avoid giving you a real person, and none of the options are helpful. But some of them are programmed to detect swearing and direct users to a representative. It usually just works to hit 0 (maybe more than once) or say "talk to an agent," even if those aren't options you're explicitly given. De…

With my Medicaid insurance carrier, long ago their automated system quit recognizing my member number, whether I recited it carefully, or typed it on the keypad. It would steadfastly pretend not to understand me. And I believe that this was somehow deliberately configured in their system, perhaps as an anti-fraud measure or perhaps just to spite/stymie me from frequently calling in. And it certainly would slow me down, especially when I was in a public place and valiantly trying to get something done by reaching out to them (their services included arranging rideshares/taxis, and so it was not unusual for them to fuck that up, thereby prompting me to call in and try to unfuck my ride home from the dreary, awful, vampiric medical clinic where they'd dumped me.)

So I have become accustomed to feeding it gibberish. I will type-in or recite nonsense numbers. It always takes 3 tries, 3 identical failures, before it routes me to a human anyways (the gatekeeping is simply an attempt at automatic authentication before the manual, human auth kicks in.) The most efficient way to get beyond that gatekeeping is by triggering unambiguous failures to authenticate.

And it is kind of funny; I don't know what is supplied to the humans' screens, but they are sometimes perplexed when they receive my call and I've just finished spouting gibberish to their ignorant robot bitch.

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