Your house is insanely easy to break into unless it’s built with special materials or has steel bars over all openings.
Disregarding the fact that windows break, pretty much every residential door (both interior and exterior) can be busted down by anyone with a decent body weight or with a framing hammer. Hammer thru the door skin, or claw pry on the jamb to force the latch to release, or even just bodyslamming it can be enough to separate the lock block and stiles and the doors will simply fall apart from there.
You reminded me of this old film from the 1980’s:
B & E from A to Z: How to Get In Anywhere, Anytime
- “Haha, deadbolt… I just smash the door in.”
- “I can pick most locks with a credit card.”
- “I know when you’re home… and when you’re not.”
Learning how locks work made me realise that locking a door is basically just like putting a sign on my door saying "please don’t burgle me :) ". That terrified me at first, but I came to realise that nothing had changed and that I was no less safe than I was before. Turns out that the social contract is the main thing that keeps people in line
Half of security is just making them be noisy enough to get worried someone will check
Don’t think there are any particular quirks of logistics that are super hidden… maybe the most surprising thing for me was the amount of plastic waste? But even then I feel like that wouldn’t surprise most people
I fear that no amount of plastic saving by the general population will even come close to the amount of plastic wasted at the industrial scale.
Real, unfortunately… like the amount of plastic I recycle at home in a month is probably less than we go through at my warehouse in ~30 minutes… not even accounting all the plastic in the other stages of shipping… having worked one step down the line from my current job, we used thrice as much there basically… and of course the stuff we get at the warehouse is also all wrapped in plastic by the previous guys
Where does all that stuff go after it’s used? I can’t imagine it’s all recycled properly (let alone reused) but also not really that the bulk is not separated out at such volumes
We do separate out plastic, cardboard etc. At my current job but im not sure if it went to recycling or if it was just dumped somewhere with other trash, that’s a bit beyond the scope of my work.
The last one we really didn’t, so im certain that’s all going straight to the landfill
There is a branch of medicine called functional neurology, where people get symptoms that present like seizures, tremors, or even paraplegia, but they have no physical cause, they’re usually a sign of pretty difficult trauma history. It’s honestly awful and I feel so bad for them, you end up in ER thinking you have epilepsy and some ignorant ER doctor treats you like you’re malingering but you absolutely are not, the symptoms are very real and compelling, and sometimes you can’t tell if it’s epileptic or not and it requires a lot of testing. Some people have both epileptic and nonepileptic seizures. It’s really tough and there’s very little treatment available. They are not harmful to you physically at all, but they’re quite distressing and I feel terrible for people who have them.
I’m in accounting and considering what I read in the news, it was surprising to me how honest it is in real, regular, non public companies. We get real audits that are trying to validate our records, we give them our real work to look at, try so hard to figure out the real cost and revenue each month and year, to allocate things correctly, nobody is pushing for some fake result, only for a clear picture.
Those companies with fraud? A lot of things have to go wrong, and someone has to be really trying hard to defraud, and needs to convince others to go along with that. Most companies hire accounting because they actually want to have a good picture of what’s going on financially.
In IT the first problem/question should always this:
Is it a people problem or a technology problem?
IT can fix technology problems, managers need to fix people problems
if someone gives an IT person a people problem and they try to fix it, it will probably not go very well
same if you give a manager a technology problem and ask them to fix it
this is the most important lesson that leaders needs to understand
My supervisors will try to fix it for 3 minutes and post a question in the chat.
If that doesn’t’t make it work, it’s an it problem.
How to read well and closely as well as how nonsense academia can be. A recent work I read had multiple minor claims that were not factual while maintaining their main point. It made me realize how it’s hard to have everything right in a work but also how academia and research in general is like a tower of dominos, unless one person questions it the field will continue to build on bs claims.
I am glad Cory Doctorow has come a long way, but man, this was a major gripe from me about him when he was first getting popular in the blogosphere. He made some outright false statements about the history of Napster in the early 2000’s, and it made me furious. I remember being like “motherfucker, you lived through this how did you get it so wrong?” He’s been a lot more consistent for about a decade now.
Thanks for getting me to look up who that is! I knew his work but not his name.
That’s very frustrating. I wonder if that’s better or worse than in academia? People get called out and theories challenged, maybe a new edition is printed, or books challenging it. In blogs will someone often edit old posts for accuracy like the news does recently?
Oh, that’s part of what frustrated me so much about it at the time! I had a friend who had just gotten his Masters whose thesis had been on the co-evolution of control and resistance in digital networks, talking about things like Napster and Bittorrent specifically, and he couldn’t find a fucking job as a teacher to save his life. Meanwhile, Doctorow, with all his mistakes, was being asked to teach a class at UCLA.
That’s a really cool thesis! That must have depressed the hell out of them. I hope they found a good job for them.
Sometimes this sort of occurrence makes me really question the assumed validity of research. People can get away with a lot just because of a credential. I say this as someone in academia not a nut job conspiracy theorist.
When I worked in local television news, people would probably be shocked about how frank and open newscasters often were during commercial breaks. We got direct satellite feeds of the national newscasts, and they didn’t mute the mics or turn off cameras during breaks. We got to still see and hear them while local commercials ran.
I remember Katie Couric going off about a bunch of dumb shit during commercial breaks. I especially remember her being a demented cheerleader for the War on Terror, especially behind the scenes.
There used to be a video of her cutting a Native American historian from a special on Columbus Day and saying “what does he know about Columbus anyway?” after chiding him for having negative things to say about Columbus. Since they were short on time, they made the decision to cut him from the program. I’m having trouble finding it now.
The 1995 film Spin is made entirely from direct satellite feeds from between commercial breaks. It was specifically about the 1992 election and how both Republicans and Democrats “massaged the message” with the news media, but watching it you’ll get an idea of how it works, because a lot of the clips are from commercial breaks.
Mediaburn has a copy of the film to watch on their website.
I don’t work in a kitchen anymore but the amount of single-use plastic used in chain restaraunts is soul crushing. Most folks have no idea
I don’t work in a microbiology lab any more, but OMG the amount of plastic waste was unbelievable. Keeping everything sterile (as in germ free and DNA free) does not come cheap! If it’s small and cheap enough, it’s going in the trash. If it’s small but expensive, you’ll autoclave it. If it’s big, you’ll squirt lots of ethanol on it and hope it doesn’t ruin your day.
Spoiler
Sooner or later it will.
Oh you think that’s bad, don’t look at the medical field
Going through hospice with my parents I saw this first hand even in that brief time, and imagined how it must be going on constantly in every hospital and facility everywhere. And the thing is, it’s necessary in most cases because going back to how it was done before would be a nightmare just from the aspect of things being sterile.
Most public school teachers have very little say about what happens in the school or the curriculum. We’re just carrying out orders and hope that students will go along.
Student discipline can only be applied with parent and administrator cooperation. If admin doesn’t do anything about bullying, fighting, or cheating, then the school is screwed.
I’m a software developer making big bucks and I’m lazy and stupid
This is common knowledge by now I think, and yet evidence shows common doesn’t mean people remember. If you ship anything, fragile or not, be sure to pack it like it’s going to be thrown, dropped, get wet, and stepped on. It’s not even that workers in shipping do this (most damage is usually either bad packaging or mechanical damage in the automated parts), but things happen between point A and point B, many of them unavoidable. And I see SO MANY packages that consist of just some thin cardboard with a few pieces of tape, or a plastic bag that’s easily torn, or documents/letters that are smaller than the label we put on them(??? That won’t get lost :/ )
Pack things like you want to to make it there. Just look at packages you get successfully, and I guarantee on many you’ll see marks of the war zone they went through. Now imagine if they had been sent with an old worn out box you found in the garage and threw some tape on and didn’t bother putting any protective packing inside because “it’ll be fine if it bounces around a bit”.
All big banks run on horrendous excel spreadsheets ridden with errors
They’re not errors. They are expected deviations from reality. And if you fix them, YOU are wrong.
Broken/buggy software usually is not developers/QA’s fault but management and clients.
Consulting want something that conforms exactly what is signed and as fast as possible, if there are later bugs that doesn’t invalidates what was agreed es or new features take longer to introduce it means more money as maintenance/evolution contracts.
Clients often don’t see why they should pay extra and include extra time for better code. Also they prioritise stupid things like changing the font in a page over fixing a bug in the checkout page.
The better you get at coding, the less you’ll probably write code. This is for two reasons: you can’t fuck up code that isn’t written and you need people that understand the bigger picture to focus on making that picture clearer. This unfortunately leads to junior and mid-level developers writing most of the code. But it’s not like things would be 10x better if senior devs wrote everything, because even for someone experienced coding well is fucking hard.
Coding: expert level fitting a square peg into a round hole. Every now and then you find a square or rectangle hole.
The bespoke software that runs most of the business world is actually way simpler than a lot of people think.
If you’re a university student and some company hires you on the first year to work on a business analysis system to be used by a major regional retailer, you might be thinking you must be some kind of a wunderkid, but it also just might be because this system really isn’t that complicated, and you had no idea about the average salaries on this field, so they hired you on the cheap.
