[HN Gopher] Allan McDonald refused to approve Challenger launch,...
___________________________________________________________________
Allan McDonald refused to approve Challenger launch, exposed cover-
up (2021)
Author : EndXA
Score : 499 points
Date : 2024-06-21 11:23 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| shswkna wrote:
| This is an ever recurring theme in the human condition.
|
| McDonald's loyalty was not beholden to his bosses, or what
| society or the country wanted at that moment in time. He knew a
| certain truth, based on facts he was aware of, and stuck by them.
|
| This is so refreshing in todays world, where almost everyone
| seems to be a slave to some kind of groupthink, at least in
| public.
| illusive4080 wrote:
| In corporate world, everything must be tame and beige. Conflict
| or differences of opinion are avoided to focus on the areas
| where everyone agrees. It's exhausting sometimes to try and
| change methodologies. Introducing new technology can cause so
| much headache that many passive leaders just shun it in favor
| of keeping the peace.
| subpixel wrote:
| If my org is any measure of the truth, passive leadership
| isn't a thing - despite the prevalence of passive leaders.
| freeopinion wrote:
| We all celebrate a hero who stands for what they believe or
| know to be right. When they stand alone we admire their
| steadfastness while triumphant music plays in the background.
|
| In real life we can't stand these people. They are always being
| difficult. They make mountains out of every molehill. They can
| never be reasonable even when everyone else on the team
| disagrees with them.
|
| Please take a moment to reflect on how you treat inconvenient
| people in real life.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| It's a shame we don't have more engineers today that refuse to
| invent things because so many technological inventions today are
| being used to further the destruction of our planet through
| consumerism.
|
| Sadly, human society has a blind spot when it comes to inventions
| with short-term benefits but long-term detriments.
|
| I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI.
| dartos wrote:
| If only it were that easy.
|
| A lot of engineers in the US who are both right out of school
| and are on visas need to find and keep work within a couple
| months of graduation and can't be picky with their job or risk
| getting deported.
|
| We have a fair number of indentured programmers.
| xeonmc wrote:
| "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or
| not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should."
| sph wrote:
| > I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI.
|
| Refusing to work on something is not newsworthy. I refuse to
| work on (or use) AI, ads and defence projects, and I'm far from
| being the only one.
|
| Though let who is free of sin throw the first stone, I now
| stand on a high horse after having worked in the gambling
| sector, and now ashamed of it, so I prefer to focus the
| projects themselves rather than the people and what they choose
| to do for a living.
| sweettea wrote:
| I am curious why you avoid ads - personally I view them as a
| tremendous good for the world, helping people improve their
| lives by introducing them to products or even just ideas they
| didn't know existed.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I also believe advertisements are useful! However, by this
| definition, the ad industry is not engaged in
| advertisement.
| myrmidon wrote:
| To me, ads are primarily a way to extract more value from
| ad-viewers by stochastically manipulating their behavior.
|
| There is a lot of support in favor. Consider:
|
| - Ads are typically NOT consumed enthusiastically or even
| sought out (which would be the cases if they were strongly
| mutually beneficial). There are such cases but they are a
| very small minority.
|
| - If product introduction was the primary purpose, then
| repeatedly bombarding people with well-known brands would
| not make sense. But that is exactly what is being done (and
| paid for!) the most. Coca Cola does not pay for you to
| learn that they produce softdrinks. They pay for ads to
| shift your spending/consumption habits.
|
| - Ads are an inherently flawed and biased way to learn
| about products, because there is no incentive whatsoever to
| inform you of flaws, or even to represent price/quality
| tradeoffs honestly.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| I tend to view ads as the perfect opposite of what you
| mentioned; it's an enormous waste of money and resources on
| a global scale that provides no tangible benefit for anyone
| that isn't easily and cheaply replaced by vastly superior
| options.
|
| If people valued ad viewing (e.g. for product decisions),
| we'd have popular websites dedicated to ad viewing. What we
| have instead is an industry dedicated to the idea of
| forcefully displaying ads to users in the least convenient
| places possible, and we _still_ all go to reddit to decide
| what to buy.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| We do have such sites though, like Tom's Hardware or
| Consumer Reports or Wirecutter or what have you.
| Consumers pay money for these ads to reduce the conflict
| of interest, but companies still need to get their
| products chosen for these review pipelines.
| autoexec wrote:
| Tom's Hardware and Consumer Reports aren't really about
| ads (or at least that's not what made them popular). they
| were about trying to determine the truth about products
| and see past the lies told about them by advertising.
| duckmysick wrote:
| Strictly speaking, isn't advertising any action that
| calls attention to a particular product over another? It
| doesn't have to be directly funded by a manufacturer or a
| distributor.
|
| I'd consider word-of-mouth a type of advertising as well.
| autoexec wrote:
| To me advertising isn't just calling attention to
| something, it's doing so with the intent to sell
| something or to manipulate.
|
| When it's totally organic the person doing the promotion
| doesn't stand to gain anything. It less about trying to
| get you to buy something and usually just people sharing
| what they enjoy/has worked for them, or what they think
| you'd enjoy/would work for you. It's the intent behind
| the promotion and who is intended to benefit from it that
| makes the difference between friendly/helpful promotion
| and adversarial/harmful promotion.
|
| Word of mouth can be a form of advertising that is
| directly funded by a manufacturer or a distributor too
| though. Social media influencers are one example, but
| companies will pay people to pretend to
| casually/organically talk up their products/services to
| strangers at bars/nightclubs, conferences, events, etc.
| just to take advantage of the increased level trust we
| put in word of mouth promotion exactly because of the
| assumption that the intent is to be helpful vs to sell.
| autoexec wrote:
| > If people valued ad viewing (e.g. for product
| decisions), we'd have popular websites dedicated to ad
| viewing.
|
| There was a site dedicated to ad viewing once
| (adcritic.com maybe?) and it was great! People just
| viewed, voted, and commented on ads. Even though it was
| about the entertainment/artistic value of advertising and
| not about making product decisions.
|
| Although the situation is likely to change somewhat in
| the near future, advertising has been one of the few ways
| that many artists have been able to make a comfortable
| living. Lying to and manipulating people in order to take
| more of their money or influence their opinions isn't
| exactly honorable work, but it has resulted in a lot of
| art that would not have happened otherwise.
|
| Sadly the website was plagued by legal complaints from
| extremely shortsighted companies who should have been
| delighted to see their ads reach more people, and it
| eventually was forced to shutdown after it got too
| expensive to run (streaming video in those days was rare,
| low quality, and costly) although I have to wonder how
| much of that came from poor choices (like paying for
| insanely expensive superbowl ads). The website was bought
| up and came back requiring a subscription at which point
| I stopped paying any attention to it.
| _kb wrote:
| Products (and particularly ideas) can be explored in a pull
| pattern too. Pushing things--physical items, concepts of
| identity, or political ideology--in the fashion endemic to
| the ad industry is a pretty surefire way to end up with an
| extremely bland society, or one that segments increasingly
| depending on targeting profile.
| asoneth wrote:
| Back when I was a professor I would give a lecture on
| ethical design near the end of the intro course. In my
| experience, most people who think critically about ethics
| eventually arrive at their own personal ethics which are
| rarely uniform.
|
| For example, many years ago I worked on military AI for my
| country. I eventually decided I couldn't square that with
| my ethics and left. But I consider advertising to be (often
| non-consensual) mind control designed to keep consumers in
| a state of perpetual desire and I'd sooner go back to
| building military AI than work for an advertising company,
| no matter how many brilliant engineers work there.
| Clubber wrote:
| >I am curious why you avoid ads - personally I view them as
| a tremendous good for the world, helping people improve
| their lives by introducing them to products or even just
| ideas they didn't know existed.
|
| I would agree with you if ads were just that. Here's our
| product, here's what it does, here's what it costs.
| Unfortunately ads sell the sizzle not the steak. That has
| been advertising mantra for probably 100 years.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW6HmQ1QVMw
| autoexec wrote:
| Ads are most often manipulation, not information. They are
| pollution.
| sneak wrote:
| Avoiding the use of AI is just going to get you lapped.
|
| There's no benefit to your ideological goals in kneecapping
| yourself.
|
| There's nothing morally wrong with using or building AI, or
| gambling.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| The benefit is a clear conscience.
| datameta wrote:
| In what context? Code generation? Art exploration?
| Tao3300 wrote:
| There's a lot baked into that thought, but I wanted to
| extract this part:
|
| > There's nothing morally wrong with ... building...
| gambling.
|
| Say you're building a gambling system and building that
| system well. What does that mean? More people use it? Those
| people access it more? Access it faster? Gamble more?
| Gamble faster?
|
| It creates and feeds addiction.
| slumberlust wrote:
| I agree with you. It's also worth noting that this isn't
| unique to anything discussed here. EVERYONE has their
| line in the sand on a huge array of issues, and that line
| falls differently for a lot of people.
|
| Environment, religion, war, medicine; everything has a
| personal line associated with it.
| sneak wrote:
| Lots of things create and feed addictions, including
| baking cookies.
|
| Let's not confuse the issue. Just because you find
| something distasteful doesn't mean it's bad or morally
| problematic.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| I've never seen a homeless person in Atlantic City put
| his fist through an oven window because the cookies
| didn't come out right.
| sph wrote:
| Wake me up when AI is able to compete with a software
| engineer with almost two decades in the field.
|
| Hint: most of my consulting rate is not about writing
| fizzbuzz. Some clients pay me without even having to write
| a single line of code.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| I also refuse to work on the war machine, blockchain, or
| gambling.
|
| Unfortunately it looks like that might also be refusing to
| eat right now. We'll see how much longer my principles can
| hold out. Being gaslit into an unjustified termination has me
| in a cynical kind of mood anyway. Doing a little damage might
| be cathartic.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| I've been gaslit, I ended up walking away from my company.
| It was extremely painful.
|
| > Doing a little damage might be cathartic.
|
| Please avoid the regret. Do something kind instead. Take
| the high road. Take care of yourself.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Kindness doesn't have any dev openings.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Of course. But at least try to minimise the damage. Don't
| do anything you'll regret.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Regret right now would be letting the stress of
| unemployment rip my family apart. I've got maybe a
| handful of door-slamming "what the fuck did you do all
| day then?" rants that I can tolerate before I'm ready to
| sign on with _Blockchain LLM O-Ring Validation as a
| Service LLC: We Always Return True!(tm)_ if it 'll pay
| the bills and get my wife to stop freaking out.
| immibis wrote:
| And this is how all unjust systems sustain themselves.
| You WILL participate in the injustice, or be punished
| SEVERELY. Why do the people doing the punishing want to
| punish you? Because they WILL participate in punishing,
| or be punished SEVERELY.
|
| People have wondered how so many people ever participated
| in any historical atrocity. This same mechanism is used
| for all of them.
| freeopinion wrote:
| It probably doesn't help right now, but you should know
| you are not the only one in your situation. Perhaps it
| might help to write down your actual principles. Then
| compare that list with the real reasons you refuse some
| employment opportunities.
|
| I think you have already listed one big reason that isn't
| a high-minded principle. You want to make money. There
| may be others.
|
| It's always wonderful when you can make a lot of money
| doing things you love to do. It stinks when you have to
| choose between what you are exceptionally good at doing
| and what your principles allow.
|
| If only somebody could figure out how the talents of all
| the people in your situation could be used to restore
| housing affordability. Would you take a 70% paycut and
| move to Nebraska if it allowed you to keep all your other
| principles?
|
| As you say, kindness isn't hiring. I'd love to see an HN
| discussion of all the good causes that need founders. It
| would be wonderful to have some well known efforts where
| the underemployed could devote some energy while they
| licked their wounds. It might even be useful to have
| "Goodworks Volunteer" fill that gap in employment history
| on your resume.
|
| How do we get a monthly "What good causes need
| volunteers?" post on HN?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > Refusing to work on something is not newsworthy.
|
| One person, no. A hundred, who knows. Ten thousand
| programmers united together not to work on something? Now
| we're getting somewhere. A hundred thousand? Newsworthy.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The issue is quantifying this sentiment. How would you even
| identify programmers who are doing this? Yet another reason
| why software engineers really ought to organize their labor
| like a lot of other disciplines of engineering have done
| decades ago. Collective action like this would be more
| easily mustered, advertised, and used to influence outcomes
| if labor were merely organized and informed of itself.
| BlarfMcFlarf wrote:
| I would bet there are a hundred thousand people refusing to
| work in war, ai, ads, gambling, crypto etc. I certainly am.
| But all it means is that pay goes up and quality of
| engineering goes down a little in those sectors, but not
| much more.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| If all the programmers working on advertising and tracking and
| fingerprinting and dark pattern psychology were to move into
| the field of AI I think that would be a big win.
|
| And that's not saying that AI is going to be great or even good
| or even overly positive, it's just streets ahead of the
| alternatives I mentioned.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I feel like AI is going to be all those things on steroids.
| Jensson wrote:
| Yeah, Google, Facebook and Microsoft putting a massive
| fraction of their resources on AI is what already happened,
| but isn't really encouraging.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Yeah they are the dark pattern, tracking, advertising l,
| privacy violating kings. Of course they're going to keep
| doing all that "but with AI (TM)"
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I'll reply here since your comment was first.
|
| AI has the potential to go in many directions, at least
| some of which could be societally 'good'.
|
| Advertising is, has always been, and likely always will be,
| societally 'bad'.
|
| This differentiation, if nothing else.
|
| (Yes, my opinion on advertising is militantly one sided.
| I'm unlikely to be convinced otherwise, but happy for, and
| will read, contrary commentary).
| Dove wrote:
| I don't think it's advertising that's inherently evil.
| Like government, it's a good thing, even a needed thing.
| People need laws and courts, and buyers and sellers need
| to be able to connect.
|
| It turns evil in the presence of corruption. Taking
| bribes in exchange for power. Government should never
| make rules for money, but for the good of the people. And
| advertising should never offer exposure for sale -
| exposure should only result from merit.
|
| Build an advertising system with integrity - in which
| truthful and useful ads are not just a minimum
| requirement but an honest aspiration and the only way to
| the top of the heap. Build an advertising system focused,
| not on exploiting the viewer, but on serving them -
| connecting them with goods and services and ideas and
| people and experiences that are wanted and that promote
| their health and thriving.
|
| I won't work on advertising as it's currently
| understood... I agree it's evil. But I'd work on that,
| and I think it would be a great good.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I used to think there were useful ads. But really, even a
| useful add is an unsolicited derailing of your
| thoughtspace. You might need a hammer, but did you really
| have to think about it right then? I think back to how my
| parents and grandparents got their goods before the
| internet. If they needed something they went to the
| store. If they were interested in new stuff that might be
| useful thats coming out, they'd get a product catalog
| from some store mailed to them. Is a product catalog an
| ad? Maybe, depending on how you argue the semantics, but
| its much more of a situation like going to a restaurant
| and browsing the menu and choosing best for yourself, vs
| being shown a picture of a big mac on a billboard every
| time you leave your home.
| BlarfMcFlarf wrote:
| AI is the anti printing press. Done well, it removes the
| ability t read something written by someone far away,
| because it erodes any ability to trust that someone exists,
| or to find that persons ideas amongst the remixed nonideas
| AI churns out.
|
| Advertising is similar, of course, and the only thing that
| has kept the internet working as a communications medium in
| spite of advertising is that it was generally labeled,
| constrained, enclosed, spam-filtered, etc.
|
| The AI of today is being applied to help advertising escape
| those shackles, and in doing so, harm the ability to
| communicate.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Is it miles ahead? An engine that ingests a ridiculous amount
| of data to produce influence? Isn't that just advertising but
| more efficient and with even less accountability?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI.
|
| This is not effective.
|
| Having a regulated profession that is held to some standards,
| like accountants, would actually work
|
| Without unions and without a professional body individual
| action won't be achieving anything
| chris_t wrote:
| But... accountants _do_ work for AI companies, right? That
| doesn 't seem like a good example.
| nradov wrote:
| So do you think that people should be required to become
| members of a "regulated profession" before writing a VBA
| spreadsheet macro, or contributing to an open-source project?
| michaelt wrote:
| Sadly it's not enough for 99% of engineers to refuse to work on
| an unethical technology, or even 99.99%
|
| Personally I don't work on advertising/tracking, anything
| highly polluting, weapons technology, high-interest loans,
| scams and scam-adjacent tech, and so on.
|
| But there are enough engineers _without_ such concerns to keep
| the snooping firms, the missile firms, and the payday loan
| firms in business.
| Frost1x wrote:
| One issue we have is that economic pressures underly
| everything, including ethics. Ethics are often malleable
| depending on what someone needs to survive and given
| different situations with resource constraints, people are
| ultimately more willing to bend ethics.
|
| Now, there's often limits to some flexibility and lines some
| simply will not cross, but survival and self preservation
| tends to take precedent and push those limits. E.g., I can't
| imagine ever resorting to cannibalism but Flight 571 with the
| passengers stranded in the Andes makes a good case for me
| bending that line. I'd be a lot more willing to work for some
| scam or in high interest loans for example before resorting
| to cannibalism to feed myself and I think most people would.
|
| If we assure basic survival at a reasonable level, you might
| find far less engineers willing to work in any of these
| spaces. It boils down to what alternatives they have and just
| how firm they are on some ethical line in the sand. We'd
| pretty much improve the world all around I'd say. Our
| economic system doesn't want that though, it wants to be able
| to apply this level of pressure on people and so do those who
| are highly successful who leverage their wealth as power. As
| such I don't see how that will ever change, you'll always
| have someone doing terrible things depending on who is the
| most desperate.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| There are even engineers with such concerns working in these
| firms. They might figure that the missile is getting built no
| matter if they work there or not, so they might as well take
| the job offer.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| I no longer work as a software developer because I feel that
| technology is ruining normal human interactions by substituting
| them in incomplete ways and making everyone depressed.
|
| I think we'd be better off making things for each other and
| being present and local rather than trying to hyperstimulate
| ourselves into oblivion.
|
| I'm just some dude though. It's not making it to the headlines.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > I'm just some dude though. It's not making it to the
| headlines.
|
| Doesn't have to be on headlines. Even just hearing that gives
| me a bit more energy to fight actively against the post-
| useful developments of modern society. Every little bit
| helps.
| tryauuum wrote:
| How do you get money nowadays?
| constantcrying wrote:
| The curse of technology is that it is neither good nor bad.
| Only in the way it is used t becomes one or the other.
|
| >I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI.
|
| That is just ridiculous. Modern neural networks are obviously
| an extremely useful tool.
| hbossy wrote:
| I will never forget the grumpy look on the face of a imperial
| tobacco representative on a job fair in my university years
| ago. No one was visiting their booth for anything except for
| silly questions about benefit package including cigarettes.
| nasaeclipse wrote:
| As others have said, a big part of the problem is the need to
| eat.
|
| I have a family. I work for a company that does stuff for the
| government.
|
| I'd _rather_ be building and working on my cycling training app
| all day every day, but that doesn't make me any money, and
| probably never will.
|
| All the majority of us can hope for is to build something that
| helps people and society, and hope that does enough good to
| counteract the morally grey in this world.
|
| Nothing is ever black and white.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The problem is that for every one that refuses, there's at
| least one that will. So standing on principles only works if
| the rest of the rungs of the ladder above you also have those
| same principles. If anywhere in the org above you does not, you
| will be overruled/replaced.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I would wish lot more programmers refuse to work with
| surveillance and add tech... But nearly every site has that
| stuff on them... Goes to tell what are the principles of
| profession or in general...
| EncomLab wrote:
| "Truth, Lies, and O-Rings" is a fascinating (if sometimes
| tedious) book that should be at the top of any reading list for
| those interested in the Challenger disaster.
|
| For me one of the more interesting side-bar discussions are those
| around deciding to use horizontal testing of the boosters despite
| that not being an operational configuration. This resulted in
| flexing of the joints that was not at all similar to the flight
| configuration and hindered identification of the weaknesses of
| the original "field joint" design.
| nordsieck wrote:
| Interestingly, we're still testing SLS SRBs[1] horizontally.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-wqAbVqZyg
|
| ---
|
| 1. In case anyone doesn't know, they use the actual recovered
| Shuttle casings on SLS, but use an extra "middle" section to
| make it 5 sections in length instead of the Shuttle's 4
| sections. In the future they'll move to "BOLE" boosters which
| won't use previously flown Shuttle parts.
| nraynaud wrote:
| I think the booster was redesigned after the accident, I
| guess/hope the opportunity was seized to make a design that
| would be less sensitive to orientation.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > I think the booster was redesigned after the accident
|
| That is correct. I believe they added:
|
| * An extra seal
|
| * A "J-Leg" carved into the insulation[1] that acts as a
| sort of pre-seal
|
| > I guess/hope the opportunity was seized to make a design
| that would be less sensitive to orientation.
|
| I guess, we'll see how things shake out.
|
| ---
|
| 1. https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2020/12/artemis-1-schedu
| le-u...
| bityard wrote:
| Are you saying that they are tested horizontally or that they
| are ONLY tested horizontally? (Very different things.)
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Are you saying that they are tested horizontally or that
| they are ONLY tested horizontally?
|
| My understanding is that they are only hot fired
| horizontally.
|
| Presumably there are many tests done at the component
| level, although it's questionable whether it makes sense to
| call those tests horizontal or vertical at that point.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| McDonald was my hero as a young engineering student. The miracle
| was that he was exonerated.
| alecco wrote:
| (2021)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> McDonald became a fierce advocate of ethical decision-making_
|
| My hero, but also Don Quixote. I'm a _huge_ believer in Personal
| Integrity and Ethics, but I am painfully aware that this makes me
| a fairly hated minority (basically, people believe that I 'm a
| stuck-up prig), especially in this crowd.
|
| I was fortunate to find an employer that also believed in these
| values. They had many other faults, but deficient institutional
| Integrity was not one of them.
| ModernMech wrote:
| If the world had more stuck up prigs, billion dollar
| corporations wouldn't be using customers to beta test their
| lethal robots on public streets.
|
| Here's to prigs!
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| And the million people being killed by human drivers every
| year? I guess they are a worthy sacrifice for idealogical
| purity.
| VHRanger wrote:
| They're a sacrifice at the altar of biased decision making.
|
| I think Tesla is somewhat reckless with self driving, but
| we all need to agree humans aren't much better and don't
| generate any controversy.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> we all need to agree humans aren 't much better_
|
| At the current state of the art for self-driving, this
| simply is not true. Humans _are_ much better, on average.
| That 's why the vast majority of cars are still driven by
| humans.
|
| The technology will keep improving, and at some point one
| would expect that it will be more reliable than humans.
| But it's significantly _less_ reliable now.
| woodson wrote:
| The human driver is liable, the machine is not (or not in
| the same sense).
| pwndByDeath wrote:
| And we all know that liability makes accidents less fatal
| after the fact ;)
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| "I can tolerate a million people dying, but I draw the
| line at one person dying without a clear person to sue."
| ModernMech wrote:
| I'm not saying they should, but that there's a right way to
| do things and a wrong way to do things.
|
| The right way asks for community buy in, follows safety
| procedures, is transparent and forthcoming about failures,
| is honest about capabilities and limitations.
|
| The wrong way says "I can do what I want, I'm not asking
| permission, if you don't like it sue me" The wrong way
| throws the safety playbook out the window and puts
| untrained operators in charge of untested deadly machines.
| The wrong way doesn't ask for community input, obfuscates
| and dissembles when challenged, is capricious, vindictive,
| and ultimately (this is the most crucial part) _not_
| effective compared to the right way of doing things.
|
| Given a choice between the safe thing to do and the thing
| that will please Musk, Tesla will _always_ choose the
| latter.
| noelherrick wrote:
| Self-driving cars are a solution to a problem we already
| fixed a hundred years ago: we fixed transit with trains.
|
| PS: I'm not claiming that every single transport need can
| be solved by trains, but they do dramatically reduce the
| cost in human life. Yes, they have to be part of a mix of
| other solutions, such as denser housing. Yes, you can have
| bad actors that don't maintain their rail and
| underpay/understaff their engineers which leads to
| derailments, etc. I say this because the utopia of not
| having to drive, not caring about sleepiness, ill health,
| or intoxication, not having to finance or repair a vehicle
| or buy insurance, not renting parking spots, all that is
| available today without having to invent new lidar sensors
| or machine vision. You can just live in London or Tokyo.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Tokyo_
|
| I traveled there regularly, for over 20 years.
|
| Their train system is the Eighth Wonder.
|
| A lot of the reason, is cultural. Trains are a standard
| part of life. Most shows have significant scenes on
| commuter trains, as do ads. Probably wouldn't apply to
| nations like the US.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Self-driving cars are a solution to a problem we
| already fixed a hundred years ago: we fixed transit with
| trains._
|
| Not for everyone, we didn't. Self-driving cars have the
| potential to serve people who don't want to restrict
| themselves to going places trains can take them.
|
| _> You can just live in London or Tokyo._
|
| Not everyone either can or wants to live in such places.
| If I prefer to live in a less dense area and have a car,
| the risk is mine to take. And if at some point a self-
| driving car can drive me more reliably than I can drive
| myself, I will gladly let it do so.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> the million people being killed by human drivers every
| year?_
|
| If self-driving cars at their current level of reliability
| were as common as human drivers, they would be killing much
| more than a million people a year.
|
| When I am satisfied that a self-driving car is _more_
| reliable than I am, I will have no problem letting it take
| me places instead of driving myself. But not until then.
| immibis wrote:
| That comment was about _self-driving cars_? Here I was
| thinking it was about Israeli arms manufacturers testing
| their intentionally-lethal robots on Palestine before
| selling them to the USA.
|
| Anyway, subways are awesome.
| LikelyABurner wrote:
| "I'm sorry ModernMech, but you're in violation of our CoC
| with your overly negative and toxic tone. We're going to go
| ahead, close your issue, and merge the PR to add Torment
| Nexus integration."
|
| This is what happens in the real world when you're a stuck up
| prig, not the Hollywood movie ending you've constructed in
| your head.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| >I'm a huge believer in Personal Integrity and Ethics, but I am
| painfully aware that this makes me a fairly hated minority
|
| This is like when you tell an interviewer your great flaw is
| being too much of a perfectionist.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| ...and... here we go...
|
| I have _no idea_ why the tech industry is such a moral
| cesspool.
| beezlewax wrote:
| It isn't though it's not really even one industry. It's
| used by every industry and some of that is a cesspool and
| some solutions/products are purely tech based cessools.
| sneak wrote:
| All industries that involve huge amounts of money are moral
| cesspools. Tech are saints compared to the "defense"
| industry, or healthcare.
| Sakos wrote:
| Or anything in manufacturing or food/beverage (see Nestle
| and water rights) production. I think most of tech has it
| pretty good. Tech has the potential for incredible
| amounts of bad, but this is limited to the handful that
| dominate social media (see Facebook and the civil war in
| Ethiopia) or, I don't know, the ones selling surveillance
| software to governments and law enforcement.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I _thought_ ICT was terrible, so I decided I 'd try the
| industrial side of things.
|
| Ok, on the one hand, getting to play with cool robots,
| and eg using an actual forklift for debugging? Absolutely
| priceless, wouldn't trade it for the world.
|
| But the ethical side of things? There's definitely
| ethics, don't get me wrong. Especially on the hardware
| side - necessary for safety after all. But the way
| software is sold and treated is ... different.
| pwndByDeath wrote:
| If you get to see some of the details, defense (US) is
| expensive but there is very little profit compared to
| other industry. There is epic amount of inefficiencies
| which is where all that cost is eaten.
| tekla wrote:
| Easy money and generally low education
| mwigdahl wrote:
| My response when I'm told that in an interview is to ask
| specifically how that trait has caused problems for them.
| Quickly separates someone who's actually put thought into it
| from someone who is just trying to skate by.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| That sounds funny, but being a perfectionist IS actually a
| problem. You'll often waste time and effort making something
| perfect when "good enough" is all that's required.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I'm a huge believer in Personal Integrity and Ethics, but I
| am painfully aware that this makes me a fairly hated minority
| (basically, people believe that I'm a stuck-up prig),
|
| This doesn't match my experience at all. In my experience, the
| average person I've worked with also believes in personality
| integrity and is guided by a sense of ethics. One company I
| worked for started doing something clearly unethical, albeit
| legal, and the resulting backlash and exodus of engineers
| (including me) was a nice confirmation that most people I work
| with won't tolerate unethical companies.
|
| I have worked with people who take the idea of ethics to such
| an unreasonable extreme that they develop an ability to find
| fault with nearly everything. They come up with ways to
| rationalize their personal preferences as being the only
| ethical option, and they start finding ways to claim things
| they don't like violate their personal integrity. One example
| that comes to mind is the security person who wanted our logins
| to expire so frequently that we had to log in multiple times
| per day. He insisted that anything less was below his personal
| standards for security and it would violate his personal
| integrity to allow it. Of course everybody loathed him, but not
| because they lacked personal integrity or ethics.
|
| If you find yourself being a "hated minority" or people
| thinking you're a "stuck up pig" for having basic ethics,
| you're keeping some strange company. I'd get out of there as
| soon as possible.
| tedivm wrote:
| I've left two companies over ethical concerns, but it's not
| as easy for most people implied here. Losing income can be
| challenging, especially if the industry is in a downturn.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Generally when people talk about leaving a company, they
| mean to go to another company.
|
| I don't think most people expect you to quit on the spot
| and walk straight into unemployment.
| datameta wrote:
| Sometimes the alternative to unemployment is far less
| attractive (exuberant burnout or total time sink
| preventing a meaningful job search).
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Out of curiosity, did you leave those companies because the
| company's core business was unethical (or veered that
| direction over time), because leadership was generally
| unethical, or because specific incidents that forced your
| hand?
|
| At a previous job I saw unethical choices made by my boss,
| but the company as a whole wasn't doing anything wrong. One
| of my coworkers was asked to do something unethical and he
| refused, but he wasn't punished and wasn't forced to choose
| between his ethics and the job.
| tedivm wrote:
| Every time I had to leave for ethical reasons it was a
| leadership thing, mostly relating to how they treated
| other employees.
|
| For instance, I joined a company that advertised itself
| as being fairly ethical (they even had a "no selling to
| military" type policy). However, after joining it was
| apparent that this wasn't the case. They really pushed
| transparent salaries, but then paid me way more than
| anyone else. There was a lot of sexism as well: despite
| one of my colleagues being just as skilled as I am, this
| colleague was given all the crap work because leadership
| didn't think they were as capable as I was. There was a
| lot of other stuff as well, but that's the big summary. I
| left after nine months.
|
| The other company was similar, but it wasn't nearly as
| obvious at first. Over time it became very apparent that
| the founders cared more about boosting their own
| perception in the industry than they did the actual
| startup, and they also allowed the women in the company
| to be treated poorly. This company doesn't exist anymore.
|
| I should mention that these were all startups I worked
| at, and I was always fairly highly positioned in the
| company. This meant I generally reported directly to the
| founders themselves. If it was something like a middle
| management issue I'd have tried to escalate it up to
| resolve it before just leaving, but if that doesn't work
| I'm financially stable enough to just leave.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to respond to me.
|
| In startups like that, company culture and the founders'
| behavior is nearly one-in-the-same.
|
| That's sad you had to deal with that kind of stuff. Even
| in the bad jobs I've had, the bad bosses treated the
| employees equally poorly.
| tedivm wrote:
| Well it's weird for me, because I was one of the people
| being treated better (I'm a guy). I just don't want to
| work with assholes, so when I see people being assholes
| to other people _and_ leadership doesn 't take it
| seriously then I leave.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> keeping some strange company_
|
| Actually, that's this community. I do understand. Money is
| the only metric that matters, here, as it's really an
| entrepreneur forum. Everyone wants to be rich, and they
| aren't particularly tolerant of anything that might interfere
| with that.
|
| But I'm not going anywhere. It's actually fun, here. I learn
| new stuff, all the time.
| layer8 wrote:
| HN is not really a community.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I believe that it is. In my opinion and experience, any
| group of humans, interacting, on a regular basis, in a
| common venue, becomes a community.
|
| I guess that it is a matter of definition.
|
| I treat it as if it were a community, and that I am a
| member of that community, with rights and
| Responsibilities, thereof.
|
| I know that lots of folks like to treat Internet (and, in
| some cases, IRL) communities as public toilets, but I'm
| not one of them. I feel that it is a privilege to hang
| out here, and don't want to piss in the punch bowl, so
| I'm rather careful about my interactions here.
|
| I do find it a bit distressing, to see folks behaving
| like trolls, here. A lot of pretty heavy-duty folks
| participate on HN, but I guess the casual nature of the
| interactions, encourages folks to lose touch with that.
|
| I think that it is really cool, that I could post a
| comment, and have an OG respond. I suspect that won't
| happen, too often, if I'm screeching and flinging poo.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Just like in-person communities, you'll have general
| consensus on some ideas and fierce disagreement in
| others. You'll have people who are kind and those who are
| hateful.
|
| You can identify that there may be a trend within a
| community without declaring that everyone in the
| community thinks the exact same way. And you could also
| be wrong about that trend because the majority is silent
| on the issue and you bump up against the vocal minority.
|
| Perhaps you can elaborate on what a community is, and how
| HN differs from one.
| layer8 wrote:
| The topical interests, general characteristics,
| experiences and opinions of HN members are too diverse to
| qualify as a community, IMO. There may be subsets that
| could qualify as a community, and if you only look at
| certain kinds/topics of submissions it might feel like
| one, but they are mixed within a larger heterogeneous
| crowd here.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Thanks, that clarifies a lot.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I feel that a community can def be heterogenous AF. I
| participate in exactly that type of (IRL) community, and
| it is worldwide.
|
| It does require some common focus, and common agreement
| that the community is important.
|
| I do believe that we have those, here. The "common focus"
| may not be immediately apparent, but I think everyone
| here shares a desire to be involved in technology; which
| can mean a few things, but I'll lay odds that we could
| find a definition that everyone could agree on.
|
| It is possible. I guarantee it.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Money is the only metric that matters, here
|
| Says who? Did I agree to that when I subscribed?
|
| > Everyone wants to be rich,
|
| Everyone? Like me too? Tell me more about that.
|
| You in an earlier comment said that people believe that you
| are "a stuck-up prig". Are you sure it is due to your moral
| stance, and not because you are judgemental, and abrasive
| about it?
|
| Perhaps if you would be less set in your mind about how you
| think everyone is you wouldn't come through as "a stuck-up
| prig". Maybe we would even find common grounds between us.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Money is the only metric that matters, here, as it's
| really an entrepreneur forum. Everyone wants to be rich
|
| This place is surprisingly mixed in that regard given its
| origin; a significant number of comments I see about Apple,
| about OpenAI, about Paul Graham, are essentially anti-
| capitalist.
|
| The vibe I get seems predominately hacker-vibe rather than
| entrepreneur-vibe.
|
| That said, I'm also well aware of the "orange site bad"
| meme, so this vibe I get may be biased by which links' I
| find interesting enough to look at the discussions of.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yeah, it was a snarky comment, and not my proudest
| moment, but it does apply to a significant number of
| folks. I tend to enjoy the contributions from folks that
| don't have that priority.
|
| The demoralizing part, is folks that are getting screwed
| by The Big Dogs, and totally reflect the behavior; even
| though TBD think of them as "subhuman."
| pyrale wrote:
| > In my experience, the average person I've worked with also
| believes in personality integrity and is guided by a sense of
| ethics.
|
| Individual aspirations are not enough, if your org doesn't
| shape itself in a way to prevent bad outcomes, bad outcomes
| will happen.
| LikelyABurner wrote:
| > One example that comes to mind is the security person who
| wanted our logins to expire so frequently that we had to log
| in multiple times per day. He insisted that anything less was
| below his personal standards for security and it would
| violate his personal integrity to allow it. Of course
| everybody loathed him, but not because they lacked personal
| integrity or ethics.
|
| Speaking as a "security person", I passionately despise
| people like this because they make my life so much more
| difficult by poisoning the well. There are times in security
| where you need to drop the hammer, but it's precisely
| _because_ of these situations that you need to build up the
| overall good will with your team of working with them. When
| you tell your team "this needs to be done immediately, and
| it's blocking", you need to have built up enough trust that
| they realize you're not throwing yet another TPS report at
| them, this time it's actually serious, and they do it
| immediately, as opposed to fighting/escalating.
|
| And yes, like the original poster, most of them think they're
| the main character in an suspense-thriller where they're The
| Only Thing Saving Humanity From Itself, when really they're
| the stuck-up side relief character in someone else's romcom,
| at best.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> And yes, like the original poster, most of them think
| they 're the main character in an suspense-thriller where
| they're The Only Thing Saving Humanity From Itself, when
| really they're the stuck-up side relief character in
| someone else's romcom, at best._
|
| That's an interesting read of what I posted.
|
| Glad to have been of service!
| pyrale wrote:
| > I was fortunate to find an employer that also believed in
| these values.
|
| Same here, it's not paying well, but it feels refreshing to
| know that babies won't get thrown into mixers if you stop
| thinking for 10 minutes.
| d--b wrote:
| Ok, cool, but what the hell happened? They had a guy in charge of
| signing-off the launch, he didn't sign off because of 3 problems
| he identified, and they still launched. wtf?
| ohmyiv wrote:
| From the article: (During the hearing)
|
| > The NASA official simply said that Thiokol had some concerns
| but approved the launch. He neglected to say that the approval
| came only after Thiokol executives, under intense pressure from
| NASA officials, overruled the engineers.
| coldcode wrote:
| The engineers were overruled by the executives because NASA was
| pissed at the company for messing up their plans.
| lancesells wrote:
| This sounds like an issue that's still around.
| htrp wrote:
| > He neglected to say that the approval came only after Thiokol
| executives, under intense pressure from NASA officials, overruled
| the engineers.
|
| Sounds kinda familiar?
| Chris2048 wrote:
| I wonder how the process even allows this. An approval from the
| executives of the company shouldn't be worth anything.
| djeastm wrote:
| A story as old as time.
| robg wrote:
| _What we should remember about Al McDonald [is] he would often
| stress his laws of the seven R 's," Maier says. "It was always,
| always do the right thing for the right reason at the right time
| with the right people. [And] you will have no regrets for the
| rest of your life._
| jrexilius wrote:
| That is the key line from the whole piece.
| treprinum wrote:
| Even following all that could have led to Challenger exploding
| (stochastic process with non-zero probability of a terminal
| failure), and leaving everyone with "What did we do wrong?"
| without any answer and full of regrets for the rest of their
| lives.
| nandgate10 wrote:
| Now that OSS projects like a certain popular dynamic language
| have been taken over by corporations, criticism like security or
| performance issues are forbidden as well and punished.
|
| (One corporation though seems to withdraw from that language due
| to the attitude of the project and its representatives.)
| mablopoule wrote:
| Honestly, you're either telling too much or too little.
|
| Could tell what are the precise language / corporation /
| project, if you're comfortable with that of course?
| christophilus wrote:
| There's a good lecture about this, called "The Normalization of
| Deviance":
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o&pp=ygUZbm9ybWFsaXp...
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Exactly the concept why you don't want to let whatever
| dashboards/alerts/etc you maintain on your systems have a
| "normal amount of reds/fails/spurious texts".
|
| At some point you become immune.
|
| It's a lot harder to notice theres 4 red lights today than the
| usual 2-3 vs noticing 1 when there are normally exactly 0.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Yes. The causative issue is the way in which projects are
| managed. Employees have no ownership of the project. If
| employees had ownership over which changes they think are
| best, a good employee would act on bringing the alerts back
| to zero before they take on new features or a new project.
| There are some obstacles:
|
| 1. Employees not having a say in which issues to work on.
| This pretty much leads to the death of a project in the
| medium term due to near-total disregard of maintenance issues
| and alerts.
|
| 2. Big-team ownership of a project. When everyone is in
| charge, no one is. This is why I advocate for a team size of
| exactly two for each corporate project.
|
| 3. Employees being unreasonably pressured for time. Perhaps
| the right framing for employees to think about it is: "If it
| were their own business or product, how would they do it?"
| This framing, combined with the backlog, should automatically
| help avoid spending more time than is necessary on an issue.
| whodidntante wrote:
| Not making an ethical/moral judgement here, just a
| practical one - is there any reason to believe that giving
| employees ownership of the projects will be any better than
| having "management" own it if all factors were truly
| considered ?
|
| If every decision an employee made on
| features/issues/quality/time was accompanied by how much
| their pay was affected, would the outcomes really be better
| ?
|
| The team could decide to fix all bugs before taking on a
| new feature, or that the 2 month allotment to a feature
| should really be three months to do it "right" without
| having to work nights/weekends, would the team really
| decide to do that if their paycheck was reduced by 10%, or
| delayed for that extra month for those new features were
| delivered ?
|
| If all factors were included in the employee decision
| process, including the real world effect of revenue/profit
| on individual compensation from those decisions, it is not
| clear to me that employees would make any "better"
| decisions.
|
| I would think that employees could be even more "short
| sighted" than senior management, as senior management
| likely has more at stake in terms of company
| reputation/equity/career than an employee who can change
| jobs easier, and an employee might choose not to "get those
| alerts to zero" if it meant they would have more immediate
| cash in their pocket.
|
| And how would disagreements between team members be worked
| out if some were willing to forgo compensation to "do it
| right', and others wanted to cut even more corners ?
|
| Truly having ownership means you have also financial risk.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| What I see is a movement where line employees have a say
| on who is retained at the director and VP level.
|
| The CEO reports to the board. But his immediate and
| second tier reports are also judged by the employees. The
| thought is that will give them pause before they embark
| on their next my way or the highway decision making. The
| most egregious directors who push out line employees in
| favor of their cronies will be fired under this
| evaluation.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| > is there any reason to believe that giving employees
| ownership of the projects will be any better than having
| "management" own it
|
| Non-technical management's skill level is almost always
| overrated. They're almost never qualified for it.
| Ultimately it still is management's decision, and always
| will be. If however management believes that employees
| are incapable of serving users, then it's management's
| fault for assigning mismatched employees.
|
| > how much their pay was affected
|
| Bringing pay into this discussion is a nonsensical
| distraction. If an employer misses two consecutive
| paychecks by even 1%, that's enough reason to stop
| showing up for work, and potentially to sue for
| severance+damages, and also claim unemployment wages.
| There is no room for any variation here.
|
| > Truly having ownership
|
| It should be obvious that ownership here refers to the
| ownership of the technical direction, not literal
| ownership in the way I own a backpack that I bring to
| work. If true financial ownership existed, the employee
| would be receiving substantial equity with a real
| tradable market value, with the risk of losing some of
| this equity if they were to lose their job.
|
| > how would disagreements between team members be worked
| out
|
| As noted, there would be just two employees per project,
| and this ought to minimize disagreements. If
| disagreements still exist, this is where management can
| assist with direction. There should always remain room
| for conducting diverse experiments without having to
| worry about which outcomes get discarded and which get
| used.
|
| ---
|
| In summary, if the suggested approach is not working,
| it's probably because there is significant unavoidable
| technical debt or the employees are mismatched to the
| task.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Been all of an engineer, a manager, and a founder/CEO,
| and I enjoy analyzing organizational dysfunction.
|
| The difference between an engineer and a manager's
| perspective usually comes down to their job description.
| An engineer is hired to get the engineering right; the
| reason the company pays them is for their ability to
| marry reality to organizational goals. The reason the
| company hires a manager is to set those organizational
| goals and ensure that everybody is marching toward them.
| This split is explicit for a reason: it ensures that when
| disagreements arise, they are explicitly negotiated. Most
| people are bad at making complex tradeoffs, and when they
| have to do so, their execution velocity suffers. Indeed,
| the job description for someone who is hired to make
| complex tradeoffs is called "executive", and they
| purposefully have to do no real work so that their
| decision-making functions only in terms of cost estimates
| that management bubbles up, not the personal pain that
| will result from those decisions.
|
| Dysfunction arises from a few major sources:
|
| 1. There's a power imbalance between management and
| engineering. An engineer usually only has one project; if
| it fails, it often means their job, even if the outcome
| reality dictates is that it _should_ fail. That gives
| them a strong incentive to send good news up the chain
| even if the project is _going_ to fail. Good management
| gets around this by never penalizing bad news or good-
| faith project failure, but good management is actually
| really counterintuitive, because your natural reaction is
| to react to negative news with negative emotions.
|
| 2. Information is lost with every explicit communication
| up the chain. The information an engineer provides to
| management is a summary of the actual state of reality;
| if they passed along everything, it'd require that
| management become an engineer. Likewise recursively along
| the management chain. It's not always possible to predict
| which information is critical to an executive's decision,
| and so sometimes this gets lost as the management chain
| plays telephone.
|
| 3. Executives and policy-makers, by definition, are the
| least reality-informed people in the system, but they
| have the final say on all the decisions. They naturally
| tend to overweight the things that they _are_ informed
| on, like "Will we lose the contract?" or "Will we miss
| earnings this quarter?"
|
| All that said, the fact that _most_ companies have a
| corporate hierarchy and they largely outcompete employee-
| owned or founder-owned cooperatives in the marketplace
| tends to suggest that even with the pitfalls, this is a
| more efficient system. The velocity penalty from having
| to _both_ make the complex decisions _and_ execute on
| them outweighs all the information loss. I experienced
| this with my startup: the failure mode was that I 'd
| emotionally second-guess my executive decisions, which
| meant that I executed slowly on them, which meant that I
| didn't get enough iterations or enough feedback from the
| market to find product/market fit. This is also why
| startups that _do_ succeed tend to be ones where the idea
| is obvious (to the founder at least, but not necessarily
| to the general public). They don 't need to spend much
| time on complex positioning decisions, and can spend that
| time executing, and then eventually grow the company
| within the niche they know well.
| kmacdough wrote:
| > All that said, the fact that most companies have a
| corporate hierarchy and they largely outcompete employee-
| owned or founder-owned cooperatives in the marketplace
| tends to suggest that even with the pitfalls, this is a
| more efficient system.
|
| This conclusion seems nonsensical. The assumption that
| what's popular in thearket is popular because it's
| effective has only limited basis in reality. Heirarchical
| structures appear because power is naturally
| consolidating and most people have an extreme
| unwillingness to release power even when presented with
| evidence that it would improve their quality of life. It
| is true that employee owned companies are less effective
| at extracting wealth from the economy, but in my
| experience working for both traditional and employee
| owned companies, the reason is employees care more deeply
| about the _cause_. They tend to be much more efficient at
| providing value to the customer and paying employees
| better. The only people who lose out are the executives
| themselves which is why employee owned companies only
| exist when run by leaders with passion for creating value
| over collecting money. And that 's just a rare breed.
| nostrademons wrote:
| You've touched on the reason why hierarchical
| corporations outcompete employee-owned-cooperatives:
|
| > Hierarchical structures appear because power is
| naturally consolidating and most people have an extreme
| unwillingness to release power even when presented with
| evidence that it would improve their quality of life.
|
| Yes, and that is a fact of human nature. Moreover, many
| people are happy to work _in_ a power structure if it
| means that they get more money to have more power over
| their own life than they otherwise would. The employees
| are all consenting actors here too: they have the option
| of quitting and going to an employee-owned cooperative,
| but most do not, because they make a lot more money in
| the corporate giant. (If they did all go to the employee-
| owned cooperative, it would drive down wages even
| further, since there is a finite amount of dollars coming
| into their market but that would be split across more
| employees.)
|
| Remember the yardstick here. Capitalism optimizes for
| _quantity of dollars transacted_. The only quality that
| counts is the baseline quality needed to make the
| transaction happen. It 's probably true that people who
| care about the cause deliver better service - but most
| customers don't care enough about the service or the
| cause for this to translate into more dollars.
|
| As an employee and customer, you're also free to set your
| own value system. And most people _are_ happier in work
| that is mission- & values-aligned; my wife has certainly
| made that tradeoff, and at various times in my life, I
| have too. But there's a financial penalty for it, because
| _lots_ of people want to work in places that are mission-
| aligned but there 's only a limited amount of dollars
| flowing into that work, so competition for those
| positions drives down wages.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| > most customers don't care enough about the service or
| the cause for this to translate into more dollars.
|
| This is an important point as it reinforces the
| hierarchical structure. In an economy composed of these
| hierarchies, a customer is often themselves buying in
| service of another hierarchy and will not themselves be
| the end user. This reduces the demand for mission-focused
| work in the economy, instead reinforcing the predominance
| of profit-focused hierarchies.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| There is a Chinese saying you can conquer a kingdom on
| horseback but you cannot rule it on horseback. What that
| means is, yes, entrepreneurial velocity and time to
| market predominate in startups. But if they don't
| implement governance and due process, they will
| eventually lose what market share they gained. Left
| uncontrolled, internal factions and self serving behavior
| destroys all organisations from within.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| This is a wonderful summary, very informative. Thank you.
| Is there a book or other source you'd recommend on the
| subject of organizational roles and/or
| dysfunction?...ideally one written with similar clarity.
|
| One thing stood out to me:
|
| You note that executives are the least reality-informed
| and are insulated from having their decisions affect
| personal pain. While somewhat obvious, it also seems
| counterintuitive in light of the usual pay structure of
| these hierarchies and the usual rationale for that
| structure. That is, they are nearly always the highest
| paid actors and usually have the most to gain from
| company success; the reasoning often being that the pay
| compensates for the stress of, criticality of, or
| experience required for their roles. Judgments aside and
| ignoring the role of power (which is not at all
| insignificant, as already mentioned by a sibling
| commenter), how would you account for this?
| chuckadams wrote:
| > Not making an ethical/moral judgement here, just a
| practical one - is there any reason to believe that
| giving employees ownership of the projects will be any
| better than having "management" own it if all factors
| were truly considered ?
|
| It's not either-or, the ownership is shared. As
| responsibility goes, the buck ultimately stops with
| management, but when the people in the trenches can make
| more of their own decisions, they'll take more pride in
| their work and invest accordingly in quality. Of course
| some managers become entirely superfluous when a team
| self-manages to this extent, and will fight tooth and
| nail to defend their fiefdom. Can't blame them, it's
| perfectly rational to try to keep one's job.
|
| As for tying the quality to pay in such an immediate way,
| I guess it depends on who's measuring what and why.
| Something about metrics becoming meaningless when made
| into a target, I believe it's called Cunningham's Law. I
| have big doubts as to whether it could work effectively
| in any large corpo shop, they're just not built for
| bottom-up organization.
| james_marks wrote:
| Yes- Goodhart's Law:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
| lencastre wrote:
| And groupthink
| CSMastermind wrote:
| > If employees had ownership over which changes they think
| are best, a good employee would act on bringing the alerts
| back to zero before they take on new features or a new
| project.
|
| You say this but as someone who's run a large platform
| organization that hasn't been my experience. Sure some
| employees, maybe you, care about things like bringing
| alerts back to zero but a large number are indifferent and
| a small number are outright dismissive.
|
| This is informed not just by individual personality but
| also by culture.
|
| Not too long ago I pointed out a bug in someone's code who
| I was reviewing and instead of fixing it they said, "Oh
| okay, I'll look out for bugs like that when I write code in
| the future" then proceeded to merge and deploy their
| unchanged code. And in that case I'm their manager not a
| peer or someone from another team, they have all the
| incentive in the world to stop and fix the problem. It was
| purely a cultural thing where in their mind their code
| worked 'good enough' so why not deploy it and just take the
| feedback as something that could be done better next time.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| With regard to alerts, I have written software that
| daytrades stocks, making a lot of trades over a lot of
| stocks. Let me assure you that not a single alert goes
| ignored, and if someone said it's okay to ignore said
| alerts, or to have persistent alerts that require no
| action, they would be losing money because in time, they
| will inevitably ignore a critical error. I stand by my
| claim that it's what sets apart good employees from those
| that don't care if the business lives or dies. I think a
| role of management is to ensure that employees understand
| the potential consequences to the business of the code
| being wrong.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Yes, there was a recent story about (yet another) Citi
| "fat finger" trade. The headlines mentioned things like
| "the trader ignored 700 error messages to put in the
| trade", but listening to a podcast about it.. its more
| like awful systems that are always half broken is what
| ultimately lead to it.
|
| The real punchline was this - the trader confused a field
| for entering shares quantity for notional quantity, but
| due to some European markets being closed, the system had
| a weird fallback logic that it sets the value of shares
| to $1, so the confirmation back to the trader was.. the
| correct number of dollars he expected.
|
| So awful system designs lead to useless and numerous
| alerts, false confirmations, and ultimately huge errors.
| josefx wrote:
| > If employees had ownership over which changes they think
| are best, a good employee would act on bringing the alerts
| back to zero before they take on new features or a new
| project
|
| That requires that you have good employees, which can be as
| rare as good management.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| The more pernicious form of this, in my experience, are
| ignored compiler/linter/test warnings. Many codebases have a
| tremendous number of these warnings, devs learn to ignore
| them, and this important signal of code quality is
| effectively lost.
| eschneider wrote:
| It's almost always worth spending the time to either fix
| all warnings or, after determining it's a false positive,
| suppressing it with a #pragma.
|
| Once things are relatively clean, it's easy to see if new
| code/changes trip a warning. Often unexpected warnings are
| a sign of subtle bugs or at least use of undefined
| behaviors. Sorting those out when they come up is a heck of
| a lot easier than tracing a bug report back to the same
| warming.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I like to program with -wall.
|
| Doesn't win me fans, but I sleep well.
| drited wrote:
| Could you please expand on what that is?
| vardump wrote:
| Enable all warnings.
|
| https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Warning-
| Options.html#inde...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It's a C/C++ compiler flag, saying all warnings on.
|
| Since I do Swift, these days, in Xcode, I use project
| settings, instead.
|
| I also like to treat warnings as errors.
|
| Forces me to be circumspect.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Warning-
| Options.html#inde...
| diab0lic wrote:
| It's a CLI flag to the compiler that enables all
| warnings.
| andrei-akopian wrote:
| I have an unclarity with this situation.
|
| How much of him being a hero is a coincidence? Did he refuse to
| sign the previous launches? Did NASA have reasons to believe that
| the launch could be successful? How much of a role does
| probability play here. I mean if someone literally tells you
| something isn't safe, especially the person who made it, you
| can't tell him it will work. There is somekind of bias here.
| vntok wrote:
| Something can work and not be safe at the same time.
| nraynaud wrote:
| The article is a bit weird, he refused to sign a form inside a
| private company. But the private company presented a signed
| form to NASA (signed by higher-up's).
|
| So NASA probably didn't look closely into the engineering, in
| particular when launch is tomorrow.
| kop316 wrote:
| I got to hear him recount the story, and yeah the article is
| weird.
|
| The form he talked about was one that, if not signed, would
| mean that the launch would not happen. I can't remember if it
| was an internal form or not, but it doesn't really matter in
| that context.
|
| Since NASA needed that form signed, he was under intense
| pressure to actually sign it both by NASA and his company.
| Someone else from the company not on site signed it.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> NASA probably didn't look closely into the engineering_
|
| Yes, they did. NASA had been told by Thiokol the previous
| summer about the O-ring issue and that it could cause the
| loss of the Shuttle--and ignored the recommendation to ground
| the Shuttle until the issue was fixed. The night before the
| launch there was a conference call where the Thiokol
| engineers recommended not launching. Detailed engineering
| information was presented on that call--and it was
| information that had already been presented to NASA
| previously. NASA knew the engineering information and
| recommendation. They chose to ignore it.
| _kb wrote:
| Of course there's bias. If he had rubber-stamped it there would
| be no story to tell.
|
| His decision would have been questioned after the fact, he
| would defer to information from levels below, and this would
| recurse until responsibility had dissipated beyond and any
| personal attribution. The same pattern happens in every org,
| every day (to decisions of mostly lesser affect).
|
| The key point--at least from my read--were the follow up
| actions to highlight where information was intentionally
| ignored, prevent that dispersion of responsibility, and ensure
| it didn't happen again.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> the follow up actions to highlight where information was
| intentionally ignored, prevent that dispersion of
| responsibility, and ensure it didn 't happen again._
|
| Unfortunately, while that specific problem did not happen
| again, the general cultural changes that were supposed to
| happen had been lost 15 years later. The loss of Columbia in
| 2003 was due to the same kind of poor decision making and
| problem solving process that was involved in the loss of
| Challenger.
| constantcrying wrote:
| To be completely honest I think you are somewhat naive. I have
| seen organizations push through decisions, which were obviously
| bad, in fact nearly everyone on the lower levels agreed that
| the goal of the decision was unachievable. But of course that
| didn't stop the organization.
|
| > I mean if someone literally tells you something isn't safe,
| especially the person who made it, you can't tell him it will
| work.
|
| You _literally_ can.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| The challenger disaster was a case study when I was in school:
| The important lesson is about human psychology, and why it's
| important to not speak up when something is dangerous.
|
| Basically, the "powers that be" wanted the launch and overruled
| the concerns of the engineers. They forced the launch against
| better judgement.
|
| (Think of the, "Oh, that nerd is always complaining, I'm going
| to ignore them because they aren't important," attitude.)
| wnissen wrote:
| Given that the other risk he cited, of ice damaging the heat
| shield tiles, is exactly what led to the loss of Columbia, I'd
| say he has an excellent grasp of the risks.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> How much of him being a hero is a coincidence?_
|
| None. He knew the right thing to do and did it despite extreme
| pressure.
|
| _> Did he refuse to sign the previous launches?_
|
| I don't know about him personally, but Thiokol, at the behest
| of McDonald and other engineers, had sent a formal letter to
| NASA the previous summer warning about the O-ring issue and
| stating explicitly that an O-ring failure could lead to loss of
| vehicle and loss of life.
|
| _> Did NASA have reasons to believe that the launch could be
| successful?_
|
| Not valid ones, no. The launch took place because managers, at
| both NASA and Thiokol, ignored valid engineering
| recommendations. But more than that, NASA had already been
| ignoring, since the previous summer, valid engineering
| recommendations to ground the Shuttle until the O-ring issue
| was understood and fixed.
| zensnail wrote:
| Iconoclasts like Robert are vital to get us to a stage one civ.
| May he rest in peace. Appreciate the post.
| cushychicken wrote:
| I got to eat lunch with Allan Macdonald in college. I was an IEEE
| officer and we hosted him for a talk at Montana State, so I got
| to take him out for lunch before his talk.
|
| Dude got a lunch beer without a second though. (My man!)
|
| He then gave a talk that afternoon talking about interrupting a
| closed session of the Challenger commission to gainsay a Thiokol
| VP. The VP in question testified to Congress that he wasn't aware
| of any launch risks. Macdonald stood up, went to the aisle, and
| said something to the effect of "Mr. Yeager, that is not true -
| this man was informed of the risks multiple times before the
| launch. I was the one that told him." (He was addressing Chuck
| Yeager, btw. Yeah, _that_ Chuck Yeager.)
|
| No mean feat to have the stones to interrupt a congressional
| hearing stacked with America's aviation and space heavyweights.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> to gainsay a Thiokol VP_
|
| My understanding is that it was the NASA manager, Larry Mulloy,
| who had given the go for launch for the SRBs.
| chasd00 wrote:
| isn't lying to congress a crime? was there documented proof of
| the notification or was it just a he said / he said situation?
| Anotheroneagain wrote:
| It's sad to see the decline of civilization, and how far back
| basic principles were not understood, and turned into a cargo
| cult. The point why somebody had to sign something to approve it
| was exactly that he had the option to not sign it in case that
| there was a problem. But even then, it was seen as a job to be
| done, that you either do, or fail to do.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| Allan McDonald is a new name for me. Thanks for posting this. See
| also other engineers who objected to the launch, like Bob Ebeling
| [0], who suffered with overwhelming guilt nearly until his death
| in 2016, and Roger Boisjoly [1], who never worked again as an
| engineer after Challenger.
|
| [0] https://archive.ph/kGMYG
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Boisjoly
| sjm-lbm wrote:
| I hadn't heard of McDonald either, but there's a recent book
| (https://www.amazon.com/Challenger-Story-Heroism-Disaster-
| Spa...) that covers his contribution well.
|
| (TBH I'm reading this book right now - probably 2/3 the way
| through or so - and it's kind of weird to see something like
| this randomly pop up on HN today.)
| aybs wrote:
| I just listened to the audio book on spotify, free for
| premium members, and I'm wondering if that's why I'm seeing
| so much about the Challenger disaster lately. Well worth a
| listen, and spends a great deal of time on setup for these
| key individuals who tried so hard to avert this disaster.
| autoexec wrote:
| Boeing's Starliner problems? This article was probably
| brought on by the (then) recent passing of Allan McDonald
| cushychicken wrote:
| Boisjoly was Macdonald's peer at Thiokol. Ebeling (I think) was
| either his direct manager or his division director.
|
| Boisjoly quit Thiokol after the booster incident. Macdonald
| stayed, and was harassed terribly by management. He took
| Thiokol to court at least once (possibly twice) on wrongful
| discrimination / termination / whistleblower clauses, and won.
| robxorb wrote:
| I have no idea what to make of this, does anyone have further
| information? Faces match, some careers match, logo is insane:
|
| https://rumble.com/v4wxpje-challenger-astronauts-alive-deman...
| datameta wrote:
| Well, according to Occam's Razor...
| wildzzz wrote:
| Why would NASA use their real names if they hired some random
| group of people to play astronauts that died in Challenger? Or,
| why would NASA not give false identities to their astronauts
| that faked dying in Challenger and instead gave them high
| profile jobs that would have required real resumes? And what is
| the point of blowing up a space shuttle? If NASA is faking
| space launches all the time, it seems easier just to declare
| each one a success than to manufacture a tragedy and
| congressional investigation. This guy is an absolute kook and
| that "documentary" is complete nonsense.
| robxorb wrote:
| My guess is because when you make it so stupidly obvious it's
| unbelievable, people will respond exactly like you have, ask
| exactly your questions, and end up convinced it's not true.
| Ad hominem doesn't help (as much as I may agree!).
|
| The fact remains that these people the guy found look
| extremely similar, but correctly aged and have the same
| names. If it's not indicative of some bizarre conspiracy,
| it's still extremely weird a coincidence.
|
| I'd have hoped someone could calculate some odds based on
| names and looks or something and make it make sense.
| globalnode wrote:
| nowadays you have an unlucky accident if youre a whistleblower,
| lucky he wound up getting a promo for it (after being demoted).
| mihaic wrote:
| Rest in peace Allan.
|
| As much as his action were admirable, the most shocking thing
| about that story was how the politicians rallied to protect him
| after his demotion, forcing his company to keep and actually
| promote him. That's why I get both sad and angry when I hear the
| new mantra of "Government can't do anything, the markets have to
| regulate that problem."
| capitainenemo wrote:
| I mean... his company was sitting on a lucrative government
| contract for an agency that was working hard to cover up a
| failure. It's fortunate that in this case distribution of power
| (and the shocking nature of the failure) ensured that the right
| thing happened, but I see a corporate and government management
| colluding to maintain their positions.
|
| Distribution of power is definitely important though, whether
| public or private. People concerned about government abuse is
| due to the fact that due to its nature, government power
| structures are more often centralised and without competitors
| by definition. There are monitors but they are often parts of
| the same system.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > the new mantra of "Government can't do anything, the markets
| have to regulate that problem."
|
| That's been the conservative line for 35+ years. How is that
| new?
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I think more like 70 years at this point. It's been SOP for
| the conservatives to get elected to govern, make government
| worse at every turn while enriching themselves and their
| friends, and then turning around to the public and being like
| "look how badly this works, clearly we need to cut taxes
| since it isn't working" and rinse and repeat until every
| institution in the world is borderline non-functioning.
| kbolino wrote:
| It was Jimmy Carter and not Ronald Reagan who scrapped the
| civil service competency exams. Government getting worse
| has been a two-party affair for quite some time. No one has
| any incentive to fix it, and the system is so vast, so
| complex, and so self-serving that no one even has the
| _power_ to fix it (as things stand).
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| The Democrats in America are highly conservative. Not as
| conservative as the Republicans, but still very
| conservative. We don't have a left and a right here, we
| have a hard right and a center right.
| kbolino wrote:
| Certain "hard right" parties like the PAP in Singapore
| and the LDP in Japan have placed a competent civil
| service at the forefront of their policies. Though in
| many ways, the US may appear more conservative than its
| "peers", in other ways, it appears more liberal.
| neilv wrote:
| > _Allan McDonald leaves behind his wife, Linda, and four
| children -- and a legacy of doing the right things at the right
| times with the right people._
|
| It sounds like the most noteworthy part of his legacy is
| attempting to do the right thing, but with the _wrong_ people.
|
| I think this is meaningful to mention, because saying to do "the
| right things, at the right time, with the right people" is easy
| -- but harder is figuring out what that really means, and how do
| you achieve that state when you have incomplete control?
| noisy_boy wrote:
| He had incomplete control but did the right thing (to refuse to
| let the risk slide) at the right time (before the launch). You
| don't need to have full control to do this.
|
| > but harder is figuring out what that really means
|
| I think it is quite clear except the part about "right people";
| if the people around you are not right, I would guess it is
| even more important to do the right thing. Obviously this comes
| at at a (potentially great) cost which is why it is easier said
| than done and why his actions are so admirable.
| neilv wrote:
| "The right people" is difficult. Working with NASA would seem
| one of the better bets.
|
| For startup founders, you can try to hire "the right people".
| (And share the equity appropriately.)
|
| For job-seekers, when you're interviewing with them, you can
| ask yourself whether they're "the right people". (And don't
| get distracted by a Leetcode hazing, in what's supposed to be
| collegial information-sharing and -gathering by both
| parties.)
| omega3 wrote:
| There is a good movie about the Challenger disaster and the
| follow up investigation from the pov of Feynman:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Challenger_Disaster
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| Which executive pressured the engineers, was there any
| accountability?
| 7e wrote:
| I don't relish all of the issues which will eventually surface
| with SpaceX's Starship, which makes Space Shuttle development
| look like a paragon of high quality development practices.
| Starship is built in a metaphorical barn with a "fuck around and
| find out" attitude.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| I don't think that's quite the case. SpaceX's method is more
| "release early, release often", and find (and solve!) issues
| early on. Traditional space companies on the other hand use a
| very rigid waterfall method.
|
| SpaceX's method is not "fuck around and find out". It's design,
| find out, iterate. From what I can tell from the outside, it
| seems very reasonable.
| fhub wrote:
| That metaphorical barn is run by Kathy Lueders. Look her up and
| it might soften your thinking a bit.
| kbolino wrote:
| The early manned space programs at USAF/NASA were a lot more
| cavalier than the shuttle program.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| If you're looking for a rocket company with a barn and a "fuck
| around and find out" attitude, Pythom is the one. Watch how
| they test rockets: https://vimeo.com/690376951
|
| From another angle, showing how some of them had to run away
| from the toxic fumes:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ1j85VgALA
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I wonder how often things like that happen.
|
| The launch could have gone right, and no one would have known
| anything about the decision process besides a few insiders. I am
| sure that on project as complex and as risky as a Space Shuttle,
| there is always an engineer that is not satisfied with some
| aspect, for some valid reason. But at some point, one needs to
| launch the thing, despite the complains. How many projects
| luckily succeeded after a reckless decision?
|
| In many accidents, we can point at an engineer who foreshadowed
| it, as it is the case here. Usually followed by blaming those who
| proceeded anyways. But these decision makers are in a difficult
| position. Saying "no" is easy and safe, but at some point, one
| needs to say "yes" and take risks, otherwise nothing would be
| done. So, whose "no" to ignore? Not Allan's apparently.
| jajko wrote:
| > But at some point, one needs to launch the thing
|
| Do they? Even if risks are not mitigated and say risk for
| catastrophe can't be pushed below ie 15%? This ain't some app
| startup world where failure will lose a bit of money and time,
| and everybody moves on.
|
| I get the political forces behind, nobody at NASA was/is
| probably happy with those, and most politicians are basically
| clueless clowns (or worse) chasing popularity polls and often
| wielding massive decisive powers over matters they barely
| understand at surface level.
|
| But you can't cheat reality and facts, not more than say in
| casino.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Maybe it's a bad analogy given the complexity of a rocket
| launch, but I always think about European exploration of the
| North Atlantic. Huge risk and loss of life, but the winners
| built empires on those achievements.
|
| So yes, I agree that at some point you need to launch the
| thing.
| whyever wrote:
| This sounds like you are saying colonialism was a success
| story?
| lkbm wrote:
| For the ones doing the colonizing? Overwhelmingly yes. A
| good potion of the issues with colonizing is about how
| the colonizing nations end up extracting massive amounts
| of resources for their own benefit.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| In context, it sounds like you think that the genocide of
| indigenous peoples was totally worth it for European
| nations and that callous lack of concern for human life
| and suffering is an example to be followed by modern
| space programs.
|
| I'd like to cut you the benefit of the doubt and assume
| that's not what you meant; if that's the case, please
| clarify.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| You are not reading the context correctly. The original
| point was that establishing colonies was very risky, to
| which whyever implied that colonialism was not a success
| story. But in fact it was extremely successful from a
| risk analysis point of view. Some nations chose to risk
| lives and it paid off quite well for them. The nuance of
| how the natives were treated is frankly irrelevant to
| this analysis, because we're asking "did the risk pay
| off", not "did they do anything wrong".
| kerkeslager wrote:
| I am not participating in amoral risk/reward analysis,
| and you should not be either.
|
| If the cost was genocide or predictable and avoidable
| astronaut deaths, the risk didn't pay off; there's no
| risk analysis. This isn't "nuance" and there is no
| ambiguity here, it's literally killing people for
| personal gain.
| lkbm wrote:
| > In context, it sounds like you think that the genocide
| of indigenous peoples was totally worth it for European
| nations and that callous lack of concern for human life
| and suffering is an example to be followed by modern
| space programs.
|
| Can you provide a quote of where I said this is an
| example to be followed"? (This is a rhetorical question:
| I know you can't because I said nothing remotely akin to
| that.)
|
| > I'd like to cut you the benefit of the doubt and assume
| that's not what you meant; if that's the case, please
| clarify.
|
| Sure, to clarify: I meant precisely what I said. I did
| not mean any of the completely different nonsense you
| decided to suggest I was _actually_ saying.
|
| If you see "colonization benefited the people doing the
| colonizing" and interpret it as "colonization is an
| example to be followed", that's entirely something wrong
| with your reading comprehension.
|
| You're not "cutting me some slack" by putting words in my
| mouth and then saying "but maaybe didn't mean that", and
| it's incredibly dishonesty and shitty of you to pretend
| you are.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > Can you provide a quote of where I said this is an
| example to be followed"?
|
| People can read the context of what you said, there's no
| need to quote it.
|
| In fact, I would advise you to read the context of what
| you said; if you don't understand why I interpreted your
| comment the way I did, maybe you should read the posts
| chain you responded to and that will help you understand.
|
| > Sure, to clarify: I meant precisely what I said. I did
| not mean any of the completely different nonsense you
| decided to suggest I was actually saying.
|
| Well, what you said, you said in a context. If you
| weren't following the conversation, you didn't have to
| respond, and you can't blame other people for trying to
| understand your comments as part of the conversation
| instead of in isolation.
|
| Even if you said what you said oblivious to context, then
| I have to say, if you meant exactly what you said, then
| my response is that a risk/reward analysis which only
| considers economic factors and ignores human factors is
| reprehensible.
|
| There is not a situation which exists in reality where we
| should be talking about economic success when human lives
| are at stake, without considering those human lives. If
| you want to claim "I wasn't talking about human life",
| then my response is simply, you _should_ have been
| talking about human life because the actions you 're
| discussing _killed people_ and that _the most important_
| factor in understanding those events. You don 't get to
| say "They took a risk and it paid off!" when the "risk"
| was wiping out entire populations--that's not a footnote
| or a minor detail, that's _the headline_.
|
| The story of the Challenger disaster isn't "they took a
| risk ignoring engineers and lost reputation with the NASA
| client"--it's "they risked astronaut's lives to win
| reputation with the NASA client and ended up killing
| people". The story of colonizing North America isn't
| "they took a risk on exploring unknown territories and
| found massive new sources of resources" it's "they
| sacrificed the lives of sailors and soldiers to explore
| unknown territories, and then wiped out the inhabitants
| and took their resources".
| themadturk wrote:
| Isn't it fairly obvious from history that you and the
| Renaissance-era colonizers calculate morality
| differently? You speak of things that _should_ not be,
| but nonetheless _were._ The success of colonialism _to
| the colonizers_ is obvious. Natives of the New World were
| regarded as primitives, non-believers, less than human.
| We see the actions of the European powers as abhorrent
| now, but 500 years ago they simply did not see things the
| way we do, and they acted accordingly.
| jajko wrote:
| I would somewhat agree with first launch, first moon
| mission and so on, but N-th in a row ain't building no new
| empires. Its business as usual.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I think ultimately the problem is of accountability
|
| If the risks are high and there are a lot of warning signs,
| there needs to be strong punishment for pushing ahead
| anyways and ignoring the risk
|
| It is much too often that people in powerful positions are
| very cavalier with the lives or livelihoods of many people
| they are supposed to be responsible for, and we let them
| get away with being reckless far too often
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > Maybe it's a bad analogy given the complexity of a rocket
| launch, but I always think about European exploration of
| the North Atlantic. Huge risk and loss of life, but the
| winners built empires on those achievements.
|
| > So yes, I agree that at some point you need to launch the
| thing.
|
| This comment sounds an awful lot like you think the
| genocide of indigenous peoples is justified by the fact
| that the winners built empires, but I'd like to assume you
| intended to say something better. If you did intend to say
| something better, please clarify.
| ufmace wrote:
| That's the thing I always wonder about these things.
|
| It's fun and easy to provide visibility into whoever called out
| an issue early when it does go on to cause a big failure. It
| gives a nice smug feeling to whoever called it out internally,
| the reporters who report it, and the readers in the general
| public who read the resulting story.
|
| The actual important thing that we hardly ever get much
| visibility into is - how many potential failures were called
| out by how many people how many times. How many of those things
| went on to cause a big, or even small, failure, and how many
| were nothingburgers in the end. Without that, it's hard to say
| whether leaders were appropriately downplaying "chicken little"
| warnings to satisfy a market or political need, and got caught
| by one actually being a big deal, or whether they really did
| recklessly ignore a called-out legitimate risk. It's easy to
| say you should take everything seriously and over-analyze
| everything, but at some point you have to make a move, or you
| lose. You don't get nearly as much second-guessing when you
| spend too much time analyzing phantom risks and end up losing
| to your competitors.
| autoexec wrote:
| > The actual important thing that we hardly ever get much
| visibility into is - how many potential failures were called
| out by how many people how many times.
|
| I'm not sure that's important at all. Every issue raised
| needs to be evaluated independently. If there is strong
| evidence that a critical part of a space shuttle is going to
| fail there should be zero discussion about how many times in
| the past other people thought other things might go wrong
| when in the end nothing did. What matters is the likelihood
| that this current thing will cause a disaster this time based
| on the current evidence, not on historical statistics
|
| The point where you "have to make a move" should only come
| after you can be reasonably sure that you aren't needlessly
| sending people to their deaths.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Can't we apply the same logic to the current Starliner
| situation. There's no way it should have launched, but someone
| brow beat others into saying it was an acceptable risk with the
| known issues to go ahead with the launch. Okay, so the _launch_
| was successful, but other issues that were known and suspect
| then caused problems after launch to the point they are not
| positive it can return. So, should it have launched? Luckily,
| at least to this point, nobody has been hurt /killed, and the
| vehicle is somewhat still intact.
| themadturk wrote:
| There are mitigations (of a sort) for the Starliner. It
| probably should not have launched, but now that it has, the
| flight crew is no longer in danger and can be brought down
| via Crew Dragon if necessary (as if Boeing needs any more
| embarrassment). If I was NASA, I'd take that option; though
| actual danger to the astronauts coming down in the Starliner
| seems minimal, having SpaceX do the job just seems safer.
|
| As it is, NASA is keeping the Starline in orbit to learn as
| much as possible about what's going on with the helium leaks,
| which are in the service module, which won't be coming back
| to earth for examination.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Saying "no" is easy and safe, but at some point, one needs to
| say "yes" and take risks, otherwise nothing would be done.
|
| Saying "no" is easy and safe in a world where there are
| absolutely no external pressures to get stuff done.
| Unfortunately, that world doesn't exist, and the decision
| makers in these kinds of situations face _far_ more pressure to
| say "yes" than they do to say "no".
|
| For example, see the article:
|
| > The NASA official simply said that Thiokol had some concerns
| but approved the launch. He neglected to say that the approval
| came only after Thiokol executives, under intense pressure from
| NASA officials, overruled the engineers.
| HankB99 wrote:
| > at some point, one needs to say "yes" and take risks
|
| I'm wondering how the two astronauts on the ISS feel about that
| while Boeing decides if/when it is safe to return then to
| Earth.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/18/science/boeing-starliner-astr...
| recursive wrote:
| Presumably about the same as they did prior to their first
| launch. Space travel is not like commercial air travel. This
| is part of the deal.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Hard disagree. The idea that the machinery your life will
| depend on might be made with half-assed safety in mind is
| definitely not part of the deal.
|
| Astronauts (and anyone intelligent who intentionally puts
| themselves in a life-threatening situation) have a more
| nuanced understanding of risk than can be represented by a
| single % risk of death number. "I'm going to space with the
| best technology humanity has to offer keeping me safe" is a
| very different risk proposition from "I'm going to space in
| a ship with known high-risk safety issues".
| iamthirsty wrote:
| > Hard disagree. The idea that the machinery your life
| will depend on might be made with half-assed safety in
| mind is definitely not part of the deal.
|
| It's definitely built in. The Apollo LM was .15mm thick
| aluminum, meaning almost any tiny object could've killed
| them.
|
| The Space Shuttle flew with SSRB's that were solid-fuel
| and unstoppable when lit.
|
| Columbia had 2 ejection seats, which were eventually
| taken out and not installed on any other shuttle.
|
| Huge risk is inherently the deal with space travel, at
| least from its inception until now.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Without links to more information on these engineering
| decisions, I don't think I'm qualified to evaluate
| whether these are serious risks, and I don't believe you
| are either. I tend to listen to engineers.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > the best technology humanity has to offer keeping me
| safe
|
| Nobody can afford the best technology humanity has to
| offer. As one adds more 9's to the odds of success, the
| cost increases exponentially. There is no end to it.
| Timwi wrote:
| If nobody can afford it, then it's not on offer.
| recursive wrote:
| How about this. Humanity can only offer the _best_ once.
| Because we will have spent the sum total of human output
| delivering the first one.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| True, but that's semantics at best--as the other post
| said, if something is better but humans can't afford it,
| then it's better than humanity has to offer. In the
| context of this conversation, there were mitigations
| which was very much within what could be afforded: wait
| for warmer temperatures, spend some money on testing
| instead of stock buybacks.
| afavour wrote:
| > at some point, one needs to say "yes" and take risks
|
| Do they though? If the Challenger launch had been pushed back
| what major effects would there have been?
|
| I do get your general point but in this specific example it
| seems the urgency to launch wasn't particularly warranted.
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| you need to establish which complaints can delay a launch.
| The parent comment is arguing that you need to set some kind
| of threshold on that. In practice, airplanes fly a little bit
| broken all the time. We have excellent data and theory and
| failsafes which allow that to be the case, but it's written
| in blood.
| ben_jones wrote:
| > If the Challenger launch had been pushed back what major
| effects would there have been?
|
| An administrator would've missed a promotion.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| I think it's not even a missed promotion but a perceived
| risk of one- which may or may not be accurate.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| That is a very uncharitable thing to say unless you have
| proof.
|
| What was the public sentiment of the Shuttle at the time?
| What was Congress sentiment? Was there organizational fear
| in NASA that the program would be cancelled if launches
| were not timely?
| jstanley wrote:
| > If the Challenger launch had been pushed back what major
| effects would there have been?
|
| The point is it's not just the Challenger launch. It's
| _every_ launch.
| ein0p wrote:
| > Saying "no" is easy and safe
|
| Not in my experience. Saying no to something major when others
| don't see a problem can easily be career-ending.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > easily be career-ending.
|
| Easily be career ending? That's a bit dramatic, don't you
| think?. Someone who continuously says no to things will
| surely not thrive and probably eventually leave the
| organization, one way or the other, that's probably right.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Not even slightly dramatic. I have seen someone be utterly
| destroyed for trying to speak out on something deeply
| unethical a state was doing, and is probably still doing.
|
| He was dragged by the head of state in the press and
| televised announcements, became untouchable overnight -
| lost his career, his wife died a few days later while at
| work at her government job in an "accident". This isn't in
| some tinpot dictatorship, rather a liberal western
| democracy.
|
| So - no. Career-ending is an understatement. You piss the
| wrong people off, they will _absolutely_ fuck you up.
| quacked wrote:
| I have long thought that there ought to be an
| independently funded International Association for the
| Protection of Whistleblowers. However, it would quickly
| become a primary target of national intelligence
| agencies, so I don't know how long it would last.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| A "liberal democracy" where the head of state can have
| random citizens murdered? And I guess despite being an
| internet anon, you won't name that country because they
| will come after you and kill your family as well?
|
| That's either a very tall tale or the state is anything
| but liberal.
| willcipriano wrote:
| > A "liberal democracy" where the head of state can have
| random citizens murdered?
|
| Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki (also spelled al-Aulaqi,
| Arabic: `bdlrHmn l`wlqy; August 26, 1995 - October 14,
| 2011) was a 16-year-old United States citizen who was
| killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen.
|
| The U.S. drone strike that killed Abdulrahman Anwar al-
| Awlaki was conducted under a policy approved by U.S.
| President Barack Obama
|
| Human rights groups questioned why Abdulrahman al-Awlaki
| was killed by the U.S. in a country with which the United
| States was not at war. Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal
| director of the American Civil Liberties Union, stated
| "If the government is going to be firing Predator
| missiles at American citizens, surely the American public
| has a right to know who's being targeted, and why."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al
| -Aw...
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| >Abdulrahman al-Awlaki's father, Anwar al-Awlaki, was a
| leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
|
| Missed highlighting that part. The boy also wasn't the
| target of the strike anyway. Was the wife from the other
| user's story living with an al-Qaeda leader as well?
| willcipriano wrote:
| > Abdulrahman al-Awlaki's father, Anwar al-Awlaki, was a
| leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
|
| You are a terrorist if you don't want a foreign power to
| install a government* over you and you fight to prevent
| that?
|
| And then further, if your dad does that you should die?
|
| *that has to be noted were literally pedophiles
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I've spoken about it here somewhat and circumspectly
| before - but I prefer to keep the SNR low, as I don't
| want repercussions for _him_. Me, good luck finding.
|
| It's the U.K. It happened under Cameron. It related to
| the judiciary. That's as much as I'll comfortably reveal.
|
| I will also say that it was a factor in me deciding to
| sell my business, leave the country, and live in the
| woods, as what I learned from him and his experience
| fundamentally changed my perception of the system in
| which we live.
| ein0p wrote:
| Ask Snowden.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Saying no isn't what ended his career.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Saying no isn't what ended his career.
|
| Within NatSec, saying No to _embarrassing the government_
| is implied. Ceaselessly.
|
| Equally implied: The brutality of the consequences for
| not saying no.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| Can someone explain why every govt official that was ever
| in the news talking about Snowden acuse him of being the
| worst sort of criminal? Specifically what is the case,
| they are never forthcoming about details.
|
| I personally am very glad to know the things he revealed.
| ein0p wrote:
| For the same reason they've been torturing Assange for
| the past decade. They view us as little more than taxable
| cattle that should not ask any questions, let alone
| embarrass or challenge the ruling class.
| bayouborne wrote:
| Considering the launch tempo that NASA had signed up for,
| and was then currently failing at? Yes, a single 'no-go' on
| the cert chain could easily result in someone being shunted
| into professional obscurity thereafter.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Everyone seems to be reading this too simply. In fact,
| stupidly.
|
| It's conceptually the easiest answer to the risk of asserting
| that you are certain, is simply don't assert that you are
| certain.
|
| They aren't saying it's easy to face your bosses with
| anything they don't want to hear.
| lolinder wrote:
| Isn't the definition of "easy" or "hard" that includes the
| external human pressures the _less_ simple /stupid one?
| What is the utility of a definition of "easy" that assumes
| that you work in complete isolation?
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Context.
| lolinder wrote:
| The context to this conversation is the launch of a space
| shuttle that's supposed to carry a teacher to space. It
| has both enormous stakes and enormous political pressure
| to not delay/cancel. I'm unsure why that context makes
| the spherical cow version of "easy" a sensible one.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| The context of that word "easy" was not a vacuum, it was
| part of a sentence which was part of a conversation.
| There is more than enough of this context to know what in
| particular was easy.
|
| You can only fail to get this by not reading the thing
| you are responding to, or deliberate obtuseness, or
| perhaps by being 12 years old.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| >Saying "no" is easy and safe, but at some point, one needs to
| say "yes" and take risks, otherwise nothing would be done.
|
| True, but that is for cases where you take the risk yourself.
| If the challenger crew knew the risk and were - fuck it - it's
| worth it it would have been different than a bureaucrat chasing
| a promotion.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Especially when that bureaucrat probably suffered no
| consequences for making the wrong call. Essentially letting
| other people take all of the risk while accepting none. No
| demotion, no firing, and even if they did get fired they
| probably got some kind of comfy pension or whatever
|
| It's a joke
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| I've always thought the same, that something like space travel
| is inherently incredibly dangerous. I mean surely someone
| during the Apollo program spoke out about something. Like
| landing on the moon with an untested engine being the only way
| back for instance.
|
| Nixon even had a 'if they died' speech prepared, so someone had
| to put the odds of success not at 100.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Neil Armstrong figured that he only had a 50% chance of
| making it back from the moon alive.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I think the deal was there was already a pretty high
| threshold for risk. I don't know the percentage exactly but
| the problem was the o-ring thing put it over the threshold
| which should triggered a a no-go.
|
| For example, you could say "we'll tolerate a 30% chance of
| loss of life on this launch" but then an engineer comes up
| and says "an issue we found puts the risk of loss of life at
| 65%". That crosses the limit and procedure means no launch.
| What should not happen is "well, we're going anyway" which is
| what happened with Challenger.
| former_navy wrote:
| Often.
|
| I used to run the nuclear power plant on a US Navy submarine.
| Back around 2006, we were sailing somewhere and Sonar reported
| that the propulsion plant was much, much louder than normal. A
| few days later we didn't need Sonar to report it, we could hear
| it ourselves. The whole rear half of the ship was vibrating. We
| pulled into our destination port, and the topside watch
| reported that oil pools were appearing in the water near the
| rear end of the ship. The ship's Engineering Officer and
| Engineering Department Master Chief shrugged it off and said
| there was no need for it to "affect ship's schedule". I was in
| charge of the engineering library. I had a hunch and I went and
| read a manual that leadership had probably never heard of. The
| propeller that drives the ship is enormous. It's held in place
| with a giant nut, but in between the nut and the propeller is a
| hydraulic tire, a toroidal balloon filled with hydraulic fluid.
| Clearly it had ruptured. The manual said the ship was supposed
| to immediately sail to the nearest port and the ship was not
| allowed to go back out to sea until the tire was replaced. I
| showed it to the Engineer. Several officers called me in to
| explain it to them. And then, nothing. Ship's Schedule was not
| affected, and we continued on the next several-week trip.
| Before we got to the next port, we had to limit the ship's top
| speed to avoid major damage to the entire propulsion plant. We
| weren't able to conduct the mission we had planned because the
| ship was too loud. And the multiple times I asked what the hell
| was going on, management literally just talked over me. When we
| got to the next port, we had to stay there while the propeller
| was removed and remachined. Management doesn't give a shit as
| long as it doesn't affect their next promotion.
|
| Don't even get me started on the nuclear safety problems.
| orblivion wrote:
| Is this a different phenomenon though? It seems that there's
| a difference between an informed risk assessment and not
| giving a fuck or letting the bureaucratic gears turn and not
| feeling responsible. Like there's a difference between
| Challenger and Chernobyl.
|
| But, maybe someone can make a case that it's fundamentally
| the same thing?
| quacked wrote:
| I would make the case that it's fundamentally the same
| thing.
|
| In both cases, there were people who cared primarily about
| the technical truth, and those people were overruled by
| people who cared primarily about their own lifestyle
| (social status, reputation, career, opportunities,
| loyalties, personal obligations, etc.) In Allan McDonald's
| book "Truth, Lies, and O-Rings" he outlines how Morton
| Thiokol was having a contract renewal held over their head
| while NASA Marshall tried to maneuver the Solid Rocket
| Booster production contract to a second source, which would
| have seriously affect MT's bottom line and profit margins.
| There's a strong implication that Morton Thiokol was not
| able to adhere to proper technical rationale and push back
| on their customer (NASA) because if they had they would
| have given too much ammunition to NASA to argue for a
| second-source for the SRB contracts. (In short: "you guys
| delayed launches over issues in your hardware, so we're
| only going to buy 30 SRB flight sets from you over the next
| 5 years instead of 60 as we initially promised."
|
| I have worked as a NASA contractor on similar issues,
| although much less directly impacting the crews than the
| SRBs. You are not free to pursue the smartest, most
| technically accurate, quickest method for fixing problems;
| if you introduce delays that your NASA contacts and
| managers don't like, they will likely ding your contract
| and redirect some of your company's work to your direct
| competitors, who you're often working with on your
| projects.
| BlarfMcFlarf wrote:
| What's the alternative? Being able to shift to a
| competitor when a producer is letting you down is the
| entire point of private contracts; without that, you
| might as well remove the whole assemblage of profit and
| just nationalize the whole thing.
| Timwi wrote:
| That's EXACTLY the alternative.
| orblivion wrote:
| Okay so it sounds like you're saying that they are
| fundamentally the same, but only because the Challenger
| wasn't in the "informed risk assessment" category after
| all.
| permo-w wrote:
| >Like there's a difference between Challenger and
| Chernobyl.
|
| not in year, incidentally
| psunavy03 wrote:
| The correct answer in that case is to go to the Inspector
| General. That's what they're there for. Leaders sweeping shit
| under the rug that ends up crippling a fleet asset and
| preventing tasking from higher is precisely the kind of
| negligence and incompetence the IG is designed to root out.
|
| And I say that as a retired officer.
| richie-guix wrote:
| How long retired? Things have gone in what can only be
| described as an.. incomprehensible unfathomable direction
| in the last decade or so. Parent post is not surprising in
| the least.
|
| Politics is seeping where it doesn't belong.
|
| I am very worried.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| Tell us more... what has happened?
| richie-guix wrote:
| To a first approximation:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZB7xEonjsc
|
| Less funny in real life. Sometimes the jizzless thing
| falls off with impeccably bad timing. Right when things
| go boom. People get injured (no deaths yet). Limp home
| early. Allies let down. Shipping routes elongate by a sad
| multiple. And it even affects you directly as you pay
| extra for that Dragon silicon toy you ordered from China.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| Just google the Red Hill failure.
|
| The Navy's careerist, bureaucratic incompetence is
| staggering. No better than Putin's generals who looted
| the military budget and crippled his army so they
| couldn't even beat a military a fraction of their size.
| richie-guix wrote:
| The unfathomable part is you getting downvotes for citing
| a well known mainstream news story.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Recently. For those who've served, it's not a surprise to
| see the constant drumbeat of commanding officers being
| relieved of command every month or so. COs are not
| bulletproof, and the last thing anyone in the seat wants
| is to end up crossways with the IG. And there are
| confidential ways Sailors can get in touch with them if
| needed.
|
| Or with their Member of Congress, who can also go to Big
| Navy and ask "WTF is going on with my constituent?"
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Honest question: what are the plausible outcomes for an
| engineer who reports this kind of issue to the IG?
|
| I'm guessing there's a real possibility of it ending his
| career, at least as a member of the military.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| I seriously believe what I've heard about upwards
| failure. Being competent seems to be an impediment, and
| the goons at the very top are ludicrously malformed
| people.
| willcipriano wrote:
| The incompetent group together, they have to in order to
| survive.
|
| The competent don't group together, they don't need to.
| They can take care of themselves.
|
| The former uses their power as a group against the
| individuals in the latter.
|
| Basically the plot of Atlas Shrugged.
| conradolandia wrote:
| Atlas Shrugged? The book written by that demented woman
| who couldn't deal with her own feelings but told everyone
| how individualism was the answer to everything while
| living thanks to other people's support?
|
| That book?
| willcipriano wrote:
| Yeah the one were people attack the author rather than
| the idea because they aren't competent enough to do so.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Objectivism: that fart-huffing philosophy that leads
| people to think everyone else is incompetent to judge it,
| when it's just a bunch of hateful trash that is to the
| right as Marxism is to the left.
| Loughla wrote:
| Objectivism, like many philosophies or political beliefs,
| only works in an absolute vacuum.
|
| Maybe the one person who survives the first trip to Mars
| can practice it.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I'm not an objectivist. My comment is the extent of the
| Ayn Rand beliefs I hold for my most part.
|
| When you work on ideas instead of personalities you get
| to do that.
|
| Nobody here tried to disprove my comment. Just a few
| people starting complaining about a dead woman whose book
| I mentioned in passing.
|
| They got together and argued, incompetently.
| Demonstrating the effect I was attempting to illustrate.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| The IG is an independent entity which exists to
| investigate misconduct and fraud/waste/abuse. There are
| Inspectors General at all levels from local bases up to
| the Secretary of Defense, and they have confidential
| reporting hotlines. The only thing worse for a commander
| than having shenanigans be substantiated at an IG
| investigation is to have been found to tolerate
| retaliation against the reporters.
|
| Generally about every month or two, a Navy commanding
| officer gets canned for "loss of confidence in his/her
| ability to command." They aren't bulletproof, quite the
| opposite. And leaving out cases of alcohol misuse and/or
| sexual misconduct, other common causes are things within
| the IG's purview.
| buildsjets wrote:
| It sounds like a certain commercial aircraft manufacturer
| that starts with a B and ends with an oeing could really
| use an effective Inspector General system.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| If you're EB, why replace a hydraulic bushing when you can
| wait, and replace it but also have to repair a bunch of
| damage and make yourself a nice big extra chunk of change off
| Uncle Sam?
|
| If you're ship's captain...why not help secure a nice
| 'consulting' 'job' at EB after retiring from the navy by
| helping EB make millions, and count on your officers to not
| say a peep to fleet command that the mess was preventable?
| buildsjets wrote:
| That sounds EXACTLY like something Fat Leonard might have
| done...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal
| quacked wrote:
| > Don't even get me started on the nuclear safety problems.
|
| I want to be pro-nuclear energy, but I just don't think I can
| trust the majority of human institutions to handle nuclear
| plants.
|
| What do you think about the idea of replacing all global
| power production with nuclear, given that it would require
| many hundreds of thousands of loosely-supervised people
| running nuclear plants?
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Considering that 1 Chernobyl scale accident per year would
| kill fewer people than global coal power does, I personally
| would be for it.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| It was a tremendous effort and sacrifice paid so that
| half of Europe wasnt poisoned by that 1 Chernobyl.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Given the scale of people killed by coal every year, I
| feel relatively confident that had that effort not been
| undertaken, it would still be true.
|
| And of course that's ignoring the fact that I _also_ feel
| relatively confident that a Chernobyl scale accident
| every year is in no way likely, even if the entire world
| was 100% on nuclear
| somenameforme wrote:
| There's also the issue of force majeure - war, terrorism,
| natural disasters, and so on. Increase the number of these
| and not only can you not really maintain the same level of
| diligence, but you also increase the odds of them ending up
| in an unfortunate location or event.
|
| There's also the issue of the uranium. Breeder reactors can
| help increase efficiency, but they bump up all the
| complexities/risks greatly. Relatively affordable uranium
| is a limited resource. We have vast quantities of it in the
| ocean, but it's not really feasible to extract. It's at
| something like 3.3 parts per billion by mass. So you'd need
| to filter a billion kg of ocean water to get 3.3kg of
| uranium. Outside of cost/complexity, you also run into
| ecological issues at that scale.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| Same. Its blatantly obvious the humanity is not up to the
| task.
| RajT88 wrote:
| My brother has loads of ghese stories related to fighter
| jets.
|
| Stuff like pilots taking off with no working nav, "I'll
| follow the guy in front of me".
| caseyy wrote:
| A lot of people are taking issue with the fact that you need to
| say yes for progress. I don't know how one could always say no
| and expect to have anything done.
|
| Every kind of meaningful success involves negotiating risk
| instead of seizing up in the presence of it.
|
| The shuttle probably could have failed in 1,000 different ways
| and eventually, it would have. But they still went to space
| with it.
|
| Some risk is acceptable. If I were to go to the moon, let's
| say, I would accept a 50% risk of death. I would be happy to do
| it. Other people would accept a risk of investment and work
| hour loss. It's not so black or white that you wouldn't go if
| there's any risk.
| lolinder wrote:
| The key thing with Challenger is that the engineers working
| on the project estimated the risk to be extremely high and
| refused to budge, eventually being overruled by the
| executives of their company.
|
| That's different than the engineers calculating the risk of
| failure at some previously-defined-as-acceptable level and
| giving the go-ahead.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > Some risk is acceptable. If I were to go to the moon, let's
| say, I would accept a 50% risk of death. I would be happy to
| do it. Other people would accept a risk of investment and
| work hour loss. It's not so black or white that you wouldn't
| go if there's any risk.
|
| It's possible you're just suicidal, but I'm reading this more
| as false internet bravado. A 50% risk of death on a mission
| to space is totally unacceptable. It's not like anyone will
| die if you don't go _now_ ; you can afford to take the time
| to eliminate all known risks of this magnitude.
| caseyy wrote:
| Not bravado at all, if I was given those odds today, I
| would put all my effort into it and go.
|
| There are many people who are ideologically-driven and
| accept odds of death at 50% or higher -- revolutionary
| fighters, political martyrs, religious martyrs, explorers
| and adventurers throughout history (including space),
| environmental activists, freedom fighters, healthcare
| workers in epidemics of serious disease...
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > Not bravado at all, if I was given those odds today, I
| would put all my effort into it and go.
|
| If that's actually true, you should see a therapist.
|
| Given we have a track record of going to the moon with
| much lower death rate than 50%, that's a proven higher
| risk than is necessary. That's not risking your life for
| a cause, because there's no cause that benefits from you
| taking this disproportionate risk. It's the heroism
| equivalent of playing Russian Roulette a little more than
| 3 times and achieves about as much.
|
| > There are many people who are ideologically-driven and
| accept odds of death at 50% or higher -- revolutionary
| fighters, political martyrs, religious martyrs, explorers
| and adventurers throughout history (including space),
| environmental activists, freedom fighters, healthcare
| workers in epidemics of serious disease...
|
| And for every one of those there's 100 keyboard cowboys
| on the internet who have never been within a mile of
| danger and have no idea how they'll react to it.
|
| I would say I'm more ideologically driven than most, and
| there are a handful of causes I'd like to think I'd die
| for. But I'm also self-aware enough to know that it's
| impossible to know how I'll react until I'm actually in
| those situations.
|
| And I'll reiterate: you aren't risking your life for a
| cause, because there's no cause that benefits from you
| taking a 50% mortality risk on a trip to the moon.
| caseyy wrote:
| I think you may be projecting, because you are acting a
| bit like a keyboard warrior -- telling others to see
| therapists. Consider that other people have different
| views, that is all. To some, the cause (principle/life
| goal) of exploring where others have not gone is enough.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| > I would accept a 50% risk of death.
|
| No offense but this sounds like the sayings of someone who
| has not ever seen a 50% of death.
|
| It's a little different 3 to 4 months out. It's way different
| the night before and morning. Stepping "in the arena" with
| odds like those, I'd say the vast, vast majority will back
| out and/or break down sobbing if forced.
|
| There's a small percent who will go forward but admit the
| fact that they were completely afraid- and rightly so.
|
| Then you have that tiny percentage that are completely calm
| and you'd swear had a tiny smile creeping in...
|
| I've never been an astronaut.
|
| But I did spend three years in and out of Bosnia with a
| special operations task force.
|
| Honestly? I have a 1% rule. The things might have a 20-30%
| chance of death of clearly stupid and no one wants to do.
| Things will a one in a million prob aren't gonna catch ya.
| But I figure that if something does, it's gonna be an
| activity that I do often but has a 1% chance of going
| horribly wrong and that I'm ignoring.
| 2shortplanks wrote:
| 50% of the time doing something that has a one percent
| chance of killing you 69 times will kill you
| WalterBright wrote:
| > No offense but this sounds like the sayings of someone
| who has not ever seen a 50% of death.
|
| The space program pilots saw it. And no, I would not have
| flown on those rockets. After all, NASA would "man rate" a
| new rocket design with only one successful launch.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Spooky graph that illustrates the risk: https://en.wikipe
| dia.org/wiki/LGM-25C_Titan_II#/media/File:U...
| MereInterest wrote:
| Using the space shuttle program as a comparison, because
| it's easy to get the numbers. There were 13 total deaths
| (7 from Challenger, 6 from Columbia [0]) during the
| program. Over 135 missions, the Space Shuttle took 817
| people into space. (From [1], the sum of the "Crew"
| column. The Space Shuttle carried 355 distinct people,
| but some were on multiple missions.)
|
| So the risk of death could be estimated as 2/135 (fatal
| flights / total flights) or as 13/817 (total fatalities /
| total crew). These are around 1.5%, must lower than a 50%
| chance of death.
|
| This is not to underplay their bravery. This is to state
| that the level of bravery to face a 1.5% chance of death
| is extremely high.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-
| related_ac... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S
| pace_Shuttle_missions
| WalterBright wrote:
| If I recall correctly, the Saturn V was man rated after
| one launch. There were multiple failures on the moon
| missions that easily could have killed the astronauts.
|
| The blastoff from the moon had never been tried before.
| nsokolsky wrote:
| > Stepping "in the arena" with odds like those, I'd say the
| vast, vast majority will back out and/or break down sobbing
| if forced.
|
| Something like 10 million people will accept those odds.
| Let's say 1 million are healthy enough to actually go to
| space and operate the machinery. Then let's say 99% will
| back out during the process. That's still 10,000 people to
| choose from, more than enough for NASA's needs.
| caseyy wrote:
| > sounds like the sayings of someone who has not ever seen
| a 50% of death
|
| Well, this sounds like simple ad-hominem. I appreciate your
| insight, overall, though.
|
| Many ideologically-driven people, like war field medics,
| explorers, adventurers, revolutionaries, and political
| martyrs take on very high risk endeavors.
|
| I would also like to explore unknown parts of the Moon
| despite the risks, even if they were 50%. And I would
| wholeheartedly try to do it and put myself in the race, if
| not for a disqualifying condition.
|
| There is also the matter of controllable and uncontrollable
| risks of death. The philosophy around dealing with them can
| be quite different. From my experience with battlefield
| medicine (albeit limited to a few years), I accepted the
| risks because the cause was worth it, the culture I was
| surrounded by was to accept these risks, and I could steer
| them by taking precautions and executing all we were
| taught. No one among the people I trained with thought they
| couldn't. And yes, many people ultimately dropped out for
| it, as did I.
|
| Strapping oneself to a rocket is a very uncontrollable
| risk. The outcome, from an astronaut's perspective, is more
| random. I think that offers a certain kind of peace. We are
| all going to die at random times for random reasons, I
| think most people make peace with that, especially as they
| go into old age. That is a more comfortable type of risk
| for me.
|
| Individuals have different views on mortality. Some are
| more afraid than others, some are afraid in one set of
| circumstances but not others. Some think that doing
| worthwhile things in their lives outweighs the risk of
| death every time. Your view is valid, but so is others'.
| nurbl wrote:
| What makes you say it "could have gone right"? From what came
| out about the o-rings behavior at cold temperatures, it seems
| they were taking a pretty big risk. Your perspective seems to
| be that it's always a coin toss no matter what, and I don't
| think that is true. Were there engineers speaking up in this
| way at every successful launch too?
| JoshuaRogers wrote:
| I think what they were saying, especially given the phrasing
| "How many projects luckily succeeded after a reckless
| decision?" is that, if things hadn't failed we would never
| have known and thus how many other failures of procedure/
| ethics have we just not seen because the worst case failed to
| occur.
| wormius wrote:
| Good ol' survivorship bias...
| elviejo79 wrote:
| It happens extremely frequently because there is almost no
| downside for management to override the engineers decision.
|
| Even in the case of the Challenger, no single article say WHO
| was the executive that finally approved the launch. No body was
| jailed for gross negligence. Even Ricahrd Feynman felt that the
| investigative comission was biased from the start.
|
| So, since there is no "price to pay" to make this bad calls
| they are continuously made.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > No body was jailed for gross negligence
|
| Jailing people means you'll have a hard time finding people
| willing to make hard decisions, and when you do, you may find
| they're not the right people for the job.
|
| Punishing people for making mistakes means very few will be
| willing to take responsibility.
|
| It will also mean that people will desperately cover up
| mistakes rather than being open about it, meaning the
| mistakes do not get corrected. We see this in play where
| manufacturers won't fix problems because fixing a problem is
| an admission of liability for the consequences of those
| problems, and punishment.
|
| Even the best, most conscientious people make mistakes.
| Jailing them is not going to be helpful, it will just make
| things worse.
| Anotheroneagain wrote:
| _Jailing people means you 'll have a hard time finding
| people willing to make hard decisions,_
|
| Why do you think you want it? You don't want it.
| Calamitous wrote:
| > Punishing people for making mistakes means very few will
| be willing to take responsibility.
|
| That's what responsibility is: taking lumps for making
| mistakes.
|
| If I make a mistake on the road and end up killing someone,
| I can absolutely be held liable for manslaughter.
|
| I don't know if jail time is the right answer, but there
| absolutely needs to be some accountability.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Have you ever made a mistake on the road that luckily did
| not result in anyone getting killed?
|
| During WW2, a B-19 crash landed in the Soviet Union. The
| B-29's technology was light-years ahead of Soviet
| engineering. Stalin demanded that an exact replica of the
| B-29 be built. And that's what the engineers did. They
| were so terrified of Stalin that they carefully
| duplicated the battle damage on the original.
|
| Be careful what you wish for when advocating criminal
| punishment.
| avar wrote:
| > Even in the case of the > Challenger, no single
| article > say WHO was the executive > that
| finally approved the launch.
|
| The people who made the final decision were Jerald Mason
| (SVP), Robert Lund, Joe Kilminster and Calvin Wiggins (all
| VP's).
|
| See page 94 of the Rogers commission report[1]: "a final
| management review was conducted by Mason, Lund, Kilminster,
| and Wiggins".
|
| Page 108 has their full names as part of a timeline of events
| at NASA and Morton Thiokol.
|
| 1. https://sma.nasa.gov/SignificantIncidents/assets/rogers_co
| mm...
| elviejo79 wrote:
| Thank you.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| From the very start they were obviously in cover-up mode.
|
| They had every engineer involved with the booster saying
| launching in the cold was a bad idea, yet they started by
| trying to look at all the ways it could have gone wrong
| rather than even looking into what the engineers were
| screaming about.
|
| We also have them claiming a calibration error with the
| pyrometer (the ancestor of the modern thermometer you point
| at something) even though that made other numbers not make
| sense.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| My understanding of the Space Shuttle program is that there
| were a lot of times they knew they probably shouldn't fly, or
| try to land, and they lucked out and didn't lose the orbiter.
| It is shocking they only lost two ships out of the 135 Space
| Shuttle missions.
|
| The safety posture of that whole program, for a US human space
| program, seemed bad. That they chose to use solid rocket motors
| shows that they were willing to compromise on human safety from
| the get-go. There are reasons there hasn't ever been even one
| other human-rated craft to use solid rocket motors.
| floating-io wrote:
| Except SLS?
|
| Not that I think it's a good thing, but...
| pseudosavant wrote:
| I forgot about the SLS until after I wrote that. SLS makes
| most of the same mistakes, plus plenty of new expensive
| ones, from the Space Shuttle program. SLS has yet to carry
| a human passenger though.
|
| Its mind boggling that SLS still exists at all. At least
| $1B-$2B in costs whether you launch or not. A launch
| cadence measured in years. $2B-$4B if you actually launch
| it. And it doesn't even lift more than Starship, which is
| launching almost quarterly already. This before we even
| talk about reusability, or that a reusable Starship + Super
| Heavy launch would only use about $2M of propellent.
| jimbobthrowawy wrote:
| > There are reasons there hasn't ever been even one other
| human-rated craft to use solid rocket motors.
|
| That's about to not be true. Atlas V + starliner has flown
| two people and has strap-on boosters, I think it only gets
| the rating once it returns from the test flight though.
|
| The shuttle didn't have a propulsive launch abort system, and
| could only abort during a percentage of its launch. The
| performance quoted for starliner's abort motor is "one mile
| up, and one mile out" based on what the presenter said during
| the last launch. You're plenty safe as long as you don't
| intersect the SRB's plume.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| ** SLS has entered the chat **
| danesparza wrote:
| Destin (from Smarter Every Day Youtube channel fame) has
| concerns about the next NASA mission to the moon (named
| Artemis): https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU
|
| Read the comments (especially from NASA engineers). It's pretty
| interesting that sometimes it takes courageous engineers to
| break the spell that poor managers can have on an organization.
| brandall10 wrote:
| What would be interesting to know is how many people tried to
| puts the brakes on all the successful missions.
| felipelemos wrote:
| > But at some point, one needs to launch the thing, despite the
| complains.
|
| Or: at some point, one decides to launch the thing.
|
| You are reducing the complaints of an engineer as something
| inevitable and unimportant, as if it happened in every lunch,
| and in every lunch someone decided to went ahead, because it
| was what was needed.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> at some point, one needs to launch the thing, despite the
| complains_
|
| There's a big difference between "complaints" because something
| is not optimal, and warnings that something is a critical risk.
| The Thiokol engineers' warnings about the O-rings were in the
| latter category.
|
| And NASA _knew_ that. The summer before the Challenger blew up,
| NASA had reclassified the O-rings as a Criticality 1 flight
| risk, where they had previously been Criticality 1R. The "1"
| meant that if the thing happens the shuttle would be lost--as
| it was. The "R" meant that there was a redundant component that
| would do the job if the first one failed--in this case there
| were two O-rings, primary and secondary. But in (IIRC) June
| 1985, NASA was told by Thiokol that the primary O-ring was not
| sealing so there was effectively no redundancy, and NASA
| acknowledged that by reclassifying the risk. But by the rules
| NASA itself had imposed, a Criticality 1 (rather than 1R)
| flight risk was supposed to mean the Shuttle was grounded until
| the issue was fixed. To avoid that, NASA waived the risk right
| after reclassifying it.
|
| _> at some point, one needs to say "yes" and take risks,
| otherwise nothing would be done_
|
| Taking calculated risks when the potential payoff justifies it
| is one thing. But taking foolish risks, when even your own
| decision making framework says you're not supposed to, is quite
| another. NASA's decision to launch the Challenger was the
| latter.
| bayouborne wrote:
| I doubt in a bureaucracy as big and political as NASA saying
| "no" is never easy or safe. In an alternate timeline (one where
| the Challenger launch succeeded) it would have been interesting
| to track McDonald's career after refusing to sign.
| tejohnso wrote:
| > Morton Thiokol executives were not happy that McDonald spoke
| up, and they demoted him.
|
| And then all of their government contracts should have been
| revoked.
| breput wrote:
| It's also worth noting how the o-ring story was made public.
| There is the famous testimony by Richard Feynman[0], but the
| secret was that astronaut/commissioner Sally Ride leaked the
| story to another commissioner, who then suggested it to Feynman
| over dinner[1].
|
| Neither Ride nor Kutyna could risk exposing the information
| themselves, but no would could question or impeach Feynman.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raMmRKGkGD4
|
| [1] https://lithub.com/how-legendary-physicist-richard-
| feynman-h...
| smsm42 wrote:
| What is missing here for me is who were the anonymous
| "executives" that overruled Mcdonald (and others) and tried to
| punish him? Did they suffer any consequences for actions that
| cost lives and for the coverup?
| quacked wrote:
| I'm late to the party, but I work as a NASA contractor and have
| just recently been reading "Truth, Lies, and O-Rings" by Mr.
| McDonald.
|
| Something that I find really frustrating is that it seems that
| there's an international "caste" of honest engineers who are
| ready, and have been ready for centuries if not millenia, to pull
| the metaphorical trigger on advancing human society to the next
| level. International rail systems, replacing all electrical
| generation with nuclear, creating safe and well-inspected
| commercial airplanes, etc.
|
| Blocking that "caste" from uniting with each other and
| coordinating these projects are the Old Guard; the "local area
| warlords", although these days they may have different titles
| than they would have a thousand years ago. These people do not
| speak a language of technical accuracy, but rather their primary
| guiding principles are personal loyalty, as was common in old
| honor societies. They introduce graft, violence, corruption,
| dishonesty, and personal asset capture into these projects and
| keep them from coming to fruition. They would not sacrifice their
| lifestyles in order to introduce technical excellence into the
| system they're charged with managing, but instead think more
| about their workload, their salary, their personal obligations to
| their other (often dishonest) friends, and their career tracks.
|
| It wouldn't even occur to me to worry more about a promotion than
| than the technical merit of a machine or system I was engaged
| with. I would never lie about something myself a colleague of
| mine said or did. For those reasons I will never be particularly
| competitive with the people who do become VPs and executive
| managers.
|
| How many different people around the world, and especially that
| are on HackerNews, are in my exact situation? With the right
| funding and leadership could all quit our stupid fucking jobs
| building adtech or joining customer databases together or
| generating glorified Excel spreadsheets and instead be the
| International Railway Corps, or the International Nuclear Corps.
| And yet since we can't generate the cashflow necessary to satisfy
| the Local Area Warlords that own all the tooling facilities and
| the markets and the land, it will never be.
| badgersnake wrote:
| > at some point, one needs to say "yes" and take risks
|
| Sure, but they need to understand the risks, and be open about
| the choices they are making. Ideally at the time but certainly
| coving it up after it goes wrong is not acceptable.
| johnea wrote:
| We're seeing it all happen again now at Boeing.
|
| I just keep waiting for that magical invisible hand to swoop in
| and fix this cluster f_ck... What could possibly be holding it
| up?
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