The government in one picture – IOTW Report

The government in one picture

38 Comments on The government in one picture

  1. …as a machine integrator heavily involved in wetware interface via HMI and tactile controls, I can tell you from experience that if you tell someone NOT to press a button, they will press it IMMEDIATELY and ALL DAY LONG, so its best to disable or remove it instead of just expect them to not do something.

    …althogh being the curmudgeon and student of human nature I am, I do occasionally provide virtual controls that flash and change numbers, but don’t actually DO anything. This is generally enough to satisfy someone who sees an imaginary problem or thinks somethings too slow if its fully optimized but a display doesn’t show 100%, but they will happily push a detached button, read a fictitious number, and their technology bias convinces them they actually DID something, and sometimes they’ll even brag about how they made it go faster…;>

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  2. Outdoorjohn DECEMBER 23, 2020 AT 10:28 AM
    “My devious little brain is imagining an Extra Bigass capacitor being discharged into the pusher of the button.”

    …I don’t know if you ever saw the old “Candid Camera” shows with ALlen Funt, but one of the meanest control gags I ever saw was on that show, although I didn’t realize HOW mean it was at the time because I was a kid.

    …see, the setup is that an actual working factory took a room with a small pass-through for a conveyor in it with no windows, put a small section of conveyor in it surrounded by boxes, and if you ever saw the “I Love Lucy” episode where SHE worked breifly in a factory, you KNOW where this is going.

    …but being Candid Camera, they had to have an unsuspecting victim.

    They did this by pretending the factory was hiring, and would take the “new employee” in and tell him, “OK, take these cakes off the belt, put them in these boxes. If the line runs too fast, here’s a dial to slow it down. If you have a problem, here’s a switch to turn it off. If there’s a serious problem, pull this cord over your head for an emergency stop”.

    …Thing is, the speed was controlled by producers and not by anything in the room, the switch and dial went nowhere, and the cord was designed to break off when pulled and also did nothing.

    …So, this person, WHO THOUGHT THEY HAD JUST LANDED A REAL JOB, would start loading, then they’d speed the belt up, the person would work the knob and they’d speed up some more (they were hand loading basic pastry loaded with whipped cream out of sight on the other side with several people doing it at the higher speeds), the switch would be used and they’d speed up, then they’d get overwhelmed (because they did it on PURPOSE for the hidden camera) and pull the cord, which would fall on their head, so they’d let them panic in a welter of whipped cream for a bit as their hopes crashed down about keeping the job, then they’d be berated breifly by a fake ‘boss’ before smiling Allen popped out and told them they never really had a job in the FIRST place, they just ruined their clothes for a laugh, thus crushing their hopes a SECOND time and then expecting them to LAUGH about it.

    …I often wondered why no one ever kicked Allen Funt’s ass, some of his stuff was rather cruel, but as far as I know, no one ever did.

    …of course, it WAS a more civilized time, except for the Allen Funt part of it, so many people DID avoid a well earned ass kicking, and maybe that’s how we got to where we are NOW…

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  3. Holey Cow
    DECEMBER 23, 2020 AT 12:24 PM
    “Saw on a bag of flour today: Raw. Cook before enjoying.”

    …Douglas Adams saw this coming a long time ago…

    “Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.
    THE TOOTHPICK INSTRUCTIONS THAT CONVINCED WONKO MANKIND IN GENERAL WAS CRAZY.

    https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Wonko_the_Sane

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  4. @The Gunny

    After years of three kids fighting for the elevator buttons, I mostly got out of that habit. But I occasionally hammer the damned CLOSE DOOR button in the vain hope of getting the show on the road quicker.

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  5. …and the minds responsible for these signs also dictate our businesses, take half our money in taxes, cover us with laws they don’t have to obey, tell us to take an unproven vaccine for a fake disease, and are foisting Kamala Harris on us as President with resistance only from one man.

    …and WE call THEM stupid…

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  6. There’s a road crossing signal here in town that “talks” when it is pushed. It has two messages: one for NOT walking, one FOR walking. I press that button continuously whenever I am waiting to cross that street. I love doing that.

    It reminds me of what I did when confronted with a display of “musical socks” in a department store one Christmas long ago. Now THAT is a treasured memory.

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  7. The next innovation will be that pushing the button will activate a camera nearby taking a photo of the perp. They’ll receive a $50 ticket in the mail and have 100 points deducted from their social credit score for 6 months.

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  8. @ SuperShopperNightshade DECEMBER 23, 2020 AT 11:02 AM

    I hold the opinion that practical jokes are usually cruel by nature.

    You’re taking advantage of someone’s innocence.

    Like tricking your pet just becomes you being an asshole pretty quickly.

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  9. President Elect Dadof4 – I saw a vid of a couple (of asshoels) saran wrapping the doorway so the dog would run into it an possibly break a leg or whatever. But the dog saw it and jumped over it. The idiots laughed and the male stood up to pull the cling wrap off and fell over it himself.
    Good.

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  10. @ ecp “the majority of us are average”

    You just figured out the problem. When you think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half the population is stupider than THAT!

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  11. SNS, I built Control and Edit rooms for ABC News later in my career… and yes, our job was to make the monkey at the controls nearly powerless to fuck things up. We locked o-scopes, removed mixers, and even took away the ability to pan audio.

    But you know what, everything was easier when the operators had few options.

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  12. It was amazing how much stuff got screwed up because a menu wasn’t password protected.

    We got a bad video feed one time.

    “Keep rolling, check frame rate, frame rate far too slow.”

    “I don’t have a frame rate, this is a video camera (snarky asswipe voice).

    “Keep rolling, check frame rate, frame rate is far too slow.”

    “I told you I don’t have a frame rate! This isn’t film!”

    “Last time, keep rolling, check your frame rate.”

    And THEN the asshole goes and checks his fucking frame rate on a fucking camera he has been operating for years.

    “Oh, my frame rate was set too low… I didn’t know these could do that…”

    “Copy, keep rolling…”

    And you want to say some nasty shit. But this is a professional environment.

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  13. Erik
    DECEMBER 23, 2020 AT 9:50 PM
    “SNS, I built Control and Edit rooms for ABC News later in my career… and yes, our job was to make the monkey at the controls nearly powerless to fuck things up.”

    …God bless you for trying, but one of the real truths of life I heard many years ago from one of our plant engineers, and its stuck with me forever because I see the truth in in almost every day. It was a manager talking about attempting to make something more difficult for an operator to screw up as you said, right after a strong manifestation of stupid brought the line down, and his response was;

    “I can make it idiot proof, but I can’t make it FUCKING idiot proof.”

    …yep, if they’re determined to wreck something, they most certainly WILL, and nothing anyone can do will change that…

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  14. Erik
    DECEMBER 24, 2020 AT 12:07 AM

    …don’t know if you’ll see this, but just by way of example, an incident I read about involved autonomous vehicles that were used to transport a large parts inventory that were operating in an exclusive machine-only environment. The pick bins were set up for vehicles and the wire guide vehicles were higher speed (25 MPH top speed) than can be safely stopped if someone got in front of them, so the enclosure around them was fenced and the fences had sensors and power breaks on them that could be engaged from the outside only, so there was theoretically no designed way to re-engage them and allow the vehicles to operate from the inside of the gate.

    …well, apparently this fellow wanted a nearby part and didn’t want to wait for the system to process it, but also didn’t want to down the system long enough to go fetch it himself, so in the morning they found an elaborate rope rigging to allow him to engage the gate from the inside and disengage it when he was done.

    Well, he was half right.

    …see, electric vehicles operating on rubber wheels on smooth floors are very quiet, and because the design was meant for humans to never be in the same space as active vehicles, they were not equipped with vusual or audible warning systems.

    Apparently, he didn’t hear it coming, and it was not equipped with safety bumpers because of the environment it was meant to operate in, so it ground him into the parts bins and kept going.

    Because they found his rigging system, they had video of him circumventing the safties, and the safety systems were tested and worked as designed, the company was not found liable in his death.

    Just one instance of the lengths an idiot will go to in order to defeat attempts to curb the stupid, but I have many more…

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