Thought for the day

[unixronin]

There are a lot of very sharp, bright people out there.

Unfortunate corollary¹:  There are a lot of depressingly stupid people out there.

[1]  Thanks to the law of averages.

Comments

[novel-tharkun.livejournal.com]

I'm doing wonderfully well at expressing myself of late. This thread a seeming proof in itself.

You are correct, I'm including mistakes of inadequate knowledge, intentional acts, and careless error.

I'm thinking not of situations where zero tolerance is the necessary criterion. But instead of areas where the result of a lack of foolproofing causes frustration. The examples I can come up with lead mostly to annoyance, not to pain. For instance, I dealt today with what I swear was a 0 degree of freedom regulation for sampling. This large level of restrictions, while likely leading to superior results, also lead to a wonderful threat of several million dollars in fines for the inability to obtain it, for the inability to meet o'erweening criteria.

I feel like I'm writing the nonsense poetry I enjoyed as a child. "I am not certain quite / that even now I've got it right." Or clear. But I'll refrain from arguing longer. I think we're largely if not almost entirely in agreement that the level of foolproofing and liability addressure has long since passed the reasonable. But I find the response that all foolproofing is unworthy a goal as almost knee-jerk and thus wrong.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

But I find the response that all foolproofing is unworthy a goal as almost knee-jerk and thus wrong.

Ah, see, now I never said one shouldn't make reasonable efforts to make things foolproof. Just that when you make all reasonable efforts to make something foolproof, and someone still manages to screw up through some truly impressive feat of total boneheadedness, the correct response is not for a crowd of lawyers to run up and offer to sue people, but for everyone to ask "Well, what'd you go and do a damn fool thing like that for?" And yeah, when you have a regulation that specifies how something is supposed to be done to such a degree of detail that it becomes impossible to actually comply with the regulation in question, then it's time to scrap the regulation, do it over, and fire the nitpicking idiot who drafted it.