These articles have a common tie (at least to me) so rather than post on each one I thought I would post them together. The first shows that our government culture has the potential to yank its head out of its ass long enough to realize that it really isn’t so bad standing up straight and not sniffing shit all day:<\/p>\n
FAA says new ‘safety culture’ will stress solutions, not blame Imagine, a safety group actually focused on safety rather than blame?! Shockingly, they are finding that if reporting errors (now called the less threatening ‘incident’) is not associated with punishment, people are more likely to own up to their mistakes. Indeed, by including the mistake-ee in the evaluation, they can often get a really good insight into why the event happened in the first place. Of course, it is subject to abuse (like anything in the human sphere), but there are plenty of laws that address people who deliberately put lives or assets in danger so I am confident that these changes will result in even greater safety in our airlines. This reminds me of some research on quality control in manufacturing I read years ago. It seems that the general way of managing manufacturing defects is to have a dedicated group of people fix any defective products. Amazingly, the identical defects kept coming up day after day. Finally someone came along and said, howzabout we ask the people responsible for the defects to fix them, then ask them for suggestions on how to keep the defects from happening in the first place. I always recall this particular instance used as an example: this company that made wiring harnesses kept having defective wires where the insulation had been nicked and in some cases stripped leading to all sorts of problems. This had been going on for years and years but once the people responsible for the defects started to fix them, one of the workers realized that what was happening was as they built the wiring harness the long wires were draped over their chairs, which happened to have very sharp metal edges. The simple fix? Put some tape along the edges of all the metal chairs and bingo! the problem went away. Stop making the (non criminal) source of defects adversarial and all the sudden you have the potential for a vastly superior product.<\/p>\n Speaking of the potential for superior product, given our current government is pretty close to being so defective it is impossible to imagine it getting worse, here are some recommendations to make our government less dysfunctional:<\/p>\n Three simple ways to make Congress work I try to be an optimist (despite my constant drone about apocalypse, yes I know it is hard to reconcile those two issues) and like to think that it is possible for our society to avoid catastrophic collapse. Were Congress able to pass such laws as mentioned in the above article I might finally be able to develop some faith that things can get better in the future. Until then, I think I am better served by being a pessimist, at least that way I can spend some time evaluating alternatives when\/if our economy collapses.<\/p>\n Similarly to how the FAA got a brain and proposals are being put forward to inject intelligence into Congress (boy, those will have to be some huge needles!), this article discusses what is plausibly behind the defective culture that has grown up in our banking industry:<\/p>\n What’s really wrong with Goldman Sachs It is plausible to me that the ‘simple’ change of making a partnership organization into a publicly traded company can lead to dramatic cultural changes. Professional organizations are not supposed to be able to duck personal liability (why they created partnerships in the first place) and based on my study of business it resonates with me that such a simple (on the surface) change can lead to dramatic differences. When partners equally share liability two very substantial behaviors are highly prevalent: first, the individuals are less likely to take huge risks as they stand to personally lose and second, their peers are likely to very closely watch their behavior since their peers are also personally responsible (they all share equally in liability, meaning when one fucks up they all pay the price just the same). However, once you incorporate then all the sudden the personal liability issue goes right out the window and risk taking becomes consequence free. I am not sure it is possible in our current oligarchical climate to change any of this, but it is an interesting idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" These articles have a common tie (at least to me) so rather than post on each one I thought I would post them together. The first shows that our government culture has the potential to yank its head out of its ass long enough to realize that it really isn’t so bad standing up straight … Continue reading “Some quick thoughts”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,16,3,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-government","category-politics","category-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=754"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":756,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions\/756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nhttp:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2012\/03\/14\/travel\/faa-nonpunitive-reporting\/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2012\/03\/15\/opinion\/avlon-fix-congress\/index.html?hpt=hp_bn3<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2012\/03\/15\/opinion\/lessig-goldman-sachs\/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9<\/a><\/p>\n