I heard a story from a professor who used to be a contractor for the US Department of Defense, he was at the pentagon talking and walking with his boss when he followed his boss into a room where he didn’t have the clearance to be. It was an accident, and nothing came of it, but he said he saw a drone operator eating a poptart while surveying somewhere.
That image has always kinda stuck with me. We like to think of our institutions, governments, and militaries as exact infallible machines, but at the end of the day everything is run by regular people eating poptarts.
So, anytime I think “there’s no way a system could be that incompetent” I remember that everything is run by regular mistake-making people who are eating poptarts.
I heard a story from a professor who used to be a contractor for the US Department of Defense, he was at the pentagon talking and walking with his boss when he followed his boss into a room where he didn’t have the clearance to be. It was an accident, and nothing came of it, but he said he saw a drone operator eating a poptart while surveying somewhere.
That image has always kinda stuck with me. We like to think of our institutions, governments, and militaries as exact infallible machines, but at the end of the day everything is run by regular people eating poptarts.
So, anytime I think “there’s no way a system could be that incompetent” I remember that everything is run by regular mistake-making people who are eating poptarts.