Isn't this the opposite of escapism? I want to play games precisely because I don't have anyone giving me hassle (well, maybe a little). This just triggers me because my working life is dealing with "politics" and certain people who don't know what they are doing.
I went to a Victorian era school in London and it had one of those cast iron fire escapes going from the ground up to the 2nd floor (3rd floor to the Americans) and it was a good deal of fun to play on!
In my last year of school, it was cut off completely and not replaced. Hmm, weird. Apparently it was unsafe and someone decided it wasn't needed because there were two other stairwells.
Fast-forwards to after my graduation and returning to work at the school as a teacher. The top floor is out of bounds to everyone. Why? The fire escape is missing :-)
During a real fire at my school, also in the UK, a cast iron fire escape partially collapsed. I don't remember any mention of injuries, and it was replaced with a new, steel staircase within a few weeks.
A big reason is a lack of agency. I work with large organisations where people cannot or do not know if they can make an executive decision. What to do? Call a meeting with everyone who might have a view on it so that you can then make a decision.
The problem, of course, is when an important person is not available so a decision is not made and then when something comes up mid-week, we need to wait another week to have another meeting.
Give people guiderails, let them try (and fail sometimes) and watch them flourish. On the other hand, tell them that they need permissions from X, Y and Z and watch them do the minimum amount possible.
It's also about lack of leadership and (true) strategy. Many large organizations just careen from "crisis" to "crisis" and are extremely reactive; lacking a long term strategy and clear plan, it becomes extremely hard to actually make decisions.
People endlessly defer because they don't want to be the person to "take the blame" for a decision. Making decisions when you don't connect them to an actual goal/plan/vision becomes a liability. The solution is endless meetings where liability is distributed to...everyone in the meeting. It's successful, in a way, but also exhausting and makes you feel like your job involves just tilting at windmills (imaginary crises).
The problem is failure seems more costly than the 30-120 minute call that may align all necessary parties. I think a lot of effective work cultures have moved towards the "move fast and expect mistakes" mentality you describe, but most people/organizations are still carrying mentalities from the "old ways"
When I was about 12, my slightly younger friend told me his family were getting rid of the Ford Granada with its high fuel consumption and getting "a convertible". I naturally pictured a Cadillac or something but it was....a 2CV Dolly. Went to Belgium from London via the ferry. It was quite comfortable but not only slow (60mph flat out) but it was brand new and had to be "run-in" so mostly 50mph all the way :-)
For me, it isn't the lack of warrant (I am a UK Citizen but I expect we have similar problems here), it is the lack of transparency and accountability.
If was arrested on suspicion of something, I can get legal assistance and I can know what I am suspected of and why before any of my property (or in this case, potentially very private and sensitive information) could be taken. If the arrest is manifestly wrongful or not based on any evidence, then I expect it would be easy enough to resist investigation.
On the other hand, having someone at the border who can justify an arbitrary search on the basis that "they might suspect of something", without having to clearly justify that basis and that if they then take property (or information), potentially copy it completely opaquely and then have zero accountability if that is misused is extremely frustrating but I guess you need to lobby your lawmakers to make the system fairer and to ensure legal protections of privileged information is completely upheld - period.
This is actually exactly why I avoid this advice: wiping your phone, and setting it back up later, is a pain in the ass. Especially when you're meant to be on vacation, or exhausted from returning from one. And if it's a pain in the ass, it likely won't get done. The below isn't perfect, but minimizing legal things that CBP can make a case of doesn't have to be all-or-nothing
At this point recommending the minimum that normal people will actually follow feels more effective: photos, main messaging app, and password database.
Photos are backed up; normal people use Google photos, my partner and I use a NAS, but everyone should have a "Free up space" / "Delete photos that are backed-up from device" option. This makes it easy and gets you space for more vacation photos
Main messaging app can be Telegram, Whatsapp, or (in my case) Element. Deleting it from your phone won't cost you your messaging history, but gets your most sensitive chats out of any potential spotlight
I can handle a password database, but "Chrome saves my passwords" means signing out of Chrome is all normal people have to do
A password database seems like the exact thing I don't want on my phone in this case. Or at least only a vault with stuff I absolutely need and can't live without.
"I can handle" being more along the lines of "Most people use Chrome to sync passwords, I can find my own solution"
I mention it because it's something I absolutely want in day-to-day use on my phone, and that I agree with it being one of the few things I'd make a point of not having with me when crossing the US border with
Normal people can sign out of Chrome, I can set up a delayed email (with an encrypted database) before I leave, or put it on a uSD card in my checked baggage, or any number of low-effort but not-on-my-phone workarounds
I suspect there is a name for thinking that, "if I do something, it will get resolved quicker". Lots of us won't just sit there and wait for someone to come and tell us when it is fixed because we don't trust that other people also want to resolve the problem.
To be fair, this sort of thinking is not entirely wrong (although it may be in this case). Your priorities are not necessarily the same as whatever person/worker you are dealing with. And the priorities of the worker you are dealing with are not necessarily the same whatever organization/company/government they are working for.
For example, I was recently at the hospital to pick up a friend who was due to be discharged that day. I arrived in their room, spoke briefly with the attending nurse who said it would be a long while before the patient was discharged (as it always is at hospitals) and sat down to wait. After a couple of hours I checked in with the nurse, who said he was waiting on the social worker. My friend noted that he had already talked to the social worker, and despite her insistence, said that he didn't want or need any sort of nursing or in-home care after discharge. When the nurse heard this, he went back, printed up the discharge papers and we were soon on our way.
Why did this happen? Because job of the social worker is to push the hospital/network's post-discharge nursing and rehab system. Once this was turned down, she had no incentive to stay involved or update the discharge status. The busy nurse had no incentive to pro-actively scrutinize the forms and decide the patient was ready for discharge. The hospital itself (as an organization) had no incentive to speed up the discharge, as they were making tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from his excellent insurance coverage.
If we had just sat around, and said nothing, we almost certainly would have been there for several more hours, until the next shift of nurses came in and reviewed the patient files. Sometimes you are just screaming into the void but many times it helps to speak up.
Very little you can do will have any effect on how an airplane airplanes, particularly in a systematic failure.
Advocating for your health care can have very large effects, healthcare suffers from a strong lack of someone being in charge of and following your care, it's more like a collection of poorly communicating agents giving you brief spurts of attention somehow leading to a resolution. In other words, folks are barely paying attention to you.
This is, at best, misleading. It is common that a junction running at capacity with a pedestrian phase will always run that phase with the same timing regardless of buttons, but that same junction (never mind other junctions) may often not be running at capacity, whereupon that pedestrian phase is inserted when demanded.
Also of course outside of a junction the control system has no reason to stop the vehicular traffic if nobody demands to cross. So even in the middle of the day the only reason somebody who refuses to press the button can ever cross is that other people will press the button.
I think a large part is being close enough to existing utilities to save the installation costs of 40 miles of cable, telecomms etc (all duplicated of course). However, some data centres are built in the middle of nowhere but that is potentially then a nature problem because why spoil this nice countryside with a massive non-descript building?
I like Copenhill (https://www.visitcopenhagen.com/copenhagen/planning/copenhil...), where they decided that waste handling is not nice so why not make it nice by building a ski slope on it. I suspect that a bit more creativity could make people want data centres (free heating and hot water anybody? Hot spring baths? Free hosting for local schools and charities?)
Clearly, it's both. Surely tech has a bad image and Flock does whatever they've done, but just because "one data center caused sludge" nowhere near equals "all data centres cause sludge", which is the implication from a lot of the anti-tech influencers. It's like saying, "data centers consume vast amounts of water" which, of course, is sometimes true but also sometimes not true at all. Data centres don't create many ongoing jobs, true but so what? Don't build anything that doesn't provide jobs?
People like my dad with no technical knowledge at all read an article in some rage-bait newspaper and it must be true (like foreigners took all your jobs, and the left-wing government wants to tax all your money and give it to scroungers).
If people are not taught how to ask "how often is this true" or "how much is this true" or "will this always be true", then they will fear whatever they are told to fear.
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