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Kissinger was a war criminal with a huge amount of blood on his hands.

That's half of the point of the comparison (otherwise I'd have picked Einstein or some other cliche smart guy).

The other half is that Kissinger was a smart and cunning piece of shit, and Trump is an absolute imbecile.


> Trump is an absolute imbecile

And thank god for that, at least. He is too stupid to make his petty policies more durable, instead relying on methods that are just as trivial to undo as they were to implement in the first place. We would be in a much worse place if he had the cunning of Kissinger.


I worked on the problem of recording 'design rationale' ~25 years ago. It is a big problem. Particulalry for long-lived artefacts, such as nuclear reactors. Nobody is quite sure exactly why decisions were made, as the original designers have forgotten, retired or been run over by buses. And this makes changing things difficult and risky. The biggest problem is that there is no real incentive for the people making the decisions to write down why they made them:

* they may see it as reducing their career security

* they may see it as opening them up to potential prosecution

* it takes a lot of time


This is incredibly valuable context thank you. The career security point especially is something I hadn't fully articulated but explains why ADRs always die. Nobody wants to document themselves out of a job. The approach I'm exploring tries to remove the human writing step entirely passively capturing decisions from PRs, Slack threads, and tickets and auto drafting the rationale. The human just approves or dismisses in one click. The incentive problem flips instead of asking someone to document themselves, you're just asking them to approve something already written. Much lower friction. Curious from your 25 years on this do you think the passive capture angle addresses the incentive problem or does the resistance run deeper than just the writing effort?

>The human just approves or dismisses in one click.

A busy engineer trying to hit a deadline is just going to do the easiest thing, aren't they?

Also there is all sorts of tacit knowledge that goes into a decision and I just don't think you are going to capture this automatically.

(I worked on it 25 years ago, rather than for 25 years.)


It is covered a bit here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/sep/12/sciencefiction...

No idea if he was as much of an insufferable egomaniac as that article makes out.

Some decades ago I think it was assumed that homosexuality and paedophilia were pretty much the same thing. Hopefully we are a bit more enlightened now.


> Some decades ago I think it was assumed that homosexuality and paedophilia were pretty much the same thing.

Yeah that’s still a thing, unfortunately.


Clarke was widely believed to be gay/bisexual when it was illegal in the UK. Perhaps he was overcompensating?

The maps look beautiful.

>nor spice under my fingernails, at all.

Definitely wear gloves when chopping chillis!


Also, even if you wear gloves don't touch your eyes after you get done. Made that mistake as a teenager, never again.

It isn't hard to make your own hot sauce to your own tastes. I grow my own chillis, lacto ferment them with shop bought pineapple and add mango and vinegar. Tastes far better than most shop bought sauces IMHO.

Try it, it's fun!

https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/08/04/making-your-own-ho...


Volunteering is a good way to get out of the house and meet people, while helping others at the same time.

Are you an IT person? In my experience charities are desparate for IT related help:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2018/02/04/volunteering-your-...

I wish you luck.


Richard the first didn't even speak English, and he was King more than a century after the battle.

Based on what - that some of the aristocracy have French/Norman sounding names? A lot don't.

Nearly a thousand years of interbreeding insures that the genes have been well and truly intermixed by now. I have no idea if my ancestors were orginally saxon, norman or something else. And I expect that it true of 99% of other people in the UK.


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