NaibofTabr

Standard reminder that Guy Fawkes was actually a monarchist who wanted to blow up Parliament because they weren't Catholic enough.

I'm trying to imagine sitting through a history class whose text was drawn from 50 years of meeting minutes of an HOA from a suburban neighborhood somewhere in Arkansas.

No more transitive verbs or translated texts. No more transportation networks or radio transmitters. Don't even talk to me about the crossbeam between the door and the window above it. And if you mention transfer students you're getting suspended!

Cattail's comment implies that the historical failures of socialist and communist societies is due to capitalists working to prevent them from reaching their true Utopian goals.

My point is that socialism and communism fail entirely on their own. Mao is obviously an extreme example, but far from the only such example.

For proponents of communist or socialist systems to blame capitalists as the reason they can't have their perfect societies is pure deflection, a refusal to address their own internal problems in an honest way. It is hypocrisy and self-delusion.

It is true that Irish people were used as slaves, it just wasn't done at a systematic scale equivalent to the African slave trade. The abduction of people from Africa was a global industry, and the scale that it operated at created inhuman horrors that are not really comparable to anything else (except maybe present-day Xinjiang).

I thought the war was over?

I mean... it might NOT be rain... was it yellow at all?

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Sure, but in the context of:

Really it's capitalist doing whatever to protect the statue quo

What Mao did to China had nothing to do with capitalism. Socialism and communism also struggle with the strong-man populist authoritarianism problem, and blaming capitalists for that makes no sense at all.

Er, wait, do you think Mao was a capitalist?

If there's no specific goal then hey, no problem, pick some part of your infrastructure that you want to work on for real, mark the project as speculative/exploratory because that's all it can be with no target metrics, then spend the budget on your actual technical debt problems and call it "modernizing to support AI implementation".

Your boss will be happy with it because he can tell his boss that you're working on implementing AI (see here's the project description and the report), and you can spend time and money on solving some actual problem. Claim any benefits that come from solving the actual problem as the result of the project.

Tell them you'll need to rip-and-replace all of the network hardware with newer gear to be AI-compatible. Then give them a realistic estimate on how much that would cost to purchase, and downtime for implementation and testing.

Then ask them what the (specific) target goal is for this project, so that you can give them a proper cost/benefit analysis, and define a progress report (in order for a goal to be achieved, it must be measurable in some way). And if they just respond with something vague like "10% increase in productivity", ask them what they think an increase in productivity looks like for network operations and how it would be measurable.

Every time they waffle on specifics, ask them again to define what the target goal is and how AI should be applied to it. If they handwave their answer, don't push them in direct conversation, but write an after-meeting email with a summary and explain that you still need a defined goal. Copy other senior employees if you think you can justify it (e.g. CFO because purchasing, CISO because network security, etc).

Avoid just saying no, as that will likely cause problems for you. After all, you are a paid employee, it is your job to help senior leadership achieve its goals. However, you are an employee, not senior leadership, so it is not your job to set targets. Your message should be that you can provide ideas if you know what the goal is.

And that goal should be SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound