given that my brother is a senior admin working in human resources at a federal agency, the answer may be much higher than you expect.

It's like any large org. Except it is probably one of the largest large orgs.

And seeing as these orgs need to provide regulated services to 330 million people, the nature of the beast is it must be a large org.

> And the other is about keeping a polite distance to prevent repeated interactions.

or, the other is about providing them the vision and the clear set of steps. Then checking their progress along those steps. (including revising the steps when the original plan diverges from the evolving reality).

Training and mentoring the people so they can become rock stars.

This comment and a sibling both brought up the issue of less experienced people and mentorship, which is important to clarify.

Some incompetence is a known quantity, and when it is known it will not produce stress. The junior dev on the team might not know how to do something. The team leadership should already have priced that in, and have a plan to help them if need be. If the junior dev's incompetence is creating stress, the root cause is leadership incompetence.

The kind of incompetence that produces stress is incompetence that is too impolite to mention. It can't be addressed through "mentorship" or "working together" because that would call the legitimacy of the role and the person filling it into question. Engineering managers who don't understand engineering, product managers who don't understand the product, etc. The list is long, and examples are common. The organization is built around the assumption that these people can do things that they are unable to do. That mismatch is the origin of stress.

Investing time in the 1st kind of incompetence is a good investment because you will get a good return on your time invested. The junior dev with potential becomes the rock star. The 2nd kind of incompetence is often "Throwing good money after bad". These situations are not worth your time. There is unlikely to be an improvement, and you risk it backfiring especially if the problem is above you in the org chart.

You nailed it. I worked in a high-expectation consultancy for 15 years, and the biggest stress didn’t come from junior people being green. It came from leadership avoiding hard decisions.

One team member had a TBI. My manager gave him a custom track so he could succeed. That sounds kind, but it meant the rest of us had to constantly check in, fix problems, and slow down for him.

Another person had lots of field experience but couldn’t handle problems without getting emotional. He built walls around every challenge and pulled people into his frustrations. He had the title of senior consultant, but he couldn’t do the work without a junior staffer helping him every step.

Then there was a junior person who had already underperformed in another team. Instead of addressing it, leadership moved her to my team, where she had even less experience. If I gave her 10 basic tasks, she would typically only complete 7. Not challenging tasks, just needed follow-through. My boss told me to keep setting clear expectations and checking in more. But she just kept pulling time and attention away from the actual work.

She was also split 50/50 between her old team and my team. I kept telling my boss and the other SVP that this made no sense. If someone is underperforming, the worst thing you can do is give them two sets of responsibilities. There’s no way to hold them accountable. Any time she didn’t deliver, we’d say, “Well, maybe it’s because of her other team.”

And here’s what really got me. My boss admitted he wanted these people off the team while enabling them. I ultimately pushed the field guy to deliver actual work until he quit. I kept pushing for the junior staffer to be placed on one team that could pin down her underperformance until the other team took her back. Leadership talked about fixing things, but they wouldn’t act. And it put me in a role that I wasn’t supposed to fill, applying pressure on my teammates rather than support.

This is an organizational deficiency with promoting engineers to manager roles as a matter of course. My boss was a fine engineer, but he was a horrible manager and no one held him accountable for his bullshit. I saw people go around him to complain to his superiors, but it wasn’t well received or productive.

Shame on the organization.

Alexander Humbolt, perhaps the greatest scientist ever, was a government bureaucrat. Started his career working as a mining examiner.

One evidence of greatness: Humbolt has more geological features named after him than anyone else. Like the Humbolt Current etc.

Yes, it costs, and yes, to make public transit a valid alternative service needs to be frequent all day.

However, all of the maintenance around allowing private transport is also a cost. That includes all of the private costs for car ownership. If public transport is a valid option, then car ownership becomes a choice.

A tiny city might need 100 busses, but how many cars does that replace? What is the full cost of those cars? If everyone made a monthly "bus payment" instead of a "car payment" (actually payments when you add insurance, maintenance, ...), I think we'd find the bus system much less expensive.

pushback:

if you are listening to a podcast or music, your mind is following those rhythms and thoughts. Not clear this is better when running that listening to the rhythms of your own body; breath, heart, footfall, and the sounds of the world around you.

If you are driving using a GPS for navigating, how much of your mind are you using to track where you are, spotting landmarks, etc. This is a FUNDAMENTAL aspect of almost all motive forms of live, the circuitry is deep in the brain, and if you are not activating it, you don't even know what you are missing.

Behind, or aligned with different goals?

Can you name a popular civilian tech that blocks adding random journalists to small chat groups? That includes strong identity guarantees? That meets compliance requirements around logging calls?

Bloomberg might come the closest on this. Why don't you go out and price a Bloomberg terminal for yourself, at the grade that lets you trade options with other Bloomberg terminal owners over the chat interface?

> very likely would vote for the tariffs anyway as the majority would support anything the president would say.

Very true, however,

1) it does slow the process somewhat and therefore also reduces total throughput, this keeps government more stable and also gives more time to respond. Slow and stable may or may not be the best way to run a company, but the government is not a company.

2) It would put the individual congresspeople on record, and they are somewhat more dependent on/accountable to their local population. If for example all the farmers realized that the tariffs would destroy the farmer's livelihood, we could see Iowa withdrawing suport.

The US goverment was set up the way it is for reasons.

wonder who is going to service that mod 3 if T. folds?

"most people mean"

implies most people since the King James version was published. Not at all clear that's what author meant; the concept of the world as we now know it didn't exist then.

So very reasonable to conclude that the Great Flood in Genesis was meant to describe a regional megaflood, which innundated the "whole world" meaning all of Mesopotamian civilization.

And there is archeological evidence of ancient cities totally buried in mud, i.e. as you say regional megafloods.

I don't think that's true at all. The narrative is very clear that all humans and land animals that are not on the ark die, and in the Talmud I'm not aware of any debate that all humans died.

Forgetting that it was the anti-education forces that created the curriculums. The war on public education goes back a long time; teachers lost the freedom to teach decades ago. and it has been the same forces behind it all along.