Yep—been there. Other times the reason is painfully obvious: drivers stopping dead in active highway lanes under overpasses to dodge hail, completely ignoring the massive hazard they're creating for everyone coming up behind them.
You've been in the traffic jam that has no cause. No crash, no closure — the cars just stop, crawl, then suddenly clear, and you never find out why.
There is no why. Researchers have shown that on a busy road, one driver tapping the brakes a little too hard sends a wave of braking rippling backward for miles. The jam is real. Its cause is nobody in particular.
How much of the friction we blame on 'the system' is really just thousands of tiny reactions to each other?
In 1628, Sweden built the mightiest warship anyone had seen: the Vasa, covered in carvings and gold, bristling with cannon.
People around the project knew it had serious stability problems — a test had already gone badly. Construction continued anyway, under pressure to finish.
It sailed barely 1,300 meters on its maiden voyage, tipped over, and sank in front of the whole city.
How much gets built wrongly because everyone can see the problem, but no one can say it to the person in charge?
@eomeetapp Trusting the handoff is everything on a project. You don't need 400,000 people to see the whole blueprint-just them doing their part flawlessly. Plus, faking it meant keeping 400k people quiet for 50+ years. Kubrick was hired to direct, but shot it on location for realism.
In Mumbai, about 5,000 dabbawalas deliver roughly 200,000 home-cooked lunches across the city every day — picking them up from homes and getting them to the right desk by noon.
Most use no computers. Many can barely read. They rely on a simple handwritten code and trains that run on time.
Errors are famously rare — something like one in a million.
How much of what we credit to technology is really just people who refuse to drop the thing they're carrying?
@eomeetapp I have no doubt big tech is trying to figure out how to use drones to replace them -- but that kind of feels like something that would be worse even if the meals still arrived on time.
@ImBreckWorsham This clip is a pretty good argument for why hosts should enforce one simple rule: answer the question first.
After that, pivot, spin, hit the talking points — fine. But if politicians had to actually answer before escaping into messaging, our politics would be a lot healthier.
@ansonmount@ansonmount No offense, but I’d watch the sh*t out of a Beverly Hillbillies remake. Just don’t give me The Beverly Hillbillies and Zombies, sexy vampires, teen angst, or some gritty reality-TV reimagining.
@atrupar At this point, polls barely matter. A third of the country is still with him, and the GOP won’t find a spine until voters force them to. They resisted releasing the Epstein files until the politics turned. Trump could hit 20%. Nothing changes until Republicans lose elections.
@reggiebblue You know it’s must-watch TV when the feud with the President gets intense enough that the former “Queen of Nice” comes out of retirement, flies back across an ocean, and signs up for five nights of televised open-mic night.
@ansonmount Calling someone a “sellout” is a lot easier when nobody’s asking you to sell anything.
Anson seems to understand the joke. I’m not sure “A Real Actor” understands why it’s funny.
In 1944, the Allies needed to move fuel across the English Channel without losing tankers to attack.
So British engineers, oil companies, and armed forces laid a flexible pipeline across the ocean floor, in secret.
Over the following months it delivered over 170 million gallons of fuel to the advancing Allied armies.
Nobody argued about who got credit. They just laid the pipe and kept moving.
Do great things require great leaders — or enough people willing to stop caring who gets the credit
@WilliamShatner@WilliamShatner We’ve reached the stage of AI where even when you do something yourself, someone will insist AI did it.
Starting to wonder if that’s because AI is answering the question of who wrote something and just wants the credit.
The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.
@GavinNewsom I'm less concerned by his rhetoric than I am by the GOP party which doesn't object, and the amount of likes and agreement in posts that he gets when he does this.
@KBassProgReport@GovPressOffice Wow, yes, when a former employee is found to have committed a crime they’re actually held liable for their actions — novel idea for some, I imagine.