Rocket Rider’s Prayer, which is also from Carmen Miranda’s ghost: https://youtu.be/MApwCxI6Oek
Also, ‘39 by Queen
Which clause of the legislation provides for moving on to a new standard, short of new legislation?
How quickly will a standard be updated if the mandate encourages companies to entrench on the current standard? Industries built around the legislative certainty of the current standard may exert influence to inhibit moves to new standards, even if there are good reasons to move on.
What if we had mandated, by law, that all monitors must use the VGA connector in 1995? Would that have made DVI or HDMI or later technologies less likely to take off?
Suppose a company sees an opportunity for a better standard with such a law in place. They would have to develop the new standard and create the market for the new standard, all while their change is forbidden by law. How can they propose a new standard before actually developing it? Then, after sinking the costs on a hope, they would have to pay more to fight to change the law to encompass the new standard against everyone who likes it the way it is.
Don’t get me wrong. It would be neat if every doodad I had used the same connector. But soon enough, any connector we care to choose is a straitjacket. We raise the standard for improvement from being incremental and iterative to no change short of world shaking all at one go.
I think it’s not so much about middle management. They implement the policies of the actual decision makers.
I think it’s because the people who actually make these decisions perform their work mostly via face-to-face meetings, handshakes, projecting personal charisma, reading body language, and personal networking. This leads to an overestimation of how much of other jobs depend on time spent in the same room with others.
The executive imagines the meetings they missed, leading to lost opportunities. So they see a loss of productivity.
They don’t appreciate how much easier it was to edit that manual or analyze that data without Joe the human tuba trying to breathe around his phlegm in the cube next door, or without the folks three rows over arguing about which director’s vision of Superman was best.
I remember when it was new, seeing a review that claimed the only entertaining thing about the movie was watching the director waste 100 million dollars. I guess they didn’t like Chris Tucker.
If you want to give him another shot, I’d actually recommend his short story anthologies. I feel like Dick excels with bringing an interesting idea or twist to a story, but is weaker with character development. In a short story, his strengths are accentuated and his weaknesses are diluted or eliminated.
Two titles to look for are “The Father-thing” and “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”.
In fact, many of his stories that turned into feature films started as shorts. “Minority Report”, “Total Recall” (originally “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale”), and “Paycheck” were all short stories originally, and hit all the harder for being shorter and more focussed.
Escape Pod is a good starting point for those who like their literature in audio. It’s free, has hundreds of stories, and covers both classic short stories and new works. The voice work is pretty consistently high quality, as are the story selections.
I think the best intro to SF is (was) the “Year’s Best SF” anthologies edited by Gardner Dozois. I haven’t found a replacement since his passing, but hopefully someone has picked up the torch with equal quality.
Science Fiction really shines in the short story form, letting the new idea in the story play out without wearing out its welcome. And for new readers, anthologies with various authors give an opportunity to sample many authors and styles quickly. Many SF authors work both in short form and in novels, so if you find a short story you like you can try the author’s longer work with greater confidence of making a good match.
The Dozois series also covered 30 years of SF, so it’s a great way to get a snapshot of various eras in science fiction if you’re interested in the history and evolution of the genre.
This generally occurs when a user enters the correct password, but has a typo in the username. The user is psychologically fixated on the password and overlooks the actual mistake.
Then, when changing the password, they re-enter the current password and finally discover the password was never the problem.
Outstanding work!