About as great as the bumbling fool before him.

If anyone still needed any proof that voting in political elections is not much more relevant than voting in American Idol...

Oh for crying out loud, he said "yes we can". Nobody said anything about actually DOING anything!

Well, they sure ain't leisure time, so what are they? Limbo? Purgatory?

Ok, I didn't want to go into detail, there are a few provisions for the problems you mention. It's a bit more complicated than the "simple" sketch I drew in the original posting, but the details are most likely far from interesting for everyone. I spent a good deal of the last 10 years making the system better (and thankfully with, as mentioned above, lots of support from further up the chain of command, mostly because they saw the benefit).

Most of the time when a topic gets discussed at length without any progress, it's between two parties. Hardly ever it's something more than two groups or even just individuals are involved. And it almost always is also something where the decision for either direction does not affect anyone else. Things like these are something I try to eliminate from group meetings altogether. That's something the two parties concerned can settle between them without having to involve the rest of the group.

Use of excess time is something you will encounter for the first few meetings where people are not used to this kind of meeting culture. It changes. Quickly. Because most people also don't enjoy sitting in boring meetings, so they see the benefit. Also, if you (or someone in your meeting group) expects a topic to run long and has to involve more than just two parties, this is something you do want to put at the end of the meeting so if it does overshoot its allotted time slot you can simply open end it if necessary. Most of the time, though, the availability of the meeting room is the limiting factor, but this may be different with your company.

Of course this meeting planning strategy only works if the people you have to involve in your meetings is fairly stable or draws from a limited pool of possible "victims". As mentioned before, it takes time to get used to it and to "learn" how to do it sensibly. The first few meetings with that strategy are going to be horrible. And every new person will suffer horribly for his first few meetings if he is not used to this kind of meeting culture.

But the benefit outweighs this. Easily. People can be surprisingly terse and to the point if they know that their time is limited.

Keep in mind that the victims here are journalists... Maybe the computer system didn't register them as human beings.

Aw, did someone publish something less than flattering about your favorite demagogue again?

The reporting on this is very muddled, but at least one article says that the car was not in "self-parking" mode, so the pedestrian detection would not have been active even if this car had it.

So does this mean Volvo sells a configuration that 1) has a computer control the car in small, enclosed spaces and 2) doesn't hae said computer look for obstacles, and specifically not humans?

This ends a situation in which two companies that would otherwise have been competitive bidders decided that it would cost them less to be a monopoly, and created their own cartel. Since they were a sole provider, they persuaded the government to pay them a Billion dollars a year simply so that they would retain the capability to manufacture rockets to government requirements.

Yes, there will be at least that Billion in savings and SpaceX so far seems more than competitive with the prices United Launch Alliance was charging. There will be other bidders eventually, as well.

Someone used a hammer to drive a screw. We should consider using more useful tools for the problem at hand.

Meetings can be made efficient. My meetings usually are. I invite people for their topic to the correct minute. Yes, minute. Give or take 5, but it's patently USELESS to have someone sit in a meeting for an hour if all the matters to him is about 10 minutes thereof. I don't need the design crew to discuss security matters, even though I do need them in the meeting in general. The meeting has an agenda and it has a time slice for every topic to be discussed. If you think you need more time, tell me in advance, but during the meeting, you will have your time slice and what you cannot get done in that slice will either have to wait 'til the next meeting or you will have to discuss it outside.

It took a few meetings for people to get a hang of it and it was a VERY fierce uphill battle (and I'm glad I had a lot of support from higher up or it would never have had a chance to fly), but now we get more done in a single 45 minute meeting than we used to do in a 4+ hour meeting. Yes, that also means that people have to come prepared and that they have to be PRECISELY on time. But their benefit is that instead of sitting around for hours and staring holes into the wall 'cause things are being discussed that are of no interest to them they come to the meeting, can talk about their topics with everyone they need and be gone again within less than 15 minutes.

Plus I now need much smaller meeting rooms since few people are going to be around during the whole meeting.

What? No graphics? No vanishing effect? How 90s!

In the average ITSM it should be good enough for a B rating, and that's usually good enough, most other departments struggle to get to a B anyway, so we needn't overdo it. Hammer away!

But then we'd notice that about 90% of the managers are useless. And please consider that most of them can't do anything else than create Power Point slides, you can't even retrain them, they ARE already at the bottom of the usefulness ladder. What would they do, especially in this economy?

Won't someone PLEASE think of the useless?

I have a tool that's way better than PP at creating interesting, topical and informative slides. It's called "sharpie". It does need some skill to use it, though.

That must be the pinnacle of the art form of how to waste time while looking productive. You get to waste time hearing how to waste time. But how to waste time more efficiently!

As long as I may take my laptop to the presentation so I can get some work done while the markedroid, manager or other useless waste of oxygen is causing some pleasant background noise, I don't mind meetings that much. It's just like working in the office just with a different kind of background noise.