That is exactly how congress works. Except the average IQ of congress is around 85.

2 out of 5 people are lower IQ than 95. an IQ of 80 is considered barely functional.

Because animals are TASTY! In fact I'm going to go have some chicken and cow for lunch... If I choose hotdogs, Then I get Chicken,Cow, Pig, Rat, Squirrel, and Mystery animal all on one!

Hold on...What you're saying suggests to me you may not understand how the process works. Whether or not the father of this family knew it, he was trying to game the system. Sure, he had frequent flyer privileges, but his kids did not. He could have paid extra for them to be up there with him, but he didn't. That's the deal with Southwest. If he doesn't like it, he can fly another airline. Maybe he didn't understand the policy, but the gate agent explained it to him. Here's the thing - he's a frequent flyer. He probably should have known better. Maybe other gate agents have made an exception for him, but they weren't required to. He wasn't entitled to that exception. On other airlines, it would be akin to you buying a first class ticket and two coach tickets and demanding that your coach companions get first class seats...probably bumping two other passengers who paid for those first class seats.

Who should the burden of thinking be shifted to, the airline employees or the traveler? What if you and your companion didn't get to sit together or had to check your bags because this guy's kids cut in line without paying for the privilege (even though you may have)?

I'm not saying that the gate agent acted correctly throughout the course of this (and I don't know if she didn't). In this situation, however, I'm inclined to give her more of the benefit of the doubt than this passenger, given the details of the story.

The 1920 pumphouse at the one I worked at was like that.

"You need Air, Fuel and Spark"

You must not work on many engines then....

Diesel does not need spark.

"but more importantly, neatly all the valves in those plants are controlled by electricity. " And they have geared handwheels on them for emergency backup.. Have you ever been in a Water filtration plant? I worked in one for over 7 years, during that time I had to operate the whole place by myself during two extended power outages, one actually blew up the main transformers on the premise and melted the 7200 volt power lines coming in to run our 350hp electric motors. I had a very hectic 30 minutes to run the 1/2 mile to the other end of the facility during a major thunderstorm to start the generators manually as we did not have auto start back then. Then run all the way back and manually close 4 60" gate valves by hand to shut down half of the water plant as water consumption dropped way down as most of the town was out of power. By the time the emergency response guys showed up and I opened the gates I had the 500,000 Gallon per day pumps running and the water towers in the city above a 75% full point.

What is fun is when you are in a pumphouse and the check valve fails and a 350hp motor is running backwards at full speed and someone does not answer the radio up at the control house and hits START on that motor. the smell of vaporized copper and ozone in the air when the breaker arms exploded and vaporized because 7200 volts at insane amps met a motor running backwards and acting like a direct short. My ears were ringing for a week.

Not hard at all. EMP does not blow up starter motors and does not blow up lead acid batteries. Hell all I have to do is connect jumper cables from the battery to the starter lugs to start the generator.

Granted that's far more difficult for the typical person that cant get past the "I pushed the button, it most be broke" thought process, but that is why most places actually hire competent employees to manage that stuff.

Real transformers dont die from EMP unless it is a direct hit by a megatron.

" disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps"

Every single water filtration plant has very large diesel generators that can run the place for months without electrical power. And no, a solar flare can not burn out giant motors and generators, all that can be ran easily without the SCADA system. In fact we used to run drills operating the place by hand, as most of the guys that did it from 1940 until 1990 did it mostly by hand.

Why does TFA not mention we should maybe consider a little personal responsibility, eh? What is this, you let hackers take your identity? Maybe you should have refused to provide Sony with any information that would allow them to take out loans in your name!

Oh, you have an address, and a credit card number? No social security number? Well, I guess you can spend credit card money; and the owner can chargeback the money, freeze the card, and get a new one.

Sony wants your SSN, bank account details, and DOB? Dude fuck them. Go get Wii.

The banks gave people a loan without your Driver's ID, SSN, etc? Just with your name and address? Dude, I can put an address into city services and get the names of the residents and their property tax payment dates and amounts, and any bill due. Tell the judge the bank is retarded for not getting actual ID.

A true agile process has an incremental delivery schedule. Rather than building the full deliverable and delivering, it identifies milestones as deliverable product. For example: a waterfall process for building a car would intake requirements and output a car; an agile process would produce the platform for inspection by the customer, followed by the suspension system, the engine, the drive train, interior, and so on, in some useful order.

For a software product, this involves delivering partial functionality to the customer, who then examines it or even integrates it with his workflow. If there are issues, the functionality can be cheaply reworked; building on top of broken functionality could incur major rework when an issue is encountered, so this process actually reduces work.

Agile is not Rapid Application Development. RAD has consistently been shown to be a large joke. Agile software project management accomplishes what RAD could not.

If you can handle two afternoons' worth of reading, I will direct you here (technical) and here (soft skills). These cover stakeholder management, which is "working with people". Part of that is working with SMEs.

If you want to argue from an actual competent stance, you'll need to bother reading the (horrifically dry) PMBOK, fifth edition, particularly chapters 5 (scope management) and 10 (communications management). I found chapter 9 (human resource management) fascinating as well; chapter 11 (risk management) is a favorite of mine. Much of the content may sound like gibberish out of full context; reading the book from start to finish is like that, too, because they forward-reference things in the beginning (integration management immediately starts talking about the requirements traceability matrix, IIRC, which is 4 chapters later).

The short of it is: there are many ways to get information out of people. Meetings are a good method, and arranging good meetings is a skill. Meetings have three isolate purposes: to share information, to develop alternatives, and to make decisions. Never perform more than one in the same meeting; you will make horrific decisions.

To put this into perspective: We've worked closely with SMEs here, and done things wrong. Sometimes, meetings occur without the SMEs, and decisions are made contrary to what the SME recommended; others, the tech workers (network engineers, programmers, etc.) were consulted separately, and then excluded from decisionary meetings. The result is often people making decision and dropping impossible, poorly defined, or useless shit on you. Then you implement it, and they tell you it's wrong.

By the by, one of the most important features of a good meeting is it's short.

I'm coming to your house and breaking your windows. Then you can return some money to the economy. The glazier will be happy.