Anyway, my point is that sloppy handing of materials, disregard to protocol, and a complete inability to own up to mistakes is the perfect recipe for release of something like this.

I've worked with plenty of Chinese researchers in the similarly safety-oriented field of radiochemistry and regularly swept the lab after they left (before I started working) with a survey meter. Despite having rigorous protocols in place and tons of training, we'd often find various hot surfaces including the doorknob, the lab phone, etc.

I'm only calling out the Chinese researchers here because they were the worst (and repeat) offenders. Anyone could do it. They would never admit to not following protocol, though. Ever. Even after their cellphone was found to be hot.

Of course we have an expression for it in the west (just like Easterners also have a concept of "honor"). "Saving face" is actively practiced in the west too, but it's not seen as a positive characteristic and is almost universally reviled here.

People clinging to units like the micron, along with others like the metric tonne and the hectare, are how customary systems of measure are born. We have a beautiful and rational system of easily scaled and converted units and still idiots insist on turning it into a bizarre system of customary units.

Knowing how a proposed system works is entirely distinct from trusting a suspected bad actor when they say that they're going to deploy the proposed system (and only the system exactly as proposed, and only for the purposes and duration proposed, ...).

If the system is safe and anonymous, why would it matter whether it's done by Google and Apple or the government? If a technical description of a system is flawless, it should be impossible to do anything but faithfully and perfectly implement it, right?

The largest issue here is one of trust. The government, Google, and (to a lesser extent) Apple, have betrayed people's trust enough times that any argument of theirs that hinges on trusting them is pretty weak.

The proposal for this tracing system looks innocuous and well designed, but it's going to be a tough sell for many people to accept a system like this based on the trust that this is how it will actually work in reality. The tech industry, and Google in particular, have already squandered too much of the public's trust in them by being such mendacious creeps.

The one that always grosses me out the most is bathroom faucet knobs: after you (or anybody else in a shared restroom) shits, it's the last thing you touch before you wash your hands and the first thing you touch after you wash them.

It always drives me crazy to see automated soap and paper towel dispensers coupled with manual faucet controls, "to prevent the spread of germs".

Definitely. Among my friends, family, and coworkers, driving an expensive car is far more correlated with “asshole” than income. Of the assholes, most of them were assholes long before they could afford an expensive car.

This is the perfect opportunity to try to find out if there’s a common gene responsible for making high functioning psychopaths.

For every wealthy person who got there through industrious use of time and hard work (i.e. success) there are at least ten others who got there by being related to the industrious person. There's a lot of money to be made by catering to the latter group.

Yes. Most of the wand type survey meters I’ve used have a test/calibration spot taped to the unit.

Ordering things that you ingest from Amazon seems like a bad idea. You're getting counterfeit water from China, and only saving a few cents for the privilege.

He's partly (accidentally) correct, though. As long as the employees work overtime at their own expense to actually be productive, the management doesn't see the consequences of their poor decisions.

Or he's only worked government jobs. There, your butt in the chair for the allotted time is more important than any actual work you produce during that time.

Google is incapable of even imagining anything but completely centralized solutions to problems (in which they are the benevolent and ever-trusted central authority). Even on the topic of encryption alone, they completely ignored DANE and other decentralized solutions for ones like certificate transparency where they stay in control of everything.

When I was young and a mechanic, I'd often go to other shops to pick up cars or drop off parts and stuff.
On more than one occasion (never in our shop!), I saw mechanics reinstalling oil drain plugs with an impact wrench. It made me queasy to see what they were doing and hear that chunk-chunk-chunk...

And ugh, transmission pans.