That's Me Being Lazy
Conrad is pretty sure he's mentioned 'Bus Factor' and even folded it into the expression 'Warp Factor One', which comes from an obscure Sixties sci-fi show on television called 'Tar Trek', about oil in the far reaches of space. Or something. I may be recollecting wrong here, it's been a while with a lot of water and gin under the bridge.
ANYWAY I have discovered that you can explain away anything if you only add in 'Redux' as part of the title. Art!
Worth it for the French scenes alone
For what I want to recount here are tales from Youtube's Reddit compilation that all express how terminally stupid it is for a company or business to begin - and end! - with a Bus Factor of 1. Art!
"Ruin" in case your ocular units cannot make the calculation. To recap slightly, the 'Bus Factor' means how resilient a business is, should a key employee be knocked down and rendered unalive by a bus on their way into work. If the BF is 10, then you have that many other employees ready and able to stand in for the now-retired worker. If it is 1, then prepare for a long period of pain.
"The value of knowledge and experience should never be underestimated."
Here is the relevant tale, and here we are talking of a printing operation that had gone on for over 40 years, thanks to the originator being canny and astute. Art!
These, lest you be unaware, are the informational inserts that sit inside packets of medicines, and which are required to be included by law. There's no getting around this, you HAVE to have these inserts included.
So, Mister Canny got together a printer, a cutter and a folder - these are industrial machines, not people - and a single operator to oversee and run them, and Hay Pesto! he made a big fat profit on his first print run. Art!
An Industrial Paper Folder. Now we all know more than we did five minutes ago
You may see where this is heading. 'A single operator -' is always a likely point of failure, especially if they have no understudy or apprentice, and here we refer again to Bus Factor One. After over 40 years Mister Astute sells his business to an up and coming Business Idiot Numpty, hereafter BIN, and retires. BIN, acting in measure with his name, fired the Single Operator, who was seen as needlessly costly, and appointed a Blank-Faced Cheap Substitute.
'Needlessly costly' immediately came back to bite BIN's business on the bottom, because BFCS had no idea how to operate the machines and control how they worked nor keep up quality standards. The penalty of Bus Factor One. BIN had (dangerously!) assumed that Single Operator merely fed paper into the printer and the end product emerged without needing any additional input. Art!
An industrial paper-cutter
Quality plummeted, the medicine people promptly jumped ship to another business who could offer inserts that were correctly printed, cut and folded, and BIN's business went into the bin. As the Reddit tale grimly informs, a 45-year old business tanked within the space of a few months. What an achievement! if not in the way one would hope for.
IF ONLY! Single Operator had not been so - Single. You know, Bus Factor Two or Three.
The coda to this tale was by an electrician, who had wired up what he called an 'antique press' for a customer who had purchased it. The customer had also hired the press operator, whom the electrician stated had to be in his seventies. It was to be hoped that the customer hired a trainee for the oldster in order to be Bus Factor Two. Art!
For your information, the press was a very specialised one that was able to print gold in-lay onto the printing medium; the illo above it merely a generic 'Hot Foil Printer' likely a generation or two more advanced than the antique one.
Don't worry, we have more of these to come. I bet you can hardly wait.
I Warned You This Was Coming
No! not the Israeli strike on Iran - although I have a hand-written position paper lying around in the Sekrit Layr about that very same thing - but my baking. Art!
Yes, this is my second, far more fruitful attempt at the Ukrainian 'Hutsul Palianitsya'. I don't really have any trays large enough to accommodate it, and the picture guide to the recipe had it being proven and baked in a large skillet, which I don't have, either.
The texture looks good and fluffy, though it tastes slightly doughy. I'll be eating it with my bean soup at lunch, having thrown away my remaining cornbread, which had gone spectacularly mouldy almost overnight. O and after having perused a few other recipes, I baked it at Gas Mark 7, not 6.
"The War Illustrated Edition 209 22nd June 1945"
We are now into the middle of 1942 in the periodical's retrospective look at the iconic events of the Second Unpleasantness. Art!
This is cheating! The siege began in August of 1942, yes, but look at the snow on the ground here. This picture is from November 1942, when the enormous encirclement of the besieging Teutons (and Italians and Romanians) took place. In August things were a lot grimmer, the Sinisters only holding onto their positions to the west of the Volga by their fingertips. Also, when the two pincers of the Sinister envelopment met, the cameramen weren't present, so it was repeated.
Just A Thought
I am referring to "The Boys" and Season 3 thereof, which featured Soldier Boy, and am warning you now that there are SPOILERS ahead. Art!
You were warned.
This is the end of Season Three, where, shock horror! the populace have been lied to. Soldier Boy is not dead, merely sedated into unconsciousness, as you can see above. Queen Maeve, the lusty lesbo - who has morals and a conscience - isn't dead, either, despite being presumably blasted by Soldier Boy's rather indiscrimanatory chest-blast. While she hasn't lost her life, she has lost her powers, so if she wants to fly, she needs an airline ticket, nor will she win any arm-wrestling sessions. Art!
Apologies for the rather blurry screenshots, Netflix's software prevents one from being able to Snip picures.
My point is, Vought knew all about the status of Soldier Boy and Maeve, and lied about it, because they're evil? Maybe because they are constitutionally incapable of being truthful? Possibly to allow Maeve to live an anonymous life in peace, untroubled by vigilantes or groupies? Take your pick. Whichever, you can guarantee she had to sign a cast-iron Non-Disclosure Agreement. Surely, knowing that SB has the ability to un-power a supe, Vought would be researching this effect and duplicating it, just in case someone like Homelander goes off the rails*? Or, if it's a power that the Sinisters and then Ruffians gave him, buy the knowledge from them?
Of course, I may be overthinking this .....
Don't Know Don't Care
Go ask the people under the stair. Art!
Chin chin!
* Sorry, 'even more off the rails'
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