Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I assume that this is actually a cynical guide to how your laziness as an employee is harming the war effort and not an actual field manual, right? It has to be.

The section where my mind was changed from "maybe this is actually a strategy" to "this is just a passive-aggressive list of grievances against anonymous subordinates" was all the machine shop sabotage suggestions. Nobody read the employee handbook when it said "sharpen your tools, store them properly, don't press too hard on your drill, and clean out the oil filters regularly", but when you say "the enemy never sharpens their tools, they store them so they'll break, and they're always pressing way too hard on the drill bits costing their employer PENNIES A DAY in replacement parts", suddenly it's your patriotic duty to do what Grandpa demands.

Everything reads like this. "Some idiot let the pilot light go out, lit a candle in the room, and then went home. Our building blew up and my precious stash of rare cigars was lost forever!" "You dumbasses flushed a sponge down the toilet AGAIN!? Are you kidding me!? WHY!?!?"

Nope, this is actually the kind of thing that e.g. the French Resistance would coordinate, under the guidance of the British SOE.

The pennies add up, and in the case of precision parts like drill bits producing endless replacements ate up very limited capacity in certain sectors.

(Hence why paranoia about sabotage is such a persistent feature of dictatorial regimes; the subtle stuff is indistinguishable from extreme incompetence or institutional dysfunction.)

It sort of reminds me of Schindler's List where the war materials they cranked out were mindfully out-of-spec, yet plausibly just bad quality.

This was exactly my same thought.

One could argue that a lot of the so-called "research" that is conducted at government subsidized laboratories in the United States like MIT Lincoln Laboratory provides a more modern example of this same form of "passive aggressive" workplace resistance.

For example, the former technical director of ballistic missile defense at MIT Lincoln Laboratory used to build miniature Rube Goldberg-style contraptions and display them in his office just to ridicule the military's stupidity for wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money on useless R&D programs like "Star Wars," which hearkens of course all the way back to the Reagan era.

He famously once told a Lincoln employee that he instructed his subordinates to bill hours against government programs that they never worked. Unfortunately for the laboratory, however, this particular employee chose not to join him and his colleagues in their "passive aggressive" form of workplace resistance.

Instead, he reported the fraud to the FBI, in connection with this famous investigation:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401412/postol-vs-the-pent...

> Hence why paranoia about sabotage is such a persistent feature of dictatorial regimes

Not only that: if simple sabotage increases paranoia, then that paranoia can harm the enemy's war effort more than the sabotage.

Trust is the most effective attack surface.

I just wonder if the reverse is true. That is if you are not capable of spotting extreme incompetence or institutional dysfunction, the only way to build up an organization is to make it a dictatorship. Paranoia being the sole method of troubleshooting that new regime.

Makes sense. If you feel you can't trust the people under you because you can't identify the problem people fast enough, then your best choice is to micromanage instead.

"Feel" is the key word here; this line of thinking can be less about the reality, and more about manager's own insecurities. This makes paranoia an even more powerful force amplifier for sabotage. If a tiny act of sabotage makes managers paranoid enough that they resort to corporate dictatorship, the productivity will tank. Which will probably not help with lowering the paranoia. At extreme ends, I imagine paranoid people get routinely triggered by normal variance in systems they oversee, making the whole thing self-perpetuating.

Institutional dysfunction is often a side effect of dictatorial regimes, which can develop paranoia about sabotage as a defense mechanism against actually realizing this.

Drill bits are expensive, and their lifetime can be an hour under good conditions but only seconds when pushed too hard. You can significantly slow down the war machine with stuff like that.

Oh absolutely. I don't think anyone sets out to abuse their tools, but there are always other constraints. I imagine that a lot of these wartime machinists were given a rulebook, then told to make X units per day more than was possible. The rulebook was then ignored to get the job done, at whatever cost. Drill bits were broken. Management was upset at the cost. So a passive-aggressive "guide to sabotage" was written to guilt them into somehow meeting their quotas while hopefully breaking fewer tools.

Have an open mind, bit don't let your brain fall out.

Good HSS drill bits like Wedevåg are cheap by proportion and can last 24h in tough materials like acid-resistant stainless steel under optimal conditions. Once dull you can just touch them up in a sharpener. Carbide bits last longer and do quicker work but are expensive.

Today. I doubt that was the case in 1940 or even in 1980, especially on the Soviet side.

Think that you need to do things subtle enough to ... well, survive. It's the kind of guide that can be applied by anybody, not just people willing to risk their lives for a big gesture. It's probably at least a couple of magnitude difference in numbers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com