I mean someone it the freaking state bureaucratic hierarchy should at least be lucid enough to consult someone who has an actual clue about things as these.
He's using the public's fear to try to gain political points by looking "hard on crime".
Obviously, he's stupid. But part of the problem is the public also think this was a "hack". Basic understanding of the web is not apparent amongst an enormous swathe of the public.
Politician: Socials are on the web site, who fucked up?
IT: the web page is encrypted, we didn’t fuck up, the hacker decrypted the source
Politician: sounds good to me, no fuckup on our part, let’s call the cops and prosecutors
This incident is just one example of this in action.
No, but it is both South-adjacent and is considered to be largely within the Bible Belt, which is almost exactly coextensive with the South, except that it excludes parts of Southern Florida and includes all or part of several South-adjacent states, so it's not an entirely hard fo understand mistake.
This seems libelous. Can you provide a single example of such a statue? I drive through several county seats in Missouri multiple times a week. There are WWII and Vietnam memorials, and actually several Civil War Union memorials, but not a single confederate memorial.
Chernobyl suffered from compounding of reactor and test design flaws and human error. Fukushima suffered from (retrospectively) insufficient risk assessments, which resulted in a design meeting a rare event beyond it design limit sooner than expected.*
I'm unaware of a human society, in fact any animal society, where politeness does not involve some degree of deference. So saying these accidents were caused by a culture of deference is essentially meaningless without some more "who, what, why, how" and importantly 'how much' and 'compared to what'.
From the IAEA report: "This common mode failure reached a scale considerably beyond that usually addressed in the assessment of BDBAs. [ed: beyond design basis accident]". https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/AdditionalVol...
https://www.coursera.org/lecture/intercultural-communication...
This attitudes fits the majority of workplaces. I know it probably makes you feel better to pass the blame off on a specific group that you can try to avoid but I've worked all over the US and it's the same crap everywhere you go.
Given the impact of technology on society, we absolutely can and should blame politicians who are technically illiterate.
I can and will blame them for not getting (And listening to!) a tech savvy advisor.
I don't think age should excuse this guy at all, nor do I buy into the meme that age has much of anything to do with technical literacy. Consider that Brian Kernighan is ~78, Tim Berners-Lee is 66 (the same age as Governor Parsons here), James Gosling is also 66, Rob Pike is 65, Steve Wozniak is 71, Geoffrey Hinton is 73, and so on. And that's not even considering folks who were around so early they've already passed away, like Marvin Minsky, Dennis Ritchie, John McCarthy, etc.
I would question that assertion, depending on how exactly we choose to define "few". Computers have been a fairly ubiquitous part of our society (in developed nations anyway) for a good 40 years or more now. And they've been absolutely ubiquitous for probably a good 30 years... ubiquitous enough that it's hard to see how any person who considers themselves an educated, competent adult wouldn't have had the opportunity to develop some baseline of technical literacy.
Personally I believe that anybody who is a functioning adult in our society today, who doesn't have that technical literacy, lacks it due to their choices not due to their age.
Younger people tend to be more open to new things and less set in their ways, which certainly makes a difference in this case. Note that I'm again not talking in absolutes, but about matters of tendency. Naturally, in the individual case all things come down to opportunity and choice, but it seems curious to deny the statistics of the matter.
Younger people tend to be more open to new things and less set in their ways
Even if that were true - and that's a pretty dubious claim, IMO - it does not necessarily follow that
... certainly makes a difference in this case.
Yes, so did I. I find it curious that we seem to remember that period so differently.
I can easily find sources saying things like "between the ages of 25 and 60 people's ability to use websites declines by 0.8% per year", that's 28 percentage points difference in the ability to use a website.
But I'll stop arguing, it doesn't seem very promising at this point.
Why are you letting the leader off the hook and charging the underlings for being responsible for something a leader should be responsible for? Age of the leader is irrelevant because the leader chose to become a leader.
That right there (probably without the age bit) would be the ideal one liner response from the reporter or an attorney from the paper.
I certainly can. They have plenty of money to hire staff, and that should include people to make sure they understand the technology that is integral to the every day lives of their constituents, or at least to push back when they do/say something completely counter to how the world works.
Now imagine what this situation teaches all the younger bureaucrats who think they can work hard and make things better.