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Comment by supafastcoder | Hacker News Reader

There’s no such thing as a broken system, every system is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it currently gets.

By that definition if I crumple a ball of paper and throw it and it goes 7 feet, I’ve engineered a physical marvel of an object that goes exactly that distance.

While absurd this is accurate. Incidentally, in the 5th grade I won (and was disqualified from) a school-wide paper airplane contest. The rules as presented prior to the contest:

- No design constraints specified, your paper airplane could be any style that suited you.

- paper airplanes must be constructed from a single sheet of paper (no size limit specified)

- weighting was allowed (no weight limit specified)

The day of the contest I walked out into the middle of the school gym with a single large sheet of construction paper and a dollar and fifty cents in quarters in my pocket. I placed the quarters in the middle of the paper then carefully crumpled it into a ball in such a way to ensure the coins were trapped. I then threw it the full length of the gym and out the gym doors, tripling the closest best distance. I was immediately pulled aside by several teachers and informed I was disqualified, with no reasons for the disqualification given. Moral: none that I can discern.

Independent thinking like that could never be encouraged or rewarded in a place designed to produce just smart enough replacement labor. Hell, equivalent stunts in places like university or the workplace wouldn't necessarily end up in your favor (similar arbitration resulting in the organizations desired outcome likely being the case).

The rules, as you gave them to us, didn't define an "airplane". So you have to go to a dictionary for that. Which means ball of paper isn't an airplane because an airplane has to have wings.

I understand why it felt unjust to you at the time. But even if you go 100% rules lawyer, the disqualification was correct.

Nope. Airplane was undefined as specific questions regarding design requirements and defining features where asked, the response was: there are no limitations other than it must be a shape made out of paper.

"The purpose of a system is what it does." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

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