The actual "biggest threat to society" is politicians.
And imho they have the hardest jobs on the planet today.
There isn't a course on Khan Academy, that they can take, which tells them what to do when uncontrolled chain reactions are set off by Social networks. The results will always be messy.
And to then say if they just did the "right thing" all will be well, isn't being very realistic. When the "right thing" for different sections of society is so different.
Politicians don't work hard and they never will, don't get fooled by the Media. Just because one travels a lot doesn't mean he/she doesn't have enough sleep or that he/she works very hard. It's the opposite!!11
They use your tax money to buy stuff for them and their family. They hire their relatives for "ghost-jobs" and double their salary within the law that they signed the other day. Get an update and a reality-check please. No offense, we're all getting brain-washed, but don't be one of the sheep.
But that's an "Apples" vs "Oranges" type of comparison. Don't compare a team with a party. A team is working to solve a problem. A party is there to reflect their ideology and motivations and to fight against other parties. Different parties rarely find consensus, because they don't work to solve a problem. They work just for themselves and THAT's the problem! But hey if you agree that bureaucratically manifesting your ideas is work, it's ok.
To answer your question: I had no failures until now and I am grateful for that. There would be no excuse if I had one though. I and my team would know what my failures were. Communicating that early is very important. But admitting failures officially is counter-effective, you're better off communicating countermeasures that will protect you from further failures. Avoid becoming the symbol of that one failure you had. Keep up, we're Start-Ups after all, no everybody will succeed in this race and it's ok. We should help other succeed when we can't. This is the big difference between you and a politician.
Ever seen a Republican going to the Democrats or vice vera who shared his knowledge having good intentions?
It is not the democracy which is wrong, people have the need for consensus. What's really wrong is that the people with the wrong mentalities or motivations lead us. People we didn't vote for join the winning parties. Corruption evolved into a sign of success inside of those parties.
Politicians give excuses for their failures, but in reality the overall situation isn't the cause for their failure. There are no excuses!
Example: Try walking outside through the crowd looking very angry, very disappointed, very sad or very happy. Every emotion, idea and thought you have in your mind will unwillingly express in all you do. You shape everyone around you without noticing it. Your thought, has a lot of effects to your environment. When you look very angry for example, people could be irritated, afraid, or aggressive.
Reading all the books about Information Management and Project Management won't help you. First hand experience, will show you that it's very important to reflect what you want. Your team will find consensus based on that.
In 68 in France we had major unrest, and fight with police, but the majority was actually against it and wanted De Gaulle back.
...on the other hand, would it be better if politicians were just a reflection of "who we all are"? I doubt it...
I didn't read his point your way. I read it as: elected politicians are a reflection of who a society is through the filter of their electoral and media system.
Protecting rights is not as easy as just giving a speech or writing a blog post. It is about engaging with the other side (not just calling them idiots). It is about building social capital. Over decades. So that when the time comes, to take a stand on something, you can cash it in even it is highly unpopular. That is the power great leaders have had throughout history and you cannot accumulate it(nonviolently) without being populist.
There's a fundamental trade-off: power attracts the corruptible, but a certain amount is necessary to get important jobs done.
I'd say that's exactly what we believe in, it's just that our society has a different view of what the "rights of the people" are. Around here they'd include, as one of our songs says, "peace, bread, housing, health and education".
Pretty much every other possible job is harder and more risk than being a politician.
That says nothing about the probability of failure, only the consequences of it. Is writing operating systems easier than driving just because you're less likely to die while doing it?
Politicians brought the world corruption, violence, massmurder, genocide and they kill our Earth. It will end with us or them, but it needs an end.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312...
Also, are you sure there is any correlation at all (assuming these stats are even right)? Couldn't it be that with the rise of nation-state and spread of democracy there was a spread of much better education? Better communication? It could have been any number of things or simply coincidence related to none of them, yet you pick the ones that those in charge would most want us to believe it was.
My skepticism isn't unfounded: I remember watching some TED talk(I guess: by the author of this book -- I googled "Steven Pinker ted talk" but I didn't do any additional check). And this talk discussed rates of individual violence(IIRC, murder statistics or something like that), and I was wondering all the time why he excludes organized violence by governments/states in 20th century(and other too).
200 million is a serious number, and it can affect your stats significantly. If you "normalize" this number by year, you'll get 2 millions of people killed on average. 4x times more than individual murder rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
Well, I hope the book is better/clearer than his talk.
The invidual murder rate doesn't seem to vary a lot across century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona... (judging by US), and total world population was 4 times lower in the beginning of 20th century, so I guess the "government murders : individual murders" ratio may be even bigger.
And this is not counting sick sad stuff like unfair incancernation: nazi concentration camps, gulag in the USSR, camps in North Korea(where people may spend their whole life after they are born). For example, USSR government used capital punishment several times less often than imprisonment in gulag. Of course, on average gulag is better than capital punishment, but IMO - it is still government-made violence.
In modern Russia there are a lot of people suffering because court system is fucked up: 99%+ of court verdict are convictions(<1% acquittals). Of course, not all cases get in court(some get closed before), but it is not so difficult to fake evidence. This is not an officially and centrally declared violence, but still it is violence. Regular criminals rob random people too.
This is what I was getting at. Things like Nazi concentration camps, starvation in Russia, etc., count because governments did this. It's an important thing to keep in mind for the people who believe democracy is non-optimal. Of course it's non-optimal, but in my mind I'm not looking for optimal, I'm looking to avoid situations where people are murdered unjustly by the government with no recourse.
For me, there is libertarian anarcho-capitalism. If you are interested, I recommend you to start with the book "For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto" : http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp (it is available for fownload for free)
Does it count organized Government led Drone attacks incl. "collateral damage" or targets in the US and other countries?
What about unpublished or unpopular genocides, mass murders and deaths as direct cause of corrupted politicians? People don't only die in 3rd world countries. How many poeple died because of fracking in the USA? How many died, because of corruption in the medical system, yes here in our 1st world country. Deaths because of corruption in the organ transplantation system.
I am sure that there are millions of souls that these statistics do no good.