Alphabet Bois Pt V
They don't know what they don't know
Back in my engineering days I once came back from lunch to find that the head of QC had made an unannounced trip out from Corp HQ and was waiting for me in my lab.
Oh, goody.
I greeted her, we did the usual pleasantries, and I asked her what she had come out for.
“I’m told you laughed at my inspector,” QC said.
Seriously? That’s what this was about?
“I did,” I responded.
“Why?” QC asked.
“She said she was here to audit my processes.”
“And you thought that was funny?” QC asked sternly.
“Hilarious, actually,” I said. I went to a shelf, grabbed a PCB at random, showed it to her and pointed to a component. “That’s a diode.”
“So?”
“Only it’s not,” I said, “it’s an electrolytic capacitor.”
She clearly wasn’t getting the point, so I led her into the wet etch lab and pointed to a beaker full of liquid and some components that was sitting in the ultrasonic. “Be careful of that,” I said, “it’s full of Hydrofluoric acid.”
The tiniest sliver of comprehension was starting to dawn. “What is it really?” QC asked.
“Isopropanol,” I said. “Perfectly safe. Well, as long as you don’t drink it, light it on fire, or… Okay, perfectly safe compared to most of what’s in here. The point is that anything I do in here, you have to take my word for it. Repairing a board, you have no way of knowing if what I’m doing is right, wrong, or indifferent. Out on the floor, for all you know you need 2CCs of mouse blood and the Rite of AshkEnte to bring a diffusion furnace online. Neither you nor your minions has anything like the knowledge-base required to make a remotely meaningful audit of what I do. That is why I laughed.”
My impolitic nature and allergy to stupidity aside, I feel the same way when it comes to the media, the news, the politicians, and guns.
They invariably know less about firearms than that QC manager knew about keeping a semiconductor facility running, yet they’re the ones doing all the talking.
Granted, when it comes to most media, regardless of subject, realism is rarely even remotely there.
TV computer hacker:
I’ll just reroute their DNS through IPV6 and hope they don’t notice an increased ping time on UDP packets.
Wait… What?
To a certain extent I get it, realism sometimes has to take a back seat to story, but for almost any subject imaginable most television and movies is so far divorced from any semblance of reality that they may as well be set in a separate universe.
Showing everyone driving from the back seat and steering with the tip of their nose would be more realistic than most of what you see in movies and TV.
It doesn’t help that a depressingly large percentage of the population doesn’t seem to realize this.
It would be nice to not see a supposedly experienced vet or awesome super spy violate every single gun rule, flag his entire squad, and refer to his weapon’s magazine as a ‘clip’ all within the first thirty seconds of the start of combat.
Hell, even the tiniest bit of trigger discipline would be an improvement.
Can I get that much just once, Hollywood?
And then there’s the “news” media.
Remember the two police officers who were killed by a gunman, later himself yeeted by a third police officer, back in January? An incident Grandpa SniffyHair used to push gun laws — something apparently lacking in places like New York, Baltimore, DC, and Detroit, where, inexplicably, gun crimes are rampant — and new controls for very scary ghost guns?
I went back and read through a bunch of articles on the shooting, curious to see if any ghost guns were actually involved.
Nope.
What guns were involved?
According to ABC:
McNeil then opened the door and fired on the officers. The gun he used was a .45-caliber Glock stolen from Baltimore in 2017, equipped with a high-capacity magazine capable of holding up to 40 extra rounds, NYPD Chief of Detectives James Essig said.
According to the New York Times:
As Officers Rivera and Mora approached the bedroom, Mr. McNeil emerged and began firing, wielding a Glock 45 handgun equipped with a drum magazine that could hold an additional 40 rounds.
So which was it? It could be a Glock chambered in .45 caliber or it could be a Glock 45, but it can’t be both as the Glock 45 only comes chambered in 9mm.
Now there’s a whole lot wrong with this story and you could make the claim that focusing on a minor detail like the exact weapon used is churlish, but reporting on incidents like this is invariably filled with little details so obviously wrong or contradictory that it would be foolish not to wonder if the big details are any more accurate.
Especially when little details are so often used to push a big narrative.
Which makes me think of Michael Crichton’s Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
And then there are the people who make the laws we all have to live under.
First up, let’s take Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee:
“I held an AR-15 in my hand, I wish I hadn’t. It is as heavy as 10 boxes that you might be moving. And the bullet that is utilized, a .50 caliber, these kinds of bullets need to be licensed and do not need to be on the street.”
As I’ve previously stated, AR-15 more refers to a platform than any particular rifle, so things can vary by configuration, but I just weighed my AR. Fully loaded with 29 green tip 5.56mm rounds and accessorized with a holosight, flip out magnifier, weapon light, and sling it comes to just over 9lbs.
As for .50 caliber rounds, the standard AR round is a .223 Remington or 5.56mm NATO, with there being only a slight difference between the two and most ARs being able to use either.
Next up, California politician Kevin de León, currently on the Los Angeles City Council, previously having been elected to both the California Assembly and California Senate. While a California State Senator, he infamously spewed these words of wisdom:
This is a ghost gun. This right here has ability with a 30 caliber clip to disperse with 30 bullets within half a second: 30 magazine clip in half a second.
There’s not a single part of what he said that makes any sense.
For the final example let’s take Grandpa SniffyHair, who has has given amazing firearms advice over the years.
I said, 'Jill, if there's ever a problem, just walk out on the balcony here, walk out and put that double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house.’.
Bad advice for dealing with a possible intruder, fantastic advice if you want to go to jail.
Then there’s this piece of advice Brandon has repeatedly given:
Instead of standing there and teaching a cop when there’s an unarmed person coming at them with a knife or something, shoot them in the leg instead of in the heart,” Biden said, going on to argue that “There’s a lot of different things that can change
Gee, I wonder why no one has ever thought of that before?
Oh yeah, because it’s idiotic for at least a dozen reasons.
By the way, since when is coming at someone with a knife considered “unarmed”?
The people who fill our entertainment with guns, the people who breathlessly report and opine on guns, and the people who make the laws regarding guns, by and large can’t even be bothered to learn even a little bit about guns.
To them I say: Neither you nor your minions have anything like the knowledge-base required to have a remotely meaningful discussion on guns.
I laugh at you because it’s better than crying.
