Tag: Feedly

Looking at its storefront, you wouldn’t expect Zume pizza to be the kind of business gunning to revolutionize the food-delivery business. Tucked into a quiet commercial park in Mountain View, California, next to a defunct flower shop — which now serves as the company’s engineering bay — Zume looks more like the countless IT startups that dot Silicon Valley than a pizzeria. But only from the outside.

One look in the building’s kitchen facility belies its benign facade: Instead of chefs tossing dough and slopping sauce, the company has installed a human-robot hybrid workforce that can crank out as many as 400 pizzas an hour and can reportedly have them to your door in a fraction of the time (and price) as the competition.

"One of the things that we have always focused on is how to create a system that works for both parties," Zume Pizza co-founder Julia Collins, told Engadget. "How do we create a system that’s stable and predictable, which are great conditions for machines, but flexible and collaborative, which are great conditions for human beings?"

Zume does not operate like conventional delivery services. Rather, it has sought to achieve a productive balance between its meaty and metallic employees, enabling each to better support the other. "Human beings are better at taste-testing," Collins said. "Human beings are better at recipe development, produce selection. Robots are great at repetitive tasks — like moving pizza in and out of an 800-degree oven 1,000 times a day — so the goal is not end-to-end automation because that’s not what’s going to create better food for the customer."

The robotic pizza-making process mirrors the traditional method, albeit with a few high-tech twists. Rather than hand-toss dough balls into their circular pizza shape, which can be tiresome and mind-numbingly repetitive for human chefs, a customized hydraulic press, dubbed Doughbot, smashes the ball into shape. The pizza crust then travels down a conveyor belt to the saucing station, where a pair of extruders named Pepe and Giorgio slather the dough with marinara or alfredo sauce. From there, a fourth robot named Marta uses a multi-axis arm to evenly spread the sauce. The pizza then continues along the conveyor to the topping station — one of the few steps in this process where human hands are involved.

Marta the sauce spreading robot

"We actually looked initially at having robots do that task," Collins said. "Then as we moved into the engineering work and the design involved realized we’re going really far down a rabbit hole that wasn’t necessarily going to create more value for our customers or a safer job for our employees. … [But] something like toppings has a lot of diversity; there’s a lot of joy in sort of dressing up a pizza. If it’s not better for our workers and it doesn’t create more value for the customer, then, really, what’s the point?"

Once the pizza has been properly prepared, it is picked up by a modified six-axis robotic arm named Bruno (originally designed to stack pallets), and set into an oven for what the company calls the "par-bake" or partial baking. The pizza isn’t fully cooked to start, a la Papa Murphy’s, and for good reason: Par-baking essentially freezes the dough-rising process as the pizza is delivered. "Bouncing around the [uncooked] yeast will actually deactivate it, and then you’ll be cooking a tortilla," Collins said. Once the pie comes out of the oven, Leonardo, the chopping bot, will slice it into eight even pieces using a 200 psi cutting press and it will be loaded into one of the company’s delivery vehicles.

The delivery truck’s wall of mini-ovens

But these aren’t run-of-the-mill delivery vehicles. Each is roughly the size of a FedEx van, their interiors lined with as many as 56 miniature ovens. Using a GPS-based predictive algorithm, each oven will turn on and fire the partially cooked pizzas for the final four minutes before the truck arrives at the drop point.

Once the pizza is ready, it ejects from the oven like a CD from a car stereo, into a waiting box (itself made from sugar-cane fiber and specially designed to ensure the crust stays crunchy) for the trip to the front door.

This leads to some tricky logistical challenges because demand for pizza tends to be really spikey. Roughly 50 percent of Zume’s order volume occurs between 5PM and 8PM, Collins told Engadget, and there are a number of factors that will affect demand. "We’re looking at past order data. We’re also looking at season, time of day and any cultural events that might be happening that could lead to a spike in sales like maybe the Silicon Valley premiere or the Game of Thrones premiere."

Bruno the par-bake oven-loading robot

Zume Pizza

When the company becomes swamped in orders, the delivery truck can convert into a localized hub. "When we get incredibly busy," Collins said, "the truck goes into what it’s called a ‘forward deployment mode.’ So the truck essentially fixes in its location, and additional resources like scooters and cars come help to fill the last mile of that delivery." The truck acts as a miniature neighborhood pizzeria with par-baked pies being delivered to the truck from the central storefront and then delivered to nearby residences via car or scooter after they’ve finished cooking.

With this system, the company should be able to take advantage of the higher population densities of cities by simply parking a van in each neighborhood, supplying them with pies from the central kitchen and then shuttling out the finished orders using smaller vehicles. In this way, Zume could theoretically cover an entire city with delivery service without having to build brick-and-mortar storefronts in each neighborhood.

Head chef Aaron Butkus working on a new pizza creation

The company also says it’s working to address the issue of food deserts, which the USDA defines as any low-income census tract in which more than a third of the population lives more than a mile from the nearest supermarket. In fact, according to the USDA’s Food Desert Locator, 10 percent of the country’s 65,000 census tracts met those criteria, and of the 13.5 million people without access to healthful food, 82 percent lived in urban areas.

"When we move into a metro area, our goal is to win that entire area," Collins said. "We’re not going to carve out pockets where we don’t serve. We’re not going to prioritize places where we do serve."

Zume may be first on the field, but these logistical and mechanizing trends are beginning to take hold to the rest of the pizza industry, which rakes in $40 billion annually in the US alone. In fact, practices like prediction and inventory delocalization (also known as "cross stocking") are already being used by the likes of UPS, DHL and Amazon and may soon spread to Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Little Caesars and Papa John’s, which collectively control 40 percent of the delivery market. "Many people are doing the same thing that we’re doing," Collins said. "We’re just doing it to get better food onto your table."

Images: Zume Pizza

via Engadget
Robot chefs and en route baking could be the future of pizza delivery

In 1944, the Allied troops were gaining ground on the battlefields of WWII, but still faced opposition from the Axis powers. The weaker that enemy targets could be made, the easier and faster the military’s job would be in wresting Europe back from its occupying forces. The U.S. government thus began a strategy to undermine Axis-aligned governments not only from without, but also from within.

The Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), a precursor to the modern C.I.A., created an initially classified booklet laying out the art of “simple sabotage” — which, “more than malicious mischief . . . should always consist of acts whose results will be detrimental to the materials and manpower of the enemy.”

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual taught O.S.S. agents not only how to recruit potential saboteurs from among those who were antagonistic towards their occupiers and sympathetic to the Allied cause, but listed specific tactics average citizens in various lines of work could employ to destabilize their government and help hasten its demise. The booklet was declassified by the director of the O.S.S., William J. Donovan, with the aim of surreptitiously distributing its information by way of leaflets, radio broadcasts, or the direct teaching of European citizens who U.S. agents had ascertained could be trusted.

Though the suggestions presented in the Simple Sabotage Field Manual were designed to soften the underbelly of the enemy by gumming up the works of factories, offices, and infrastructure, what’s hilariously surprising is how many of them, especially regarding white collar work, continue to be inadvertently (we think?) practiced today.

When you read tips to employees like “refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration,’” and “Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can,” as well as instructions to managers to “Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done,” one realizes the ways in which, in the present day, employees sabotage their companies, managers sabotage their teams, and workers sabotage their own success — not for any purposeful mission, but simply out of laziness, carelessness, and a lack of motivation and morale.

Further, the general injunction to “Act stupid,” uncomfortably invokes the fact that modern citizens may be sabotaging the strength of a country they actually support.

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual thus cannot only be used as a handbook on guerrilla resistance, should you find yourself living under a tyrannical occupying government, but also a guide on how to “reverse engineer” success in peacetime pursuits — how to recognize and address would-be saboteurs in the cubicle next door (or in the mirror).

Either way, it’s a fascinating read. Below we’ve re-published a condensed version of the booklet, collecting the tips that are the most interesting, and which still remain relevant today. (Numbering/formatting was changed in places by the necessity of the condensing process.) The entire booklet can be found here.

Fight the power, and don’t forget to leave home without a bag of moths.

---

INTRODUCTION

a. The purpose of this paper is to characterize simple sabotage, to outline its possible effects, and to present suggestions for inciting and executing it.

b. Sabotage varies from highly technical coup de main acts that require detailed planning and the use of specially trained operatives, to innumerable simple acts which the ordinary individual citizen-saboteur can perform. This paper is primarily concerned with the latter type. Simple sabotage does not require specially prepared tools or equipment; it is executed by an ordinary citizen who may or may not act individually and without the necessity for active connection with an organized group; and it is carried out in such a way as to involve a minimum danger of injury, detection, and reprisal.

c. Where destruction is involved, the weapons of the citizen-saboteur are salt, nails, candles, pebbles, thread, or any other materials he might normally be expected to possess as a householder or as a worker in his particular occupation. His arsenal is the kitchen shelf, the trash pile, his own usual kit of tools and supplies. The targets of his sabotage are usually objects to which he has normal and inconspicuous access in everyday life.

d. A second type of simple sabotage requires no destructive tools whatsoever and produces physical damage, if any, by highly indirect means. It is based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a noncooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit. Making a faulty decision may be simply a matter of placing tools in one spot instead of another. A non-cooperative attitude may involve nothing more than creating an unpleasant situation among one’s fellow workers, engaging in bickerings, or displaying surliness and stupidity.

e. This type of activity, sometimes referred to as the “human element,” is frequently responsible for accidents, delays, and general obstruction even under normal conditions. The potential saboteur should discover what types of faulty decisions and non-cooperation are normally found in this kind of work and should then devise his sabotage so as to enlarge that “margin for error.”

POSSIBLE EFFECTS

a. Acts of simple sabotage are occurring throughout Europe. An effort should be made to add to their efficiency, lessen their detectability, and increase their number. Acts of simple sabotage, multiplied by thousands of citizen saboteurs, can be an effective weapon against the enemy. Slashing tires, draining fuel tanks, starting fires, starting arguments, acting stupidly, short-circuiting electric systems, abrading machine parts will waste materials, manpower, and time. Occurring on a wide scale, simple sabotage will be a constant and tangible drag on the war effort of the enemy.

b. Simple sabotage may also have secondary results of more or less value. Widespread practice of simple sabotage will harass and demoralize enemy administrators and police. Further, success may embolden the citizen-saboteur eventually to find colleagues who can assist him in sabotage of greater dimensions. Finally, the very practice of simple sabotage by natives in enemy or occupied territory may make these individuals identify themselves actively with the United Nations war effort, and encourage them to assist openly in periods of Allied invasion and occupation.

ENCOURAGING DESTRUCTIVENESS

a. It should be pointed out to the saboteur where the circumstances are suitable, that he is acting in self-defense against the enemy, or retaliating against the enemy for other acts of destruction. A reasonable amount of humor in the presentation of suggestions for simple sabotage will relax tensions of fear.

b. The saboteur may have to reverse his thinking, and he should be told this in so many words. Where he formerly thought of keeping his tools sharp, he should now let them grow dull; surfaces that formerly were lubricated now should be sanded; normally diligent, he should now be lazy and careless; and so on. Once he is encouraged to think backwards about himself and the objects of his everyday life, the saboteur will see many opportunities in his immediate environment which cannot possibly be seen from a distance. A state of mind should be encouraged that anything can be sabotaged.

SAFETY MEASURES

a. The amount of activity carried on by the saboteur will be governed not only by the number of opportunities he sees, but also by the amount of danger he feels. Bad news travels fast, and simple sabotage will be discouraged if too many simple saboteurs are arrested.

b. It should not be difficult to prepare leaflets and other media for the saboteur about the choice of weapons, time, and targets which will insure the saboteur against detection and retaliation. Among such suggestions might be the following:

(1) Use materials which appear to be innocent. A knife or a nail file can be carried normally on your person; either is a multi-purpose instrument for creating damage. Matches, pebbles, hair, salt, nails, and dozens of other destructive agents can be carried or kept in your living quarters without exciting any suspicion whatever. If you are a worker in a particular trade or industry you can easily carry and keep such things as wrenches, hammers, emery paper, and the like.

(2) Try to commit acts for which large numbers of people could be responsible. For instance, if you blow out the wiring in a factory at a central fire box, almost anyone could have done it. On-the-street sabotage after dark, such as you might be able to carry out against a military car or truck, is another example of an act for which it would be impossible to blame you.

(3) Do not be afraid to commit acts for which you might be blamed directly, so long as you do so rarely, and as long as you have a plausible excuse: you dropped your wrench across an electric circuit because an air raid had kept you up the night before and you were half-dozing at work. Always be profuse in your apologies. Frequently you can “get away” with such acts under the cover of pretending stupidity, ignorance, over-caution, fear of being suspected of sabotage, or weakness and dullness due to undernourishment.

(4) After you have committed an act of easy sabotage, resist any temptation to wait around and see what happens. Loiterers arouse suspicion. Of course, there are circumstances when it would be suspicious for you to leave. If you commit sabotage on your job, you should naturally stay at your work.

SPECIFIC SUGGESTIONS FOR SIMPLE SABOTAGE

a. It will not be possible to evaluate the desirability of simple sabotage in an area without having in mind rather specifically what individual acts and results are embraced by the definition of simple sabotage.

b. A listing of specific acts follows, classified according to types of target. This list is presented as a growing rather than a complete outline of the methods of simple sabotage. As new techniques are developed, or new fields explored, it will be elaborated and expanded.

(1) Buildings

Warehouses, barracks, offices, hotels, and factory buildings are outstanding targets for simple sabotage. They are extremely susceptible to damage, especially by fire; they offer opportunities to such untrained people as janitors, charwomen [office/house cleaner], and casual visitors; and, when damaged, they present a relatively large handicap to the enemy.

(a) Fires can be started wherever there is an accumulation of inflammable material. Warehouses are obviously the most promising targets but incendiary sabotage need not be confined to them alone.

(1) Whenever possible, arrange to have the fire start after you have gone away. Use a candle and paper combination, setting it as close as possible to the inflammable material you want to burn: From a sheet of paper, tear a strip three or four centimeters wide and wrap it around the base of the candle two or three times. Twist more sheets of paper into loose ropes and place them around the base of the candle. When the candle flame reaches the encircling strip, it will be ignited and in turn will ignite the surrounding paper. The size, heat, and duration of the resulting flame will depend on how much paper you use and how much of it you can cramp in a small space.

(2) With a flame of this kind, do not attempt to ignite any but rather inflammable materials, such as cotton sacking. To light more resistant materials, use a candle plus tightly rolled or twisted paper which has been soaked in gasoline. To create a briefer but even hotter flame, put celluloid such as you might find in an old comb, into a nest of plain or saturated paper which is to be fired by a candle.

(3) To make another type of simple fuse, soak one end of a piece of string in grease. Rub a generous pinch of gunpowder over the inch of string where greasy string meets clean string. Then ignite the clean end of the string. It will burn slowly without a flame (in much the same way that a cigarette burns) until it reaches the grease and gunpowder; it will then flare up suddenly. The grease-treated string will then burn with a flame. The same effect may be achieved by using matches instead of the grease and gunpowder. Run the string over the match heads, taking care that the string is not pressed or knotted. They too will produce a sudden flame. The advantage of this type of fuse is that string burns at a set speed. You can time your fire by the length and thickness of the string you chose.

(4) Use a fuse such as the ones suggested above to start a fire in an office after hours. The destruction of records and other types of documents would be a serious handicap to the enemy.

(5) In basements where waste is kept, janitors should accumulate oily and greasy waste. Such waste sometimes ignites spontaneously, but it can easily be lit with a cigarette or match. If you are a janitor on night duty, you can be the first to report the fire, but don’t report it too soon.

(6) A clean factory is not susceptible to fire, but a dirty one is. Workers should be careless with refuse and janitors should be inefficient in cleaning. If enough dirt and trash can be accumulated an otherwise fireproof building will become inflammable.

(b) Water and miscellaneous

(1) Ruin warehouse stock by setting the automatic sprinkler system to work. You can do this by tapping the sprinkler heads sharply with a hammer or by holding a match under them.

(2) Forget to provide paper in toilets; put tightly rolled paper, hair, and other obstructions in the W. C. [Water Closet] Saturate a sponge with a thick starch or sugar solution. Squeeze it tightly into a ball, wrap it with string, and dry. Remove the string when fully dried. The sponge will be in the form of a tight hard ball. Flush down a W. C. or otherwise introduce into a sewer line. The sponge will gradually expand to its normal size and plug the sewage system.

(3) Jam paper, bits of wood, hairpins, and anything else that will fit, into the locks of all unguarded entrances to public buildings.

(2) Industrial Production: Manufacturing

(a) Tools

(1) Let cutting tools grow dull. They will be inefficient, will slow down production, and may damage the materials and parts you use them on.

(2) Leave saws slightly twisted when you are not using them. After a while, they will break when used.

(3) Using a very rapid stroke will wear out a file before its time. So will dragging a file in slow strokes under heavy pressure. Exert pressure on the backward stroke as well as the forward stroke.

(4) Clean files by knocking them against the vise or the workpiece; they are easily broken this way.

(5) Bits and drills will snap under heavy pressure.

(6) You can put a press punch out of order by putting in it more material than it is adjusted for — two blanks instead of one, for example.

(7) Power-driven tools like pneumatic drills, riveters, and so on, are never efficient when dirty. Lubrication points and electric contacts can easily be fouled by normal accumulations of dirt or the insertion of foreign matter.

(b) Oil and lubrication systems are not only vulnerable to easy sabotage, but are critical in every machine with moving parts. Sabotage of oil and lubrication will slow production or stop work entirely at strategic points in industrial processes.

(1) Put metal dust or filings, fine sand, ground glass, emery dust (get it by pounding up an emery knife sharpener) and similar hard, gritty substances directly into lubrication systems. They will scour smooth surfaces, ruining pistons, cylinder walls, shafts, and bearings. They will overheat and stop motors which will need overhauling, new parts, and extensive repairs. Such materials, if they are used, should be introduced into lubrication systems past any filters which otherwise would strain them out.

(2) You can cause wear on any machine by uncovering a filter system, poking a pencil or any other sharp object through the filter mesh, then covering it up again. Or, if you can dispose of it quickly, simply remove the filter.

(3) If you cannot get at the lubrication system or filter directly, you may be able to lessen the effectiveness of oil by diluting it in storage. In this case, almost any liquid will do which will thin the oil. A small amount of sulphuric acid, varnish, water-glass, or linseed oil will be especially effective.

(4) Using a thin oil where a heavy oil is prescribed will break down a machine or heat up a moving shaft so that it will “freeze” and stop.

(5) Put any clogging substance into lubrication systems or, if it will float, into stored oil. Twisted combings of human hair, pieces of string, dead insects, and many other common objects will be effective in stopping or hindering the flow of oil through feed lines and filters.

(c) Gasoline and oil fuel. Tanks and fueling engines usually are accessible and easy to open. They afford a very vulnerable target for simple sabotage activities.

(1) Put several pinches of sawdust or hard grain, such as rice or wheat, into the fuel tank of a gasoline engine. The particles will choke a feed line so that the engine will stop. Some time will be required to discover the source of the trouble. Although they will be hard to get, crumbs of natural rubber, such as you might find in old rubber bands and pencil erasers, are also effective.

(2) If you can accumulate sugar, put it in the fuel tank of a gasoline engine. As it burns together with the gasoline, it will turn into a sticky mess which will completely mire the engine and necessitate extensive cleaning and repair. Honey and molasses are as good as sugar. Try to use about 75-100 grams for each 10 gallons of gasoline.

(3) Other impurities which you can introduce into gasoline will cause rapid engine wear and eventual breakdown. Fine particles of pumice, sand, ground glass, and metal dust can easily be introduced into a gasoline tank. Be sure that the particles are very fine, so that they will be able to pass through the carburetor jet.

(4) Water, urine, wine, or any other simple liquid you can get in reasonably large quantities Will dilute gasoline fuel to a point where no combustion will occur in the cylinder and the engine will not move. One pint to 20 gallons of gasoline is sufficient. If salt water is used, it will cause corrosion and permanent motor damage.

(5) In the case of diesel engines, put low flashpoint oil into the fuel tank; the engine will not move. If there already is proper oil in the tank when the wrong kind is added, the engine will only limp and sputter along.

(6) Fuel lines to gasoline and oil engines frequently pass over the exhaust pipe. When the machine is at rest, you can stab a small hole in the fuel line and plug the hole with wax. As the engine runs and the exhaust tube becomes hot, the wax will be melted; fuel will drip onto the exhaust and a blaze will start.

(3) Transportation: Railways

(a) Passengers

(1) Make train travel as inconvenient as possible for enemy personnel. Make mistakes in issuing train tickets, leaving portions of the journey uncovered by the ticket book; issue two tickets for the same seat in the train, so that an interesting argument will result. On station bulletin boards announcing train arrivals and departures, see that false and misleading information is given about trains bound for enemy destinations.

(2) In trains bound for enemy destinations, attendants should make life as uncomfortable as possible for passengers. See that the food is especially bad, take up tickets after midnight, call all station stops very loudly during the night, handle baggage as noisily as possible during the night, and so on.

(3) See that the luggage of enemy personnel is mislaid or unloaded at the wrong stations. Switch address labels on enemy baggage.

(4) Engineers should see that trains run slow or make unscheduled stops for plausible reasons.

(4) Transportation: Automotive

(a) Roads

(1) Change sign posts at intersections and forks; the enemy will go the wrong way and it may be miles before he discovers his mistakes. In areas where traffic is composed primarily of enemy autos, trucks, and motor convoys of various kinds, remove danger signals from curves and intersections.

(2) When the enemy asks for directions, give him wrong information. Especially when enemy convoys are in the neighborhood, truck drivers can spread rumors and give false information about bridges being out, ferries closed, and detours lying ahead.

(3) If you can start damage to a heavily traveled road, passing traffic and the elements will do the rest. Construction gangs can see that too much sand or water is put in concrete or that the road foundation has soft spots. Anyone can scoop ruts in asphalt and macadam roads which turn soft in hot weather; passing trucks will accentuate the ruts to a point where substantial repair will be needed. Dirt roads also can be scooped out. If you are a road laborer, it will be only a few minutes work to divert a small stream from a sluice so that it runs over and eats away the road.

(4) Distribute broken glass, nails, and sharp rocks on roads to puncture tires.

(b) Passengers

(1) Bus-driver can go past the stop where the enemy wants to get off. Taxi drivers can waste the enemy’s time and make extra money by driving the longest possible route to his destination.

(c) Battery

(1) Turn on the lights in parked cars so that the battery will run down.

(d) Tires

(1) Slash or puncture tires of unguarded vehicles. Put a nail inside a match box or other small box, and set it vertically in front of the back tire of a stationary car; when the car starts off, the nail will go neatly through the tire.

(2) In putting air into tires, see that they are kept below normal pressure, so that more than an ordinary amount of wear will result. In filling tires on double wheels, inflate the inner tire to a much higher pressure than the outer one; both will wear out more quickly this way.

(5) Communications

(a) Telephone

(1) At office, hotel and exchange switchboards delay putting enemy calls through, give them wrong numbers, cut them off “accidentally,” or forget to disconnect them so that the line cannot be used again.

(2) Hamper official and especially military business by making at least one telephone call a day to an enemy headquarters; when you get them, tell them you have the wrong number. Call military or police offices and make anonymous false reports of fires, air raids, bombs.

(b) Mail

(1) Post office employees can see to it that enemy mail is always delayed by one day or more, that it is put in wrong sacks, and so on.

(c) Motion Pictures

(1) Projector operators can ruin newsreels and other enemy propaganda films by bad focusing, speeding up or slowing down the film and by causing frequent breakage in the film.

(2) Audiences can ruin enemy propaganda films by applauding to drown the words of the speaker, by coughing loudly, and by talking.

(3) Anyone can break up a showing of an enemy propaganda film by putting two or three dozen large moths in a paper bag. Take the bag to the movies with you, put it on the floor in an empty section of the theater as you go in and leave it open. The moths will fly out and climb into the projector beam, so that the film will be obscured by fluttering shadows.

(6) General Interference with Organizations and Production

(a) Organizations and Conferences

(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.

(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.

(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

(b) Managers and Supervisors

(1) Demand written orders.

(2) “Misunderstand” orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.

(3) Do everything possible to delay the delivery of orders. Even though parts of an order may be ready beforehand, don’t deliver it until it is completely ready.

(4) Don’t order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.

(5) Order high-quality materials which are hard to get. If you don’t get them argue about it. Warn that inferior materials will mean inferior work.

(6) In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.

(7) Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye.

(8) Make mistakes in routing so that parts and materials will be sent to the wrong place in the plant.

(9) When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.

(10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.

(11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.

(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.

(13) Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.

(14) Apply all regulations to the last letter.

(c) Office Workers

(1) Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses.

(2) Prolong correspondence with government bureaus.

(3) Misfile essential documents.

(4) Tell important callers the boss is busy or talking on another telephone.

(5) Hold up mail until the next collection.

(6) Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.

(d) Employees

(1) Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job: use a light hammer instead of a heavy one, try to make a small wrench do when a big one is necessary, use little force where considerable force is needed, and so on.

(2) Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can: when changing the material on which you are working, as you would on a lathe or punch, take needless time to do it. If you are cutting, shaping or doing other measured work, measure dimensions twice as often as you need to. When you go to the lavatory, spend a longer time there than is necessary. Forget tools so that you will have to go back after them.

(3) Even if you understand the language, pretend not to understand instructions in a foreign tongue.

(4) Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions.

(5) Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.

(6) Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.

(7) Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.

(8) If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on.

(7) General Devices for Lowering Morale and Creating Confusion

(a) Give lengthy and incomprehensible explanations when questioned.

(b) Report imaginary spies or danger to the Gestapo or police.

(c) Act stupid.

(d) Be as irritable and quarrelsome as possible without getting yourself into trouble.

(e) Misunderstand all sorts of regulations concerning such matters as rationing, transportation, traffic regulations.

(f) Complain against ersatz materials.

(g) In public treat axis nationals or quislings [a traitor who collaborates with an enemy force occupying their country] coldly.

(h) Stop all conversation when axis nationals or quislings enter a cafe.

(i) Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks.

(j) Boycott all movies, entertainments, concerts, newspapers which are in any way connected with the quisling authorities.

The post The Simple Sabotage Manual appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

via The Art of Manliness
The Simple Sabotage Manual

PITTSBURGH—Confirming that the change in outlook was already a massive pain in the ass, area woman Jen McKessy reported Thursday that her plan to be more positive was off to a shitty fucking start. “Well, I’m not even three days into giving optimism a shot, and it already sucks,” said McKessy, adding that her plan to live in the moment and give people the benefit of the doubt was probably a hopelessly naïve idea to begin with and that a smarter, less awful person would have realized this from the very beginning. “I can’t believe how quickly keeping things in perspective has gotten fucking unbearable. I mean, maybe I should feel proud that a fuck-up like me has even lasted 72 hours with a positive attitude, but there’s no way I’m missing out on an opportunity to feel like shit.” At press time McKessy’s …

via The Onion
Plan To Be More Positive Off To Shitty Fucking Start

via Gizmodo
An Old-School Voltron Set Is Officially Coming to Lego

via The Truth About Guns
Gun Review: Savage B22 FV-SR .22LR Rifle

The mindfulness craze has already been tapped for a huge variety of benefits—improved sleep, increased productivity, cutting out mindless snacking, etc. And we now may be able to add another upside to the list: researchers with the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University and the University of California, Davis, have found that mindfulness practice can be channeled to increase compassion, which can in turn, help us all deal with irritating (or downright) difficult people we encounter in our day-to-day.

In a new study published online last month by the journal Mindfulness, researchers analyzed day-to-day trajectories of 51 adult participants in Stanford’s 9-week Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT). An educational program developed by a team of clinical psychologists and contemplative scholars including the Dalai Lama’s principal English translator Thupten Jinpa, CCT trains individuals how to choose more compassionate thoughts and actions and build relational skills.

While taking the course, participants used an app to record twice-daily ratings of four emotional states — anxiety, calm, fatigue and alertness — along with their capability and desire to manage how they were feeling. They also provided week-to-week feedback about the strategies they employed — including techniques such as modifying their reaction to a situation to simply accepting a situation.

The results? Researchers found that actively practicing compassion — the capability to recognize another’s suffering and be motivated to relieve that suffering — not only decreases anxiety, but it also increases an overall state of calm.

And, more importantly, they found that it is indeed possible to teach people to be more compassionate.

Want to do some training of your brain at home with a few CCT concepts? Try tips like these suggested by the Wall Street Journal:

• Notice and pay attention: Notice how you’re feeling in a situation and how your body is reacting. Figure out what you need. You might just need a few deep breaths to settle your mind and those sweaty hands.
• Put yourself in the other person’s shoes: Take time to consider life from her perspective. Recognize that just like you, she has family and friends, goals and dreams … and baggage.
• Let it go: Acknowledge that you’re anxious about a person or situation and let that thought move on to allow the flight-or-fight part of your brain to relax instead of obsess. (Meditating daily, in particular, can help train your brain to let go.)
• Practice makes perfect: Start where it’s easier. Practice compassion with yourself and with a loved one. Then ease into those more difficult relationships.

And if you want to take it further, Stanford’s CCT program, now in its eighth year, is open to the public, and you don’t have to be in California to take the classes. More than 100 certified teachers offer sessions year-round across the U.S. and in 10 other countries. Through meditation and mindfulness practices, lectures and interactive communication exercises (and homework), participants learn to develop resilience, strength and courage in the face of suffering, both others’ and their own.

via Lifehacker
Use These Mental Tricks to Prepare for Dealing with Unpleasant People

via The Truth About Guns
NRA Bringing Members, Guns and $50 Million Back To Louisville in ’22

via The Truth About Guns
Trailblazer Firearms’ New .22LR Single Shot LifeCard®

A SaaS product needs to use security measures you might not ordinarily use in an on-premises solution. In particular, it’s important that all sensitive data be secured. Encryption plays an important role in information security. At VividCortex, we encrypt data in-flight and at-rest, so your sensitive data is never exposed.

We use Go and MySQL extensively at VividCortex and thought other Go programmers might be interested to see how we’ve integrated encryption into our services layer (APIs). (And if you’d like to learn more about programming with Go in general, please take a look at our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Building Database-Driven Apps with Go.)

Image Source

Encryption Techniques

At a high level, you can think of two kinds of data encryption inside of MySQL or any similar data store. I’ll oversimplify for purposes of illustration. You can:

1. Store the data in MySQL as normal, but encrypt the container that holds MySQL. Usually this means storing MySQL’s data on an encrypted disk volume. The protection? Broadly speaking, if someone gains access to a backup disk, they can’t see your data.
2. Encrypt the data before sending it to MySQL. In this case the security boundary is pushed out further: even if someone gets access to the server, and can run SQL commands, they can’t see your data.

Each of these has advantages and disadvantages. These include ease of use, programmer overhead, ability to inspect (e.g. recovering from backups), searchability and indexability, and so on. There are a lot of things to consider here. Just a few:

• Will data be exposed if backups are unencrypted? (Our backups are encrypted, by the way.)
• Are sensitive values possibly in cleartext in query logs?
• Will sensitive values be visible in status commands like SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST?

At VividCortex we err on the side of safety and security, rather than favoring convenience. There’s a fairly simple question that does a pretty good job of illustrating our goal: if someone succeeds in a SQL injection attack against our databases, will they see any sensitive data in cleartext? The answer needs to be “no.” This is a higher standard than on-disk encryption. It means that someone has to get access to the keys for the particular data they’re trying to decrypt, in order to see anything other than garbage. And those keys are not present or accessible on the database servers in any form, not even in-memory.

Making It Convenient

Convenience is important. If it’s too hard to do encryption, there’s an increased risk that it won’t be done. Fortunately, Go’s elegant interfaces for the database/sql package make the burden transparent to the programmer!

We learned how to do this from Jason Moiron’s excellent blog post on the Valuer and Scanner interfaces. Please read that if you haven’t yet.

To implement transparent encryption and decryption, we created a custom data type that implements the Valuer and Scanner interfaces. The implementation is straightforward and quite similar to Jason’s example of compressing and decompressing, except that we used encryption libraries instead.

Now our code is incredibly simple to use with encrypted values. All we do is define a variable of our custom type. For example, instead of

var password string
err = rows.Scan(&password)

We simply use

var password EncryptedValue
err = rows.Scan(&password)

It’s similarly simple to insert values encrypted into the database. Magic! This is why I often say that Go’s design, although it seems minimalistic at first, is actually very advanced and powerful.

"Go feels under-engineered because it only solves real problems." Exactly. http://t.co/18LhLT0ALB #golang

— VividCortex (@VividCortex) September 18, 2014

Nuts And Bolts

The code is small. The exact details of all the code are not all that important for this blog post; much of it is about things that are out of scope here. The gist of it, though, is that we store values as byte arrays:

• The first byte is an indicator of the version of our encryption algorithm used, so there’s a clear migration path for changes.
• The next four bytes indicate which key we used to encrypt this value, so we have 4 billion possible keys.
• The rest is the encrypted payload.

We can even change this in the future. For example, we can switch on the first byte’s value, if we want, to determine whether the key ID is in the next 4 bytes, or if it’s something more, such as the next 8 bytes. So we can easily expand the number of keys we can indicate. We can also, if we ever hit version 255, use that to indicate that the version number continues in the next byte. This is a standard trick used, among other places, by the MySQL wire protocol.

The result is that we have a simple and future-proof way to encrypt values.

Alternative Approaches

In addition to the approaches we’ve mentioned, there are several others. There are commercial projects designed to help ease the encryption and decryption techniques you might otherwise wrap around MySQL and perhaps fumble in some ways. There are encryption functions inside of MySQL—but educate yourself about those before using them. There are others, too, but you should be able to find all you need with a search.

Conclusions

By using Go’s built-in interfaces, we created a solution for transparently encrypting values in our database so that it’s never in the database in cleartext, either on-disk or in-memory. The code is easy for programmers to use, which improves our security posture automatically. All sensitive data gets encrypted in-flight and at-rest, and an attacker would have to have extensive access to our systems (an SQL injection wouldn’t suffice) to be able to decrypt the data.

We highly recommend that you use the standard Go interfaces for the power they give you. And please, ask your SaaS providers, including us, hard questions about security and how it’s implemented. Every service needs to be secure to make the Internet a safer place.

If you liked this and want to learn more about Go, you might also like our webinar about developing database-driven apps with Go and MySQL. Click below to watch a recording.

Post Updated 7/31/2017

via Planet MySQL
How We Encrypt Data In MySQL With Go

via Gizmodo
Here’s What Everyone Says About How The Tesla Model 3 Drives