Suitably Random

The TL;DR is that technical competence is very important for managers in keeping their staff happy. From experience, I think this is true, but is really a couple of different things rolled together.

1) Understanding the work to be done means that it is more likely to be handed to workers over in a decent workable state (or it would be pushed back before they get to see it). This is effective delegation. Staff can get things done, the manager can support them and mentor as necessary, everybody is happy.

2) Conversely - Managers who want something done which they can’t do themselves will probably not communicate what they want in language and terms which make the task actually workable. This isn’t really delegating work at this point, it is much more of a client / consultant relationship. To me this means that there will probably need to be a couple of iterations to get to a solution.

There is a really interesting letter from George Orwell in which he talks about, well, I’ll just leave this quote here :

Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer.

Related to the court judgement between Microsoft and the US DOJ - this is a tiny anecdote which says that the Indian Government wanted the ability to do a MITM attack on Facebook (anywhere in the world) for allowing them to host in the country.

An evenly split federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that it won't revisit its July decision that allowed Microsoft to squash a US court warrant for e-mail stored on its servers in Dublin, Ireland. The 4-4 vote by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals sets the stage for a potential Supreme Court showdown over the US government's demands that it be able to reach into the world's servers with the assistance of the tech sector.

After that, the scene somehow transitioned to a Skype video call with a number of speedrunners speaking live from the AGDQ event through the SNES.

The UK government's recently enacted Investigatory Powers law faces a fight from human rights group Liberty, which has launched an appeal to crowdfund a legal challenge against what it described as "indiscriminate state spying" on Brits.

It comes just weeks after the so-called Snoopers' Charter suffered a sizeable setback when the European Union's top court ruled that the "general and indiscriminate" retention of citizen's data communications was unlawful where it's being slurped for anything other than serious crime cases.