"And then... we encounter the event of the hospital's retinal machine failing to connect to the network when plugged in.  As was in fact the actual reason why Exception Handling was first notified of this event at all."

"Usually, as I understand it, one identifies unconscious patients through their fingerprints and their electronic devices.  What that means, my fellow citizens of Civilization, is that a retinal scanner at a hospital is itself a kind of exception handler.  A hospital retinal scanner gets invoked when circumstances are anomalous, ordinary means have failed.  This means that when you plug it in and turn it on, it should work correctly on the first try, absolutely shitting period.  When a program tries to throw an exception inside an exception, the correct compiler behavior is to dump memory and immediately quit the program with a message saying that the programmer was an idiot and ought to be fired."

"It didn't have to be like that, is the thing.  If you'll pardon something of an angry sub-rant, so long as I'm ranting anyways about these fascinating events that I will not be allowed to write up in a newspaper.  Hospitals could leave emergency machines like that plugged in to a row of outlets, and have them turn themselves on and run self-tests every day.  Maybe then there'd be a reasonable chance that they'd work the first time, when people tried to use them during ongoing exceptions."

"So why did we build the system this way?  To save on electricity, instead of building an additional three percent of a nuclear power plant to serve all the self-testing hospital devices on the planet?"

"No.  We did it that way because somebody thought for fifteen seconds about how the system ought to work and then decided that a policy of turning on the device once a month and testing it had taken care of the part of the system labeled 'testing'.  Somebody actually thought that and, apparently, the rest of Civilization just nodded along and thought it was a great idea."

"Why is our planet like this?  Why do we choose to live like this?  Isn't the whole design aim of a democracy to end up with a society that's smarter than its median voter?  Isn't that the entire point of having a voting system more complicated than selecting one random voter to be dictator?  Have we just given up on that important social goal?  Every part of dath ilan reads like it was built by some person of strictly average intelligence who'd read about education in a book but never actually gone to school, who spent ten minutes designing all our civilizational systems via a series of fifteen-second casual decisions about how things intuitively 'ought to work' that they made without ever seeing the consequences in action.  We have the illusion that Civilization works only because it's not on fire most of the time, and mostly doesn't kill us, and we think deep in our limbic system that this must mean that everything is fine.  The entirety of dath ilan is one gigantic failure fractal."

"And then... we encounter the event of the hospital's retinal machine failing to connect to the network when plugged in.  As was in fact the actual reason why Exception Handling was first notified of this event at all."

"Usually, as I understand it, one identifies unconscious patients through their fingerprints and their electronic devices.  What that means, my fellow citizens of Civilization, is that a retinal scanner at a hospital is itself a kind of exception handler.  A hospital retinal scanner gets invoked when circumstances are anomalous, ordinary means have failed.  This means that when you plug it in and turn it on, it should work correctly on the first try, absolutely shitting period.  When a program tries to throw an exception inside an exception, the correct compiler behavior is to immediately dump memory and quit the program with a message saying that the programmer was an idiot and ought to be fired."

"It didn't have to be like that, is the thing.  If you'll pardon something of an angry sub-rant, so long as I'm ranting anyways about these fascinating events that I will not be allowed to write up in a newspaper.  Hospitals could leave emergency machines like that plugged in to a row of outlets, and have them turn themselves on and run self-tests every day.  Maybe then there'd be a reasonable chance that they'd work the first time, when people tried to use them during ongoing exceptions."

"So why did we build the system this way?  To save on electricity, instead of building an additional three percent of a nuclear power plant to serve all the self-testing hospital devices on the planet?"

"No.  We did it that way because somebody thought for fifteen seconds about how the system ought to work and then decided that a policy of turning on the device once a month and testing it had taken care of the part of the system labeled 'testing'.  Somebody actually thought that and, apparently, the rest of Civilization just nodded along and thought it was a great idea."

"Why is our planet like this?  Why do we choose to live like this?  Isn't the whole design aim of a democracy to end up with a society that's smarter than its median voter?  Isn't that the entire point of having a voting system more complicated than selecting one random voter to be dictator?  Have we just given up on that important social goal?  Every part of dath ilan reads like it was built by some person of strictly average intelligence who'd read about education in a book but never actually gone to school, who spent ten minutes designing all our civilizational systems via a series of fifteen-second casual decisions about how things intuitively 'ought to work' that they made without ever seeing the consequences in action.  We have the illusion that Civilization works only because it's not on fire most of the time, and mostly doesn't kill us, and we think deep in our limbic system that this must mean that everything is fine.  The entirety of dath ilan is one gigantic failure fractal."

"And then... we encounter the event of the hospital's retinal machine failing to connect to the network when plugged in.  As was in fact the actual reason why Exception Handling was first notified of this event at all."

"Usually, as I understand it, one identifies unconscious patients through their fingerprints and their electronic devices.  What that means, my fellow citizens of Civilization, is that a retinal scanner at a hospital is itself a kind of exception handler.  A hospital retinal scanner gets invoked when circumstances are anomalous, ordinary means have failed.  This means that when you plug it in and turn it on, it should work correctly on the first try, absolutely shitting period.  When a program tries to throw an exception inside an exception, the correct compiler behavior is to immediately dump memory and quit the program with a message saying that the programmer was an idiot and ought to be fired."

"It didn't have to be like that, is the thing.  If you'll pardon something of an angry sub-rant, so long as I'm ranting anyways about these fascinating events that I will not be allowed to write up in a newspaper.  Hospitals could leave emergency machines like that plugged in to a row of outlets, and have them turn themselves on and run self-tests every day.  Maybe then there'd be a reasonable chance that they'd work the first time, when people tried to use them during ongoing exceptions."

"So why did we build the system this way?  To save on electricity, instead of building an additional three percent of a nuclear power plant to serve all the self-testing hospital devices on the planet?"

"No.  We did it that way because somebody thought for fifteen seconds about how the system ought to work and then decided that a policy of turning on the device once a month and testing it had taken care of the part of the system labeled 'testing'.  Somebody actually thought that and, apparently, the rest of Civilization just nodded along and thought it was a great idea."

"Why is our planet like this?  Why do we choose to live like this?  Isn't the whole design aim of a democracy to end up with a society that's smarter than its median voter?  Isn't that the point of having a voting system more complicated than selecting one random voter to be dictator?  Have we just given up on that important social goal?  Every part of dath ilan reads like it was built by some person of strictly average intelligence who'd read about education in a book but never actually gone to school, who spent ten minutes designing all our civilizational systems via a series of fifteen-second casual decisions about how things intuitively 'ought to work' that they made without ever seeing the consequences in action.  We have the illusion that Civilization works only because it's not on fire most of the time, and mostly doesn't kill us, and we think deep in our limbic system that this must mean that everything is fine.  The entirety of dath ilan is one gigantic failure fractal."

"And then... we encounter the event of the hospital's retinal machine failing to connect to the network when plugged in.  As was in fact the actual reason why Exception Handling was first notified of this event at all."

"Usually, as I understand it, one identifies unconscious patients through their fingerprints and their electronic devices.  What that means, my fellow citizens of Civilization, is that a retinal scanner at a hospital is itself a kind of exception handler.  A hospital retinal scanner gets invoked when circumstances are anomalous, ordinary means have failed.  This means that when you plug it in and turn it on, it should work correctly on the first try, absolutely shitting period.  When a program throws an unhandled exception inside the exception-handling mechanism, the correct compiler behavior is to dump memory and quit the program with a message saying that the programmer was an idiot and ought to be fired."

"It didn't have to be like that, is the thing.  If you'll pardon something of an angry sub-rant, so long as I'm ranting anyways about these fascinating events that I will not be allowed to write up in a newspaper.  Hospitals could leave emergency machines like that plugged in to a row of outlets, and have them turn themselves on and run self-tests every day.  Maybe then there'd be a reasonable chance that they'd work the first time, when people tried to use them during ongoing exceptions."

"So why did we build the system this way?  To save on electricity, instead of building an additional three percent of a nuclear power plant to serve all the self-testing hospital devices on the planet?"

"No.  We did it that way because somebody thought for fifteen seconds about how the system ought to work and then decided that a policy of turning on the device once a month and testing it had taken care of the part of the system labeled 'testing'.  Somebody actually thought that and, apparently, the rest of Civilization just nodded along and thought it was a great idea."

"Why is our planet like this?  Why do we choose to live like this?  Isn't the whole design aim of a democracy to end up with a society that's smarter than its median voter?  Isn't that the point of having a voting system more complicated than selecting one random voter to be dictator?  Have we just given up on that important social goal?  Every part of dath ilan reads like it was built by some person of strictly average intelligence who'd read about education in a book but never actually gone to school, who spent ten minutes designing all our civilizational systems via a series of fifteen-second casual decisions about how things intuitively 'ought to work' that they made without ever seeing the consequences in action.  We have the illusion that Civilization works only because it's not on fire most of the time, and mostly doesn't kill us, and we think deep in our limbic system that this must mean that everything is fine.  The entirety of dath ilan is one gigantic failure fractal."

"And then... we encounter the event of the hospital's retinal machine failing to connect to the network when plugged in.  As was in fact the actual reason why Exception Handling was first notified of this event at all."

"Usually, as I understand it, one identifies unconscious patients through their fingerprints and their electronic devices.  What that means, my fellow citizens of Civilization, is that a retinal scanner at a hospital is itself a kind of exception handler.  A hospital retinal scanner gets invoked when circumstances are anomalous, ordinary means have failed.  This means that when you plug it in and turn it on, it should work correctly on the first try, absolutely shitting period.  When a program throws an exception inside the exception-handling mechanism, the correct compiler behavior is to dump memory and quit the program with a message saying that the programmer was an idiot and ought to be fired."

"It didn't have to be like that, is the thing.  If you'll pardon something of an angry sub-rant, so long as I'm ranting anyways about these fascinating events that I will not be allowed to write up in a newspaper.  Hospitals could leave emergency machines like that plugged in to a row of outlets, and have them turn themselves on and run self-tests every day.  Maybe then there'd be a reasonable chance that they'd work the first time, when people tried to use them during ongoing exceptions."

"So why did we build the system this way?  To save on electricity, instead of building an additional three percent of a nuclear power plant to serve all the self-testing hospital devices on the planet?"

"No.  We did it that way because somebody thought for fifteen seconds about how the system ought to work and then decided that a policy of turning on the device once a month and testing it had taken care of the part of the system labeled 'testing'.  Somebody actually thought that and, apparently, the rest of Civilization just nodded along and thought it was a great idea."

"Why is our planet like this?  Why do we choose to live like this?  Isn't the whole design aim of a democracy to end up with a society that's smarter than its median voter?  Isn't that the point of having a voting system more complicated than selecting one random voter to be dictator?  Have we just given up on that important social goal?  Every part of dath ilan reads like it was built by some person of strictly average intelligence who'd read about education in a book but never actually gone to school, who spent ten minutes designing all our civilizational systems via a series of fifteen-second casual decisions about how things intuitively 'ought to work' that they made without ever seeing the consequences in action.  We have the illusion that Civilization works only because it's not on fire most of the time, and mostly doesn't kill us, and we think deep in our limbic system that this must mean that everything is fine.  The entirety of dath ilan is one gigantic failure fractal."

"And then... we encounter the event of the hospital's retinal machine failing to connect to the network when plugged in.  As was in fact the actual reason why Exception Handling was first notified of this event at all."

"Usually, as I understand it, one identifies unconscious patients through their fingerprints and their electronic devices.  What that means, my fellow citizens of Civilization, is that a retinal scanner at a hospital is itself a kind of exception handler.  A hospital retinal scanner gets invoked when circumstances are anomalous, ordinary means have failed.  This means that when you plug it in and turn it on, it should work correctly on the first try, absolutely shitting period.  When a program throws an exception inside the exception-handling mechanism, the correct compiler behavior is to dump memory and quit with a message saying that the programmer was an idiot and ought to be fired."

"It didn't have to be like that, is the thing.  If you'll pardon something of an angry sub-rant, so long as I'm ranting anyways about these fascinating events that I will not be allowed to write up in a newspaper.  Hospitals could leave emergency machines like that plugged in to a row of outlets, and have them turn themselves on and run self-tests every day.  Maybe then there'd be a reasonable chance that they'd work the first time, when people tried to use them during ongoing exceptions."

"So why did we build the system this way?  To save on electricity, instead of building an additional three percent of a nuclear power plant to serve all the self-testing hospital devices on the planet?"

"No.  We did it that way because somebody thought for fifteen seconds about how the system ought to work and then decided that a policy of turning on the device once a month and testing it had taken care of the part of the system labeled 'testing'.  Somebody actually thought that and, apparently, the rest of Civilization just nodded along and thought it was a great idea."

"Why is our planet like this?  Why do we choose to live like this?  Isn't the whole design aim of a democracy to end up with a society that's smarter than its median voter?  Isn't that the point of having a voting system more complicated than selecting one random voter to be dictator?  Have we just given up on that important social goal?  Every part of dath ilan reads like it was built by some person of strictly average intelligence who'd read about education in a book but never actually gone to school, who spent ten minutes designing all our civilizational systems via a series of fifteen-second casual decisions about how things intuitively 'ought to work' that they made without ever seeing the consequences in action.  We have the illusion that Civilization works only because it's not on fire most of the time, and mostly doesn't kill us, and we think deep in our limbic system that this must mean that everything is fine.  The entirety of dath ilan is one gigantic failure fractal."