Inside My Days as a Content Bot

"In the early 2000s, I created bogus websites for powerful people eager to rewrite their narratives. Now, online reputations matter more than ever—and AI threatens to take my old job.

By Rachel KhongPublished: Apr 18, 2024

In the summer of 2007, I was freshly out of college and searching for jobs with increasing desperation. I had worked unpaid internships at a newspaper and a literary journal; I’d written music reviews. None of this, it was becoming apparent, screamed “employable.” Who would pay me to do what I wanted to do, which was write? When I happened across a Craigslist ad that said, “Creative writer wanted,” I responded. My recent job inquiries had been as effective as dropping bottled messages into the Pacific. When a response came—“Can you come into our Menlo Park offices this week for an interview?”—I replied immediately. Yes, I could.

Did I wear a blazer? Did I take Caltrain? How did I get around before Uber or GPS? I remember being nervous, and I remember wanting to be liked. I don’t remember what was asked of me, or how the job was described. The man interviewing me was older than I was then, younger than I am now. The job was “a lot like working for the CIA,” he told me. “Your best work, you can’t show anyone.”

These were the early years of Facebook, of shareable iTunes libraries—of downloading music illegally (or legally, but let’s be real). I had a phone that flipped open and didn’t take pictures. Menlo Park wasn’t on the map. It would be years before Mark Zuckerberg was named Time’s person of the year, and even more years before he came to be viewed as a creepy robot. Silicon Valley had not yet accrued its sinister air. Twitter had been founded recently, in March 2006, but it had not yet attracted media personalities; it wasn’t where anyone went for news. It hadn’t yet been renamed X by a billionaire, who wasn’t yet a billionaire. There were fewer billionaires back then. But Google existed, and so did its pages of search results. A search for a semi-prominent individual yielded information about them.

These search results would be the main focus of my new job. I was to be a protector of online reputations.

---

None of our clients had been convicted of any crimes, our higher-ups assured us. If ever they were, they would be dropped as clients. But everyone deserved to put their best foot forward—didn’t they? We would be helping them to do so. Each of our clients had hired us because they disliked their search results. For one client, the problem was that a New York Times Vows article about his marriage to his ex-wife was the very first link you saw when you searched his name. We couldn’t eliminate these offending items from the Internet. But we could try to bump them off Google’s top spot—or, even better, off the first page entirely, into the realm of the never-seen. All we had to do was create new material—what we called “pink sites.” This was what put the “creative” in “creative writer.”

For each client, we’d receive lists of their hobbies, interests, and positive attributes. These were the qualities we’d highlight. One client, a businessman, was an avid sailor in addition to a cheating spouse. We chose to emphasize the former. I created several websites about boating, mentioning his name on each. Then I would go about trying to promote each website using early social-media platforms: Reddit, Maple, StumbleUpon, Xing. “Check out this website on boating!” I might have posted on Twitter, from one of my dozens of made-up profiles. I didn’t bother to make my alter egos particularly realistic (one was “Salvador Whippet”). We were urged to make our websites as believable as we could, so they’d gain organic traffic and appear higher in search results—edging out less desirable sites.

Another method of reputation management was putting up websites about fictional people who happened to share our clients’ names. One of my coworkers maintained a stream-of-consciousness skateboarding blog, ostensibly penned by someone with the same name as a client but with a different age and a different personality. (“That ramp was hella sick but I was ready for it.”) We maintained spreadsheets of our pink sites, called pink profiles. I generated long lists of negative domain names that our company would purchase, so that our clients’ detractors wouldn’t be able to snap up the most desirable ones (soandsosucks.com, soandsoistheworst.com, ihatesoandso.com). These methods, combined, were called the “secret sauce.” The “secret” was heavily stressed. We called each client by a code name corresponding to their initials: Jennifer Aniston, Mark Wahlberg, Spider Man.

I was paid eight cents per word, so writing that didn’t require heavy research was ideal. For one site, I wrote short stories and poems from the perspectives of twelve-year-old girls. I mentioned the client’s name on one of the site’s pages, but beyond that, the site needed content. What was easiest for me to generate was subpar fiction and poetry. In one story, a girl living on Jupiter wakes up to find that her parents have disappeared. Plaintively, she wonders: “WHERE ARE MY PARENTS/ALL OF JUPITER?” My boss encouraged experimentation because we never knew what sites would catch on. If I succeeded in attracting real preteen girls to my invented site, their traffic might cause Google to rank the site more highly, deposing our client’s negative search results.

The office building was small and nondescript. I remember gray, even as I can’t picture the space anymore. We brought our own laptops to work. We chatted all day long on Instant Messenger—trying to make one another laugh, often succeeding. My coworkers were a ragtag group ranging in age and racial background. If not for the job, I might have never met them. They were excellent writers—strange and funny, united in our bizarre labor. It occurs to me now that we were bots before bots were bots. Did we call it “content” back then? I don’t think the noun had yet acquired its negative connotation, to mean meaninglessness. But none of us were under the illusion that what we were creating was lasting. It wasn’t the ideal job for any of us. It was just the job we had.

---

Every month, I aimed to write 40,000 words. It was a novel every one and a half months, though that meant I wasn’t working on my own hypothetical novel. My wrists hurt; I got carpal tunnel. What I wrote was fictional, but it wasn’t the fiction that I hoped to write. Within two months, I was desperately applying to MFA programs.

On weekends, I took my laptop to coffee shops. In those days, San Francisco cafés weren’t white-walled or third-wave. They served dark roasts and had sticky floors and faux-leather chairs that hissed. What I hoped to write was something of my own, something meaningful to me. But I never wrote anything good. It would take time to become a better writer—time I hadn’t lived yet.

---

My job was online, but my real life was lived in person. We didn’t need the acronym IRL back then. It was a given. Life was lived in real life—where else would it be lived? Facebook wasn’t widespread; Instagram didn’t exist.

I was living in a Victorian flat in San Francisco’s Lower Haight. The rent was $3,280 split four ways. My roommates were also new college graduates. We hosted dinners and parties—homemade pasta and pickles—and pooled our money for communal bourbon. The frequency of our gatherings feels like a relic of the past, too, though it’s hard to say if it’s that times changed or we did, settling into families of our own. When I told new friends what my job was, their eyes widened. You should write about that, they always said.

I remember one visitor, a friend of a friend. She was slightly older than we were—more cultured. She was a chef at a prestigious restaurant where I could not afford to eat. When I told her about my job, she could not conceal her disgust. She asked, “How do you sleep at night?” I remember being speechless at her judgment. I slept at night because I was tired, and this was the only job I had gotten.

Seventeen years later, my experience has been reduced into a tellable anecdote. Most of my memories have fallen away, but I remember that moment, feeling judged by her. From her privileged position, she could judge me for my job. I can judge myself for it, now. My coworkers and I were doing what the Russian and Chinese hackers did to the American people before the 2016 election, albeit less effectively. None of our clients have been convicted of crimes or accused of sexual assault went my superiors’ constant refrain. But they weren’t exactly upstanding people.

In the years after writing content for the client we called Ed Bradley, I would happen across his name in the news: corruption, bribery, a sex scandal. His current Wikipedia page, which calls him a “disgraced former American lobbyist and businessman,” doesn’t even mention whatever he was up to in the years that I was generating websites on his behalf. Those particular misdemeanors seem to have vanished with time, replaced by more up-to-date offenses. It doesn’t appear that he changed his ways. He seems to be doing fine—still wealthy, largely unscathed. He pled guilty to a felony that carried a prison sentence of up to five years but was pardoned by Donald Trump.

---

I did become a writer. I write novels now, as I hoped to then. I have privilege enough not to have to work for eight cents a word. My writing can take more time. I changed, and the world did, too.

The Internet has become less personal. It feels endless—and not in a good way. Our online experiences have become angrier, more algorithm driven. In 2007, our lives were only beginning to have an online footprint. Since then, our existences have steadily moved in the virtual direction: Thanks to social media, smartphones, and omnipresent cameras, our online identities have become nearly synonymous with our identities themselves. The divide between public and private has eroded. Online reputations matter more than they ever have, and the methods for controlling narratives have become more powerful, too.

I’m not proud that I contributed to the Internet’s general bullshit quotient. But my coworkers and I were a dozen writers in a gray room in Menlo Park, and there was a limit to how much damage we could cause. With AI now available to generate writing, we are on the verge of infinite damage. In a John Henry-style contest to see who can write more preteen stories about Jupiter, AI would leave me dead at my keyboard. And AI can do much more than write stories about Jupiter: it can bend reality entirely. What I did back then makes for a funny anecdote, but there’s nothing funny about what’s happening now. Disinformation and conspiracy theories run rampant; attempts to call out fake news are decried by a major party’s presidential candidate as censorship. Knowing who to believe is trickier than ever. And more confusion is on the horizon. What will happen when fake news is accompanied by deepfaked video or counterfeit audio? What will “reputation” mean then? I have no doubt that in seventeen years, this reflection will seem quaint.

The websites I created are long gone, and thankfully so. What I wrote wasn’t meant to endure. I remember resenting that I had to write novels’ worth of text for clients instead of the novels I wished to be writing. But writing nonsense was writing, too. It was practice. Despite everything, the job oriented me toward the writing that I do believe is worth my time: writing that is crafted from contemplation and introspection, that hopes to connect deeply with its reader, that is meaningful to me, as a writer. Lately, this kind of writing feels doomed, too. ChatGPT threatens to take my job—not just my old one, but the one I care about.

Times change—technology arrives—and we change along with it. We can only comprehend those changes with perspective. From here, in the present, I can only wonder what’s to come—how our lives will be transformed. For now, I can do my best to write something true."

Elgesio ekonomika

 

     "Nobelio ekonomikos premijos laureatai linkę apibarstyti jų straipsnius lygtimis. Kovo 27 d. miręs Danielis Kahnemanas žinomiausius jo kūrinius užpildė personažais ir galvosūkiais. Pirmieji skaitytojai susidūrė su moksleiviu, kurio IQ buvo 150, o jo mieste vidurkis buvo 100. Vėliau jie susimąstė apie nelaimingąjį poną Teesą, kuris į oro uostą atvyko, praėjus 30 minučių po suplanuoto skrydžio ir turėjo pasijusti dar blogiau, kai sužinojo, kad lėktuvas vėlavo 25 minutes. Aštuntajame dešimtmetyje skaitytojai turėjo įvertinti būdus, kaip kovoti su liga, kuri grasino nužudyti 600 žmonių. 1983 m. jų buvo paprašyta atspėti atviros, vienišos, 31 metų filosofijos absolventės, darbą.

 

     Kahnemanas naudojo tokias vinjetes, kad atskleistų viliojančias psichikos nuorodas, kurios gali iškreipti žmonių mintis ir sprendimus. Pavyzdžiui, daugelis žmonių mano, kad labiau tikėtina, kad Linda yra feministinė banko kasininkė, o ne bet kokia banko kasininkė. Pateikiami du atsakai į ligą, dauguma renkasi tą, kuris tikrai išgelbės 200 žmonių, o ne tikimesnę alternatyvą, kuri turi trečdalį galimybės išgelbėti visus ir du trečdalius galimybės neišgelbėti nieko. Tačiau jei pasirinkimas perfrazuojamas, sprendimas dažnai būna kitoks. Galų gale, pasirinkite pirmąjį variantą ir 400 žmonių miršta tikrai. Pasirinkite antrąjį ir niekas nemiršta su trečdalio tikimybe.

 

     Kaip rašoma Michaelo Lewiso knygoje „The Undoing Project“, Kahnemanui lengvai kilo erzinančių klausimų, net miegant. Kai kurie kilo iš jo mokymo, kuris neapsiribojo dramblio kaulo bokštais. Kartą jis Izraelio oro pajėgų skrydžių instruktoriams paaiškino „regresijos iki vidurkio“ idėją. Priežastis, dėl kurios pilotai buvo linkę tobulėti po aplaidaus manevro, buvo ne dėl to, kad instruktorius ant jų rėkė, o dėl to, kad pagerėjimo tikimybė yra didesnė, jei ankstesnis pasirodymas buvo neįprastai blogas.

 

     Kahnemanas buvo atšiaurus jo paties nepataisomam "aš", dėmesingas jo klaidoms. Viename iš jo ankstyvųjų populiarių straipsnių buvo atskleistos metodinės painiavos, kurioms jis pats buvo pažeidžiamas, pavyzdžiui, klaidingas pasitikėjimas, kad nuokrypis, kaip vaikas, kurio IQ yra 150, neiškreips net mažos imties.

 

     Kahnemanas taip pat visą gyvenimą domėjosi apkalbomis, nes jos buvo svarbios, kartais išsaugojant net gyvybę. Kartą jis rašė, kad jo, kaip Lietuvos žydų sūnaus, vedant patogų, bet audringą prieškario gyvenimą Paryžiuje, vaikystė buvo kupina kalbų apie kitus žmones. Žydai Europoje turėjo „visą laiką vertinti kitus“, – sakė ponui Lewisui vienas jo draugas. „Kas pavojingas? Kas nėra pavojingas?...Žmonės iš esmės priklausė nuo savo psichologinio sprendimo.

 

     Apkalbos buvo ir jo darbo šaltinis, ir numatytas tikslas. Jo bestseleriu tapusi knyga „Greitai ir lėtai mąstymas“ buvo parašyta ne sprendimų priėmėjams, o „kritikams ir apkalbų kūrėjams“. Sprendimus priimantys, asmenys dažnai buvo pernelyg „kognityviai užsiėmę“, kad pastebėtų savo šališkumą. Pilotus galėtų pataisyti pastabūs antraeiliai pilotai, o pernelyg pasitikinčius viršininkus – šnabždesys aplink vandens aušintuvą, ypač jei šnabždesių kūrėjai būtų skaitę Kahnemano knygą.

 

     Siekdamas skleisti psichologinę įžvalgą, Kahnemanas kartą bandė įtraukti į Izraelio mokyklos mokymo programą kursą apie sprendimą. Jis tikėjosi, kad projektas užtruks metus ar dvejus. Prireikė aštuonių, iki to laiko švietimo ministerija prarado entuziazmą; žeminantis pavyzdys to, ką jis ir Amosas Tversky, dažnas jo bendraautoris, pavadino „planavimo klaida“. Jam labiau pasisekė, kai psichologinė išmintis buvo įtraukta į gerai saugomą ekonomikos sritį, kuri buvo prilipusi prie plono, bet tvarkingo žmogaus sprendimų priėmimo modelio.

 

     Kaip jis tai padarė? Vienas atsakymas – jis susivienijo su Tverskiu, kurio elegantiškas protas buvo toks pat negailestingai tvarkingas, kaip jo stalas. Jie įtraukė atrastas pažinimo iliuzijas į modelį, vadinamą „perspektyvų teorija“. 

 

Remiantis šia teorija, žmonių gerovės jausmas labiau reaguoja į turto pokyčius, nei į lygius. Pokyčiai vertinami, atsižvelgiant į neutralų atskaitos tašką. 

 

Šis punktas ne visada akivaizdus ir gali būti išdėstytas iš naujo: premija gali nuvilti, jei ji yra mažesnė, nei tikėtasi. Siekdami naudos, žmonės vengia rizikuoti. Jie tikrai laimės 450 dolerių, net jei turės 50% tikimybę laimėti 1000 dolerių. Tačiau žmonės lošia, kad išvengtų nuostolių, kurie atrodo daug didesni. nei panašaus dydžio pelnai.

 

     Perspektyvos teorija išvertė šį sprendimų priėmimo modelį iš vinječių į algebros ir geometrijos kalbą. Dėl to jis patiko ekonomistams. Iš tiesų, disciplina pradėjo teigti, kad tai yra jai sava. Psichologijos taikymas buvo pradėtas vadinti elgesio ekonomika, apgailestavo Kahnemanas, ir daugelis psichologų atrado, kad jų amato pavadinimas pasikeitė, net jei jo turinys nepasikeitė.

 

     Šaltos rankos klaidingumas

 

     Net kai ekonomika pakeitė psichologijos prekės ženklą, Kahnemanas atgaivino senesnę ekonomikos tradiciją: „hedonimetrus“, malonumo ir skausmo matuoklius, kuriuos įsivaizdavo XIX amžiaus ekonomistas Francisas Edgeworthas. Kahnemano hedonimetras tiesiog paprašė žmonių įvertinti jų jausmus akimirksnio skalėje. Jis pastebėjo, kad žmonių vertinimai dažnai prieštarauja tam, ką jie vėliau prisiminė. Jų „atsiminimas“ per daug sveria patirties pabaigą ir geriausią ar blogiausią momentą, nepaisydamas jo trukmės. Žmonės mieliau laikytų ranką skausmingai šaltame vandenyje 90 sekundžių, o ne minutę, jei paskutinės 30 sekundžių būtų šiek tiek mažiau šaltos nei prieš tai buvusios 60. 

 

Taip pat žmonės registruojasi į audringus turistinius maršrutus, nes nekantriai laukia daug prisiminimų, o ne todėl, kad tuo metu jiems labai patinka.

 

     Šio atradimo reikšmė apima filosofiją. Kuris "aš" svarbus? Nepaisant akivaizdžių ydų, kuratoriškasis „aš“, meniškai sujungiantis nereprezentatyvius prisiminimus į gyvenimo istoriją, yra brangus žmonėms. Kahnemanas rašė: „Aš esu save atsimenantis "aš", o kitas, patiriantis "aš", kuris veda mano gyvenimą, yra man tarsi svetimas žmogus. Dabar jo patiriantis „aš“ baigė vesti jo gyvenimą. Ir daug žmonių, kuriuos jis palietė, turi atsiminti už jį." [1]

 

1.  Nobel gossip. The Economist; London Vol. 451, Iss. 9391,  (Apr 6, 2024): 70. 

Behavioural economics

"Winners of the Nobel prize in economics tend to sprinkle their papers with equations. Daniel Kahneman, who died on March 27th, populated his best-known work with characters and conundrums. Early readers encountered a schoolchild with an IQ of 150 in a city where the average was 100. Later they pondered the unfortunate Mr Tees, who arrived at the airport 30 minutes after his flight’s scheduled departure, and must have felt even worse when he discovered the plane had left 25 minutes late. In the 1970s readers had to evaluate ways to fight a disease that threatened to kill 600 people. In 1983 they were asked to guess the job of Linda, an outspoken, single 31-year-old philosophy graduate.

Kahneman used such vignettes to expose the seductive mental shortcuts that can warp people’s thoughts and decisions. Many people, for example, think it more likely that Linda is a feminist bank-teller than a bank-teller of any kind. Presented with two responses to the disease, most choose one that saves 200 people for certain, over a chancier alternative that has a one-third chance of saving everyone and a two-thirds chance of saving no one. But if the choice is reframed, the decision is often different. Choose the first option, after all, and 400 people die for sure. Choose the second and nobody dies with a one-third probability.

Teasing questions came easily to Kahneman, even in his sleep, according to “The Undoing Project”, a book by Michael Lewis. Some sprang from his teaching, which was not confined to ivory towers. He once explained the idea of “regression to the mean” to flight instructors in Israel’s air force. The reason pilots tended to improve after a sloppy manoeuvre was not because the instructor screamed at them, but because the chances of an improvement are higher if the prior performance was unusually bad.

Kahneman was a harsh grader of his own incorrigible self, attentive to his own lapses. One of his early hit papers exposed the kind of methodological muddles to which he himself was vulnerable, such as the misplaced confidence that an outlier, like a child with an IQ of 150, would not skew even a small sample.

Kahneman also had a lifelong—and life-preserving—interest in gossip. His childhood, as the son of Lithuanian Jews living a comfortable but edgy pre-war existence in Paris, was full of talk about other people, he once wrote. Jews in Europe had to “assess others, all the time,” a friend of his told Mr Lewis. “Who is dangerous? Who is not dangerous?…People were basically dependent on their psychological judgment.”

Gossip was both a source of his work and an intended target. His bestselling book, “Thinking Fast and Slow”, was written not for decision-makers, but for “critics and gossipers”. Decision-makers were often too “cognitively busy” to notice their own biases. Pilots could be corrected by observant co-pilots and overconfident bosses might be chastened by whispers around the water-cooler, especially if the whisperers had read Kahneman’s book.

To spread psychological insight, Kahneman once tried to add a course on judgment to Israel’s school curriculum. He expected the project would take a year or two. It took eight, by which time the ministry of education had lost enthusiasm; a humbling example of what he and Amos Tversky, his frequent co-author, called the “planning fallacy”. He had more success inveigling psychological wisdom into the well-guarded realm of economics, which had clung to a thin but tidy model of human decision-making.

How did he do it? One answer is that he teamed up with Tversky, whose elegant mind was as ruthlessly tidy as his desk. They incorporated the cognitive illusions they had discovered into a model called “prospect theory”. According to this theory, people’s well-being responds to changes in wealth, more than levels. The changes are judged relative to a neutral reference point. That point is not always obvious and can be recast: a bonus can disappoint if it is smaller than expected. In pursuit of gains, people are risk averse. They will take a sure win of $450 over a 50% chance of winning $1,000. But people gamble to avoid losses, which loom larger than gains of an equivalent size.

Prospect theory translated this model of decision-making from vignettes into the language of algebra and geometry. That made it palatable to economists. Indeed, the discipline began to claim this sort of thing as its own. Applications of psychology “came to be called behavioural economics”, lamented Kahneman, “and many psychologists discovered that the name of their trade had changed even if its content had not.”

The cold-hand fallacy

Even as economics was rebranding psychology, Kahneman revived an older economic tradition: “hedonimeters”, gauges of pleasure and pain that Francis Edgeworth, a 19th-century economist, had imagined. Kahneman’s hedonimeter simply asked people to rate their feelings moment-to-moment on a scale. He found that people’s ratings were often at odds with what they later recalled. Their “remembering” selves put undue weight on the end of an experience and its best or worst moment, neglecting its duration. People would rather keep their hand in painfully cold water for 90 seconds than for a minute, if the final 30 seconds were a little less cold than the preceding 60. Likewise, people sign up for hectic tourist itineraries because they look forward to looking back on them, not because they much enjoy them at the time.

The implications of this discovery extend into philosophy. Which self counts? Despite its manifest flaws, the curatorial self, artfully arranging unrepresentative memories into a life story, is dear to people. “I am my remembering self,” Kahneman wrote, “and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.” Now his experiencing self has done its living. And it is up to the many people he touched to do the remembering for him." [1]

1.  Nobel gossip. The Economist; London Vol. 451, Iss. 9391,  (Apr 6, 2024): 70. 

Kaip GE buvo suremontuotas: Kaizen

 „Laimei, GE generalinis direktorius ponas Culpas suprato, kad reformuojant GE, reikia pakeisti ne tik jos struktūrą, bet ir veiklą.

 

     Six Sigma, Welcho palaikomų metodų serija, kuria siekiama, kad gamybos defektų būtų mažiau, nei 3,4 defektų milijonui dalių, tapo kliūtimi naujovėms ir buvo atsisakyta.

 

     Vietoj to, ponas Culpas pristatė GE „švelnų valdymą“, kuris ieško nedidelių pakeitimų, kurie, laikui bėgant, priartina didelius patobulinimus. Šis metodas, kurio pradininkė Toyota Japonijoje, apima vadybininkus, kurie sprendžia problemas, apsilankę gamykloje arba jų klientus, o ne patogiai sėdėdami prie jų stalo.

 

     Šiandien GE vadovai rėžia japoniškus terminus, tokius, kaip kaizen (nuolatinio tobulėjimo procesas), gemba (vieta, kur vyksta veiksmas) ir hoshin kanri (darbuotojų darbo suderinimas su įmonės tikslais).

 

 Dar svarbiau, kad ponas Kulpas ir jo pavaldiniai reguliariai praleidžia savaitę gamykloje kartu su darbuotojais. 

 

Bendrovė dėkoja šiai sistemai už patobulinimus, ji, pvz., sumažino bendrą atstumą, kurį viena iš dujų turbinų plieninių menčių nuvažiuoja gamybos proceso metu nuo 5 km iki 165 pėdų (50 metrų), ir sutrumpino sraigtasparnio variklio sukūrimo laiką nuo 75 iki 11 valandų." [1]

 

1. Less general, more electric. The Economist; London Vol. 451, Iss. 9391,  (Apr 6, 2024): 60, 61.

How GE Was Repaired: Kaizen

"Critically, GE CEO, Mr Culp, understood that reforming GE required not just changes to its structure but also to its operations. 

Six Sigma, a series of techniques championed by Welch that aimed to keep manufacturing defects below 3.4 per million parts, had become a barrier to innovation and was dropped. 

Instead Mr Culp introduced GE to “lean management”, which looks for small changes that add up to big improvements over time. This approach, pioneered by Toyota in Japan, involves managers solving problems by visiting the factory floor or their customers, rather than from the comfort of their desks.

Today GE executives pepper their disquisitions with Japanese terms such as kaizen (a process of continuous improvement), gemba (the place where the action happens) and hoshin kanri (aligning employees’ work with the company’s goals). More important, Mr Culp and his underlings routinely spend a week on the factory floor alongside workers. The company credits this system for improvements such as reducing the total distance a steel blade for one of its gas turbines travels during the manufacturing process from three miles (5km) to 165 feet (50 metres), and slashing the time to build a helicopter engine from 75 to 11 hours." [1]

1. Less general, more electric. The Economist; London Vol. 451, Iss. 9391,  (Apr 6, 2024): 60, 61.

Taika ar nebus taikos – štai koks šiandienos klausimas

 Bėgioti nuo rusų pas kinus ir atgal, dalinant grasinimus abiem tautoms vienu metu, nėra diplomatija. Mums reikia tikros diplomatijos šiomis sudėtingomis sąlygomis. Kad ir koks būtų Susitarimo menas, vienintelė viltis nuraminti pasaulį yra D.Trumpo išrinkimas kitu Amerikos prezidentu.  

Gamindami artilerijos sviedinius ir jais šaudydami, mes tikrai neapsaugosime Žemę nuo klimato katastrofos. Sakyti Kinijai, kad jos pigūs elektromobiliai ir pigios saulės baterijos yra grėsmė žmonijai, kai mes nesugebame tokių padaryti, yra begėdiškas kvailumas ir akiplėšiškas melas visam pasauliui. (Visi pasisuko į jus, p. Yelen.)

Pažiūrėsim, kas nutiks.

Peace or no peace, this is the question

Running from Russians to Chinese, and back, pronouncing threats for both of them at the same time is not diplomacy. We need real diplomacy in these complicated conditions. Whatever the Art of the Deal is, the only hope to pacify the world is the election of D.Trump as the next president of America. Let's see what happens.

By making artillery shells and firing them, we will certainly not protect the Earth from climate catastrophe. Telling China that its cheap electric cars and cheap solar panels are a threat to humanity, when we are unable to make them, is shameless stupidity and a blatant lie to the entire world. (Everyone turns to you, Ms. Yelen.)

We'll see what happens.