Today's Keyboard Smash
Jul. 15th, 2021 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaksSo I'm being subjected* to a training course at work on improving processes to eliminate waste (in the broad sense of resources including time and people, not just material). And the way they define waste is so buck wild, it makes me wonder what alien life form comes up with this shit.
Waste apparently includes almost everything, including completely essential processes like making material to use and conducting quality inspections. One of the examples was making a PB&J sandwich, and one of the "waste" elements is the step "get a knife out." Because that's not a step which actively "transforms material into a product." Which...hm. Kinda seems like a critical element, but hey, enjoy your culinary adventures, I guess. And while they admit that it can't all be eliminated, they really rather wish it could.
Presumably, they are holding out hope for the day teleportation becomes possible and they can just zap objects from here to there. Actually, I think they're dreaming of a future when products can simply be made manifest from the ether, independent of all human activity. Hell, even the robots wouldn't be able to compete with that.
I had this post I never got around to writing, prompted by playing Stardew Valley. I wanted to talk about pathfinding in games, particularly one with a strict, obvious grid like Stardew, one which also has an in-game clock to contend with. There's frustration in taking an inefficient route, because of those systems, or in forgetting something and having to backtrack while that clock ticks away the usable hours of the game day. I was thinking about how that compares to my wandering in the garden, when I'm definitely trying to get something done but I also don't mind if I take the long way round to it. I was thinking about how life, real life, is not efficient. Is, maybe, not meant to be optimized in that way.
I'm fascinated by the idea of optimizing time, yet I'm also profoundly suspicious of it. I think probably it's a fool's errand at a certain point. Or maybe I just think we will lose something good, something necessary, if we ever succeed in stripping each step of life down to its most efficient core, devoid of cruft and happy accidents both.
If there had ever been a concrete conclusion to that post, I don't know what it was. I certainly don't have one now. I just got to thinking about it again while contending with this damn course on how we might eliminate all inefficiency from production. Ideally, by eliminating all the messy human failures, like making too much of something, forgetting paperwork, needing to transport goods instead of beaming them down, or *checks notes* existing on the physical plane.
*I suspect I was selected for this in particular, rather than it being foisted on the general population, so they probably imagine I should be grateful for the vote of confidence. I am, to put it mildly, not into it.
Waste apparently includes almost everything, including completely essential processes like making material to use and conducting quality inspections. One of the examples was making a PB&J sandwich, and one of the "waste" elements is the step "get a knife out." Because that's not a step which actively "transforms material into a product." Which...hm. Kinda seems like a critical element, but hey, enjoy your culinary adventures, I guess. And while they admit that it can't all be eliminated, they really rather wish it could.
Presumably, they are holding out hope for the day teleportation becomes possible and they can just zap objects from here to there. Actually, I think they're dreaming of a future when products can simply be made manifest from the ether, independent of all human activity. Hell, even the robots wouldn't be able to compete with that.
I had this post I never got around to writing, prompted by playing Stardew Valley. I wanted to talk about pathfinding in games, particularly one with a strict, obvious grid like Stardew, one which also has an in-game clock to contend with. There's frustration in taking an inefficient route, because of those systems, or in forgetting something and having to backtrack while that clock ticks away the usable hours of the game day. I was thinking about how that compares to my wandering in the garden, when I'm definitely trying to get something done but I also don't mind if I take the long way round to it. I was thinking about how life, real life, is not efficient. Is, maybe, not meant to be optimized in that way.
I'm fascinated by the idea of optimizing time, yet I'm also profoundly suspicious of it. I think probably it's a fool's errand at a certain point. Or maybe I just think we will lose something good, something necessary, if we ever succeed in stripping each step of life down to its most efficient core, devoid of cruft and happy accidents both.
If there had ever been a concrete conclusion to that post, I don't know what it was. I certainly don't have one now. I just got to thinking about it again while contending with this damn course on how we might eliminate all inefficiency from production. Ideally, by eliminating all the messy human failures, like making too much of something, forgetting paperwork, needing to transport goods instead of beaming them down, or *checks notes* existing on the physical plane.
*I suspect I was selected for this in particular, rather than it being foisted on the general population, so they probably imagine I should be grateful for the vote of confidence. I am, to put it mildly, not into it.
