No, it's not a parasocial relationship. Those are one-sided and usually a passive consumer of media believing they have a real relationship with those who appear within said media.
If you are a customer you most assuredly have an actual relationship with the company. Your options when dissatisfied with that relationship is to end it, send your complaints to the company, or decide the dissatisfaction is overcome by the value you receive.
A muscle car is as much a visceral experience as it is a means of transportation, and never under-sell the fun of driving a slow car fast. Modern cars are sensory deprivation chambers that turn the joy of driving into the tedium of transporting oneself from one place to another.
We're decades past the time when a 1960s car was remotely competitive on any measurable aspect of performance but, just as rock climbing is not a valid competitor for taking a train/ski lift/whatever to the top of a mountain, there will always be those that revel in the joy of doing something that calls to our more primitive selves.
Muscle cars are the essence of being young... they're unreasonable, loud, reckless, and beautiful.
I'm not sure that you can reach the conclusion that "people don't have world models" based on beliefs that do not fully integrate with such a model. We too often try to misapply binary truth requirements to domains in which there exists at least a trinary logic, if not a greater number of logic truths.
If I meet a random stranger, do I trust them or distrust them? The answer is "both/neither," because a concept such as "trust" isn't a binary logic in such a circumstance. They are neither trustworthy nor untrustworthy, they are in a state of nontrustworthiness (the absence of trust, but not the opposite of truth).
World models tend to have foundational principles/truths that inform what can be compatible for inclusion. A belief that is non-compatible, rather than compatible/incompatible, can exist in such a model (often weakly) since it does not meet the requirements for rejection. Incomplete information can be integrated into a world model as long as the aspects being evaluated for compatibility conform to the model.
Requiring a world model to contain complete information and logical consistency at all possible levels from the granular to the metaphysical seems to be one Hell of a high bar that makes demands no other system is expected to achieve.
Everything? How about legal liability for the car killing someone? Are all the self-driving vendors stepping up and accepting full legal liability for the outcomes of their non-deterministic software?
Thousands have died directly due to known defects in manufactured cars. Those companies (Ford, others) still are operating today.
Even if driverless cars killed more people than humans they would see mass adoption eventually. However they are subject to farr higher scrutiny than human drivers and even so make fewer mistakes, avoid accidents more frequently and can't get drunk, tired, angry, or distracted.
There is a fetish for technology that sometimes we are not aware of. On average there might be less accidents, but if specific accidents were preventable and now they happen, people will sue. And who will take the blame? The day the company takes the blame is the day self-driving exists IMO.
But even if they can theoretically be hacked, so far Waymos are still safer and more reliable than human drivers. The biggest danger someone has riding in one is someone destroying it for vindictive reasons.
In the bluntest possible sense, who cares if we can make roads safer?
Solving liability in traffic collisions is basically a solved problem through the courts, and at least in the UK, liability is assigned in law to the vendor (more accurately, there’s a list of who’s responsible for stuff, I’m not certain if it’s possible to assume legal responsibility without being the vendor).
There is a reason that newspapers had old saws about their business such as "if it bleeds, it leads" and "dog bites man isn't newsworthy, man bites dog is."
And there is the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect that was coined by Michael Crichton back in the early 2000s.
A common mistake that some managers make is pushing the burdens of managing onto those you're managing. Any of us who have been managers can look back and see things that we tried to push down to those we've managed because it made it easier for us while later realizing that wasn't the best solution.
If there's a catch-all channel that employees are using to share knowledge that's not a bug, it's a feature. If, as a manager, you want a more structured means of conveying institutional knowledge generated within such channels then it's on you to put that together. Trying to push that burden down the chain often results in that institutional knowledge being shared verbally or via private emails/DMs in order to avoid the burden of documentation, which is a net negative.
Such information is a force multiplier for teams as well as a great asset for onboarding new hires. Both of those are direct benefits for the manager and the company, so take the advantage of that kind of spontaneous documentation rather than insisting on passing on the cognitive burden.
IMO, the greatest force multiplier in onboarding is automation... How many user interactive steps does a dev need to walk through to get up and running?
I've often gotten this down to a single directory and a primary script you need to run 3-4 times... mostly because of required reboots, such as after WSL setup, also, a few options to set in Docker Desktop. I've done similar with mac/homebrew.
From there, you have docker-compose and shell scripts to run against the projects... these scripts and the compose file(s) are the entry points into a project, actually documenting where things are, and how they connect (to an extent).
Effectively, getting a working solution running sooner than later. This is just my own opinion, but automating a dev environment for onboarding, especially if you're a larger org, is a great tactical decision.
Heavily seconding the “setup script” method for anything that can be scripted in lieu of documentation and handholding. I’ve done this at multiple companies and it proved valuable. Even if it eventually breaks it’s easy to fix, and it’s usually pretty self-documenting, so anyone who’s even a little curious what’s going on, they have access to all the “secrets” of how it’s being done (and can also improve it).
> If, as a manager, you want a more structured means of conveying institutional knowledge generated within such channels then it's on you to put that together
After having a stress-induced LAD heart attack at the age of 46, my cardiologist gave me the "you need to reduce stress" line and I responded with "Oh, so you're not going to send me a bill for that stent in order to help me reduce my stress?" Apparently he believed that my heart could handle the stress of that bill after all.
If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in a cursed timeline. Additionally if you think there are two kinds of jokes: those that were once funny and those that were never funny, then I suggest that your jokes were at best lazy. The human condition is pretty constant throughout the ages and those jokes that are aimed at such universal experiences continue to amuse for centuries or millennia.
Understandably the humor of the inexperienced 20-something will differ from that of the 40+ year-old. The simple and absolute world that we believe to see and understand in our younger years tends to vanish from our grasp as we become older and attain the wisdom of experience. Perhaps the author's belief that "it has been done already" reflects some of that wisdom, and just maybe those of a certain age at the time of the publishing of "Crap Towns" felt exactly the same way about his book. It seems, after all, that every generation believes that it is the first to do or discover a thing without considering that humans have been doing human things for an awfully long time and that the observation "there is nothing new under the sun" has some merit.
> If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in a cursed timeline.
This has literally always been the case. The topics have shifted, and some other details have changed, but in essence it's no difference. Try publishing a humorist book about, say, sex or religion in the 50s. Or the world wars, or maybe something that features gay characters. Or civil rights-type stuff (in US).
The counter culture did just that in trove by the end of the 50s and it had started long before. That was pretty much the whole point and it offended the polite society very much.
This is, unfortunately, the world that we live in right now. There are stand-up comedians who privately admit it’s almost impossible to do their jobs any more because of the faux outrage.
While not fully economic isolationism, there was a drive to turn the national focus away from looking outward to gazing at the national navel. Apollo, and much of NASA's ambitious projects, were cut short thanks to defunding in order to deploy those funds towards social projects such as the War on Poverty. The Malthusian worldview of those like Paul Ehrlich led to a system less interested in risk management and more interested in employing the precautionary principle. This often resulted in decisions that were more concerned about the negative aspects of the short term rather than the necessary transitions required to achieve long term goals.
If you are a customer you most assuredly have an actual relationship with the company. Your options when dissatisfied with that relationship is to end it, send your complaints to the company, or decide the dissatisfaction is overcome by the value you receive.