> Anyone can break up a showing of an enemy propaganda film by putting two or three dozen large moths in a paper bag. Take the bag to the movies with you, put it on the floor in an empty section of the theater as you go in and leave it open. The moths will fly out and climb into the projector beam, so that the film will be obscured by fluttering shadows.
How do you go about surreptitiously obtaining several dozen large moths?
this manual is several decades old. large moths (the size of your palm) used to be very common, and still are in some remote places. you could catch them easily near any lamp after sundown.
The Bay Area used to have cercropia moths in the surrounding foothills. They are enormous, 8" or more, and their wing flapping makes an incredible basso profondo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyalophora_cecropia
I haven't seen one in decades. No idea if there are any left.
Used to live in an attic in the presidio. Pretty sure one of these mfs flew into my face one time as I was on my phone, trying to read myself to sleep. Terrible experience.
Many of those guidelines are strikingly similar to what you find in pretty much most of big companies. Makes you wonder...
->
(10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
(11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways.
(13) Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.
Part of me wonders to what degree the authors of this were in on the joke. Bill Donovan was known to prefer independent-minded and creative people as OSS agents, and while the advice here is genuinely useful I wouldn’t be surprised if the authors were also intentionally satirizing the sorts of corporate and government bureaucracy that they had likely chafed against throughout their lives.
Local elections were especially contentious here in my city -- a former police officer switched to the GOP and lost, then in parallel a member of congress decided not to seek another term after it was pointed out he was in a cult.
Then on top of all that you had the presidential election.
I ended up reading a lot of Sun Tzu and python books because of it.
The above comments mentioned a "coup effort." An effort does not imply possession or control, only that an effort toward such an end was made, which it was, and which the Wikipedia article describes.
I don't know where you got the phrase "Trump's coup" from, but it wasn't from myself or the grandparent.
Given the severe shortages that existed in Germany by the end of the war I would imagine that even the most whimsical acts of small scale sabotage inflicted a surprising amount of pain.
> (1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
> (2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences...
> (3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five.
> (4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
> (5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
> (6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
So what you're telling me is my coworkers are all saboteurs!
Sounds like all my middle management meetings at Google. At least 10 people to make a decision, they all have the ability to veto, but none have approval authority.
"As early as 1973, the FBI was running a program aimed at securing information about reading habits of many library users; this program was ultimately called the "Library Awareness Program.... The FBI claimed that one of the major reasons this program was initiated was because hostile intelligence agents had been able to find some information that could be dangerous to the security of the United States. "
> you mean to tell me... the government has always wanted to know what I read? Call me shocked!
Not really:
> The FBI was particularly interested in learning this type of information about foreign diplomats or their agents.
> ...The area of greatest concern was the information at academic libraries that could be accessed through sophisticated databanks used for research. This point was illuminated by the report that a Soviet employee of the United Nations had been able to recruit a college student from Queens to obtain information at the library that was described as sensitive.
Wow, he's going on an on about keeping mung beans in jars, then I skip ahead and he's making homemade fuses for bombs? Then I noticed he's missing half his fingers on his right hand. WTF.
Most people you meet have at least some wacky ideas. I’m sure you do as well.
Yeah I agree guy was kinda nuts. Lol so what?
It’s the content that’s interesting. Didn’t see anyone else share something like that, so I did. He was one of the first in the “survivalist” movement, seemed relevant to the discussion as the document in the post was from a similar time period.
8. Arbitrarily assign points in sprints, making critical tasks more points.
9. Spend time “improving” the “UX” of your system. Use lots of metrics to justify hiding key functionality.
10. Tell everyone not to use code comments and make their code “self-commenting”.
11. Insist on 100% test coverage to waste time. Make most tests test the test suite and private methods.
12. Use O(n²) algorithms wherever possible, and ensure your test data sets are always small. Be sure to say you can’t replicate slowness when you close the ticket.
13. Delay updating software as long as possible. Never update to the latest version — if a new security fix comes out, deploy the old patch because the new one wasn’t audited. Disable automatic updates.
14. Validate data on the client side.
15. Never take tasks from an out-of-band request, no matter how easy or important. Always insist that tickets are properly triaged, assigned story points, and go through sprint planning first.
> 12. Use O(n²) algorithms wherever possible, and ensure your test data sets are always small. Be sure to say you can’t replicate slowness when you close the ticket.
hah, I saw some of that right here on HackerNews, on today's thread about someone cutting GTA's load time from 6 minutes to <2 with a few lines of code. A lot of stuff along the lines of "I can't believe you'd attack the engineers like that, they're just focusing on what's really important to the company"
Somewhat related, this cracked me up the other day:
> Mechanic tells crew what he found:
"Tank was out of fuel & broken down as you said. I found a leaking fuel line, timing belt snapped, puncture in oil reservoir & cracked radiator"
"A cracked radiator you say?" interjected one Russian soldier.
"Huh. I don't remember doing that."
> Anyone can break up a showing of an enemy propaganda film by putting two or three dozen large moths in a paper bag. Take the bag to the movies with you, put it on the floor in an empty section of the theater as you go in and leave it open. The moths will fly out and climb into the projector beam, so that the film will be obscured by fluttering shadows.
How do you go about surreptitiously obtaining several dozen large moths?