I see (at the time of this post) a regional person and a techno-geek respond to your comment, trying to disqualify it as not being universal (sorry globalist techno-geeks!), even though it is, measured by global magnitude.
But I am baffled by the reference to the toy maker? Who is that? Unless you mean Apple?
I founded a company that, in the 1990s, was implementing a Visa/Mastercard/(Amex, IBM, HP, Sun, RSA, Netscape) backed "Standard" for credit card payments. IBM had "invented" the spec's predecessor in Zurich Switzerland.
We were in Austin, Texas. Tiny, but scrappy. Our first customer was the largest card payment processor in Zurich Switzerland (blocks away from that IBM R&D lab!) and they were an IBM shop.
Somehow, we beat IBM in our toe-to-toe attempt to sell into that account. (Less marketing, and more sales "grit"). I asked their project leader later - "Why?". He said that at the end of the day, they knew that they were one of 100 IBM banking customers. And that they were our "first". When deploying "new" technology, they wanted a vendor that will kill themselves trying before they let the customer fail. They knew, simply, that we wanted, that we needed, their success more than IBM did...
This is actually a very interesting question that might take one down the rabbit hole.
Acquiring knowledge (I should say 'beliefs about valid knowledge') and brainstorming (and certainly collaboration and getting an advisor to adopt you) appear to be social activities, as much as purely logical and analytic activities.
Social activities like this, for social or herd creatures, are subject to flock or swarming patterns.
Maybe all the brilliant people are swarming around a locus of interest? It's certainly a good way to have the population explore the ins and outs of a, well, locus of interest. It's also a good way to have a loner get shunned by wandering off and poking at an uninteresting pile of dung.
I guess my point is: why not both? (Mathematically, statistically, egotistically, I know the idea that I am the foolish one is almost certainly more likely to be the case)
> But if someone just shows up to work and does nothing, then they're stealing from you and must be punished! It is human nature.
I do realize that far too many people put their faith in the healing power of judgement.
But that is partly because, as a component of that cognative circuit, is that most people have some sort of innate desire to see things as "fair". Certainly not to be the victim! (That's bigger, actually, by far).
People who work with people know who the slackers or the non-producers are. I try to separate those, because some high-output producers can appear to be slackers because they think for 8 days before they type that one magical line of code that saves the project. (It's hard to tell when you are in the trenches day-to-day which may be which).
In any case! (I almost got lost in my parenthetical there), Workers know which co-workers are getting paid to not produce, and know that this wage, applied to a producer would lower their own work load 10% (or whatever), and besides: it's NOT fair! He get's paid $100K/year to not work! And I work my ass off for the same wage! It's enough to make me stop working myself. That will certainly show "them".
At the end of the day, if we do not purge the slacker, morale-rot sets in on the rest of the team, and that's just "bad". Even without the needing to be punitive in our heart, those people must be culled for the continued positive morale of the herd.
Or, so, I thought once. Now - I'm not so sure. But it seemed reasonable at the time!
> Nevertheless I encounter research close to the second meaning you mentioned frequently.
Would you mind sharing the context?
I work in a field where the PR machine of my target "research" jumps ahead of the methodological reports. Then those reports are often vague (length limits?) about the details of their methodology. That makes me not trust much that I find - but I've got to have something - so I end up doing some sort of meta-analysis. It's time-consuming, exausting and frustrating - and has confidence-bars that might as well be non-existent - but without doing the on-the-ground fundamental-study - it's what I've got. For example - I just spent 60 hours over the last 4 days trying to triangulate a "probably correct-ish" value and range for a variable from a heck-of-a-lot of studies that didn't use the same methodology. Would that count as research in your book, or not?
Breaking the back of OPEC, plummeting the price of oil played no small factor. Even today, with the bounties of modern production tech, Saudi Arabia and Russia and Venezuela are hurting more than a little...
Here you mean "Manichean" to mean 'redemptive' in the moral-dualism sense? If not, what do you mean? (I want to make sure I am reading you as you intend)
Nation-states are not people. Nations have (temporary and shifting) alliances based on common shared interests -- not love.
Japan is a great ally. I lived there for over a decade, and I can say that I love the Japanese people. But I will admit - and their people of the WWII generation would too (although - sadly they are (have been) passing too quickly), it took a solid kick in the teeth to get them to calm down and cooperate.
Sometimes, with intense nation-state disagreement, things are settled at the point of a gun. Where there is a winner and a loser.
I like diplomacy as much (or more) than the next guy ... but it is irresponsible for a nation to be unprepared for when that doesn't work.
N.B. Fighting back after Pearl Harbor is a different kettle of fish than exporting democracy by force. We have no business doing the latter. It's obscene.
EDIT: I didn't downvote you. I appreciated your take on the query posed.
So... Like Heinlein? Post-WWII Cold War sentiment of that type was not uncommon. I/We (old people) looked at "big government" as something that collectivists (national socialists (nazis), fascists, international socialists (communists), socialists) did ... and without going all John Birch, even ignoring the air-raid sirens making you (uselessly) hide under your desks, it made one cynical about systems related to people pointing their nukes (back) at you...
But I am baffled by the reference to the toy maker? Who is that? Unless you mean Apple?