This is your last chance to win this very rare Mamba pistol!
https://www.fanathem.com/forgottenweapons
DEADLINE to ENTER is TONIGHT 12/20/24 @11:59 PM PST
The Mamba was a pistol that had a pretty decent design, but failed because of incompetent manufacturing. Today we are taking a look at a handful of surviving Mambas including the only know Green Mamba, courtesy of Val Forgett at Navy Arms. In addition, we have the minutes of a June 13, 1978 meeting of the whole Mamba team along with the senior Forgett and his factory manager. Those minutes really shed some light on why the project failed so badly. You can download the PDF and read them in full yourself here:
Mamba production meeting minutes [PDF]
Full video on Mamba history and development:
Joe Hale sounds like managers I have worked for. Full on blowhards with failure after failure, which people never were willing to shut down. The blowhards just go from company to company, making tons of money for themselves, but never producing a solid product.
Bart
It sounds like the Dilbert principle working as it should
those who can; do
those who can’t; become managers.
it’s nature’s way of getting them out of the way of productive people.
It’s also one of the roles of new start up businesses and the state sector.
Everyone else strokes the egos of their own very worst employees and encourages them to let their skills and abilities shine in the shiny new jobs with the shiny new companies.
Anywhere you have a hierarchy, you’ve got what I’d term “hierarchists”, people who don’t specialize in doing what the hierarchy is supposed to be doing, but who are actually specializing in “working the hierarchy”.
Every organization we’ve ever built as human beings inevitably succumbs to this innate failure-mode: The hierarchists eventually wind up running everything, and then choke the whole enterprise to death.
The only really major enterprises that humanity has accomplished without this creeping idiocy destroying them were things like the apparent rise of modern humanity out of Africa, the colonization of the Pacific by the Polynesians, and the colonization of the Americas by the people who apparently arrived after whatever it was that happened at the end of the Younger Dryas. None of that occurred with any form of identifiable program/hierarchy: There was no Polynesian equivalent to NASA, there was no “North America Company” run by Siberian entrepreneurs… It was all just inchoate humanity doing what it does best, with little cellular band organizations competing with each other.
I’m going to go out on a limb here, and point out that this syndrome of ours is exactly why we put man on the Moon some sixty-odd years ago, and haven’t been back once since the original program ended. Granted, there’s some similarity to the way the Europeans colonized the Americas, with the lag time between initial voyage of discovery and actual exploitation, but… I blame the tendency towards promoting hierarchists at NASA, and the utter bullshit they brought in. We should have had orbital stations above Mars, by now… Certainly, we should have had ones around the Earth and Moon, with ground stations exploiting lunar resources.
Leave it to the short-sighted exploiters of the hierarchy? You’re going nowhere. Leave off with the hierarchy? You just may wind up running entire continents.
Organization and hierarchy are powerful tools; misused, they’re worse than useless.