Today is the first day of the rest of your life

Yesterday, a Negro man in a piece of junk car pulled a quick lane change in front of me and nearly killed me. I swerved into the other lane which luckily was empty so other than spiking my hear rate, no harm was done. I was angry and in my anger I immediately knew him...straight from the streets of Harari, not used to our traffic, a refugee (probably of dubious origin here to make a quick buck at my social expense).
Snap, I had him in a moment. I blame Conan Doyle, I spent way too much time on that stuff as a child. Whatever the excuse for my stereotyping, a few hours later, I cut a guy off at a roundabout and he had to brake hard in the wet so he didnt hit my truck. Apparently it turns out I'm faulty too, and I wonder, what did he think of me?

I'm given to wonder sometimes at how faulty we are. Everyone suffers daily from hundreds of cognitive failures, unreasonable biases, a blindness of the past, an unfounded rosy outlook for the future. We are all immortal and we are all infallible and everybody else is ignorant and wrong.
We characterize those around us, neatly pigeon holing them into bands of friend or foe based on their skin colour, driving habits, the music they listen to, the hat they wear. Once you realise that, the world makes a lot more sense. A friend of mine says 'never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence' it's really very true. I don't know if he's quoting someone, and even if he did, my inherent source blindness makes it irrelevant in any case.
How then should we live with this knowledge? How can you design a traffic system, a web page, a government beurocracy that takes account of our universal ability to fail? As a collective we lurch through the universe leaving a trail of destruction behind us, broken people, economies and ecosystems - all of this the result of our inherent human flaws. The sum of our flaws is the system. We are defined by our errors, our ommissions and our deliberate attempts to undermine each other. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

Airport restrooms

Airports jangle the nerves at the best of times so why is it that every damned airport corporation seems to have somebody dedicated to the task of finding creative ways to make it worse. It's no wonder frequent flyers turn to drink. In the Melbourne domestic terminal they have even taken the step of installing vidscreens and speakers in the handryers with the entirely predictable result that people now avoid drying their hands lest the be visually assaulted with some idiotic government propoganda. To the legion of marketing guru's out there who think this and other similarly invasive ad techniques are a good idea I have a request, give us a fucking break. We are just trying to get to our next destination and we don't want to hear about your product as the price we have to pay for taking a piss. While I'm on the subject, to the toilet attendents in Dubai, you guys do realise that one of your KPI's is actually getting the sewerage out of the building, not flooding the building with it? Just a heads up there...