doonesbury

If I had a no-paywall URL I'd give it. I love ft.com because it's harder hitting that many US publications in the same space. And here they are really onto to something.

It's inevitable.

Super nice. Thank you for posting.

Agree. And another thing: Brett talks too much.

An outstanding one-liner. Where/who's it from?

I am happy to read to a piece which gives friendly fire to the left and the right. We need more of these.

My own tired example "half of the fraud" is fiscal management: one-half focus only on income (via raising taxes) and the others on cutting expenses. No successful family or company does fiscal management this way. It's both sides, and it's even deeper than that: usually we need to re-assess the priorities which underpin expenses and taxing strategies. And fix those too. Heck, the GOP has even given up on talking the talk. Not even that is around anymore.

Like other commenters here outrage isn't an answer. Yes, it's the present currency for talking heads on TV and crap talkers on the radio. Like a Woody Allen movie without the humor or intellect or pretense of trying, each side tries extract more outrage, more anger, and to guilt the other side into change. It's stupid. As one corporate owner put it (paraphrasing) Americans prefer to be entertained than to deal better with the truth. So we play into this.

Why outrage? Because we have no agency in the present. We gotta fix that.

MLK had two easy outs: give up beating a dead horse, and open a barber shop or preach. Or payback. He, thankfully, chose the middle course. The middle course in America will travel through both political parties re-examining their political planks, since without them, they are lobbying fodder.

Oresteia - Aeschylus: is great read!

Whatever the root reason this is now conflict over control. Therefore you need to know your legal contractual options and obligations and his plus whatever poison pills or repercussions for out of contract behavior. Who owns the IP is key. What is that? No need to necessarily write here but to bolster your resolve. Now if the contract allows bad actors without downside risk ... There are no good answers except experience. Watch out for attrition by tying you up on legal fees. But then call BS on him not having buyout proceeds. Finally, maybe you need to press him and not let him set the context. Saying no is but one play his side. You can put him in a box too All this assumes an adversarial process. Good luck to you.

Agree! Let's not think leather shoes and shirt cuffs is always better. There's a long running issue with fee-for-service giving what the client wants. Ok to be fair to banks they could easily be value add but only if they face stiffer down side on fees when fraud, bs, and bad evals happen earning indeed commanding those fees on the upside or average case. It's separating risk from reward that is the issue largely.

I worked at Broderbund testing this. Hired out of an arcade by a Broderbund guy in San Rafael.

Thank you for bringing smarter, better information. I stand corrected then.

a^4 = b^2 = 1, a^3 b = ba has exactly eight elements

I suppose the missing issue (or at least the one I feel could have had more sunshine on it) is how and why elements of the monster groups are represented as this would more subtly capture the symmetry that keeps the group finite. It's not so much symmetry as a subject unto itself, as the subtle interplay between group operations on the form of elements with symmetry that keeps the group finite.

Your term "a^4=1" has exactly that missing emphasis: take element 'a' (i.e. a square) and rotate it four times and it's the same as multiplying a by 1, which is the identity element. Ditto b^2: perform the mirror operation twice and again it's the same as doing b*1 etc.

When I wrote:

"then you can do line symmetry of (a+b)+c through c and on and on an on and on ... until at some point you've played through all the symmetry on all the permutation and choices of elements until it goes back into something you started with earlier. Extending the analogy monster groups have rotation, translate, mirror, and zillion other kinds of symmetries ..."

That's slightly misleading. What I should have wrote is starting with two random elements in the set a,b form c=a+b. Almost always this will yield a new, distinct element in the set c. So throw c into the set and repeat trying all permutations and combinations getting d,e,f,...z.

At some point the symmetry in the monster group will overtake insuring that, because of symmetry, a subsequent operation on z will transform it equal an earlier element. Thus the monster group maintains an interesting ultimate boundary where all elements eventually through symmetry revert back to an earlier form.

In the article's 90deg rotation analogy on 2D squares, we can rotate a to b to c thus making 3 distinct squares (if we label their corners), however, upon rotating c again we get back to a. In monster groups it takes a longer run to revert.

I suppose it's worth emphasizing monster groups of finite size can only exist in a few variations. And between two monster groups M,O there is no in-between group N. It's definitely discrete in that sense.

understanding that the reads or sequences are long

So why slice and replicate slices? All that makes more noise. The wikipedia seems to suggest (or I infer) that one can't merely "just read of" the base pairs in QWERTYUIOP through some super cool process and be done with it. No, I have to split QWERTYUIOP into chunks and replicate the hell out of the resulting chunks which just re-asks my question. I mean how is QWERTYUIOPQWERTYUIOP not a reasonable outcome?

I'm still missing something fundamental. The more chunks there are, the more permutations, combinations there are in possible re-assembly up to all the power sets of base pairs. Granted, it may not be possible to make complex simple here. So that thank you for your time and effort.

Good question. I think I screwed up a bit, and typed things up too fast.

For multiplication the identity element is 1, and therefore inverses relate to 1 not 0 like addition.

So what 'a' makes a*0 = 1? There is no such element and it has to be excluded as per other comments.

I really do like Quanta Magazine but it sometimes bogs down in background for 75% of the article hardly saying anything about the subject in hand. Anything vaguely concerning groups-physics seems to come with the same lukewarm re-review of symmetry. They ought to hit that once and or for all then give a link to it spending the majority of their time on the subject at hand. I'm also a bit jealous of the writers here: they seems to have fun job and I'd like to interview the same guys/gals and I'd love to type something up too.

The Langlands Programme was an effort in group theory to develop a representation (a way to generate all the elements in a group as far as I understand it) for all possible groups. Groups depend both on the operation and the elements it operates over. Groups satisfy the four definitional requirements. Assume addition here:

- If 'a' is an element in the group there must be another element 'e' such that a+e=a. e.g. 2+0=2

- If 'a' is in the group there must be another element in the group 'b' such that a+b=e e.g. 2 + (-2) = 0. This is the inverse requirement.

- The group operation must be associative a+(b+c) = (a+b)+c

- If 'a,b' is in the group then c=a+b and 'c' must be in the group. This is called closure

- If, optionally, a+b = b+c then the group is called Abelian. Notably when a,b are matrices and instead of addition we do multiplication ab <> ba generally. So being Abelian is hardly automatic.

If you try to make a group on the addition operator using only whole numbers you'll soon see you'll break the inverse requirement e.g. for some whole number 'a' there's no other whole number 'b' s.t. a+b=0. You'll need the negative of the whole numbers too. Therefore grade school arithmetic addition is a group on (+,Z) where Z is all integers.

Note that the number of elements in Z is infinite. You'll get the same sort of infinite sets trying addition over complex numbers, or reals, or fractions some being countably infinite and some being uncountably infinite.

Returning to the monster groups, how do we get a group with a finite number of elements in it? Well, there's a pseudo way to do this: define addition (or your operation in general) to work over a modulus. So we could define Abelian addition over the three elements 0,1,2 like this:

0+0 = 0

0+1 = 1

0+2 = 2

1+0 = 0

1+1 = 2

1+2 = 0 we wrap mod 3

2+0 = 2

2+1 = 0

2+2 = 1 e.g. 2+1+1 = 0 + 1 = 1

Ok, what do we add to 1 to get 0 for inverse? What's 1's inverse? It's 2 since 1+2=0 and 0 is the identity element. Other examples can be worked out from above. And because it's Abelian we can reverse the order of the elements in the example and get the same thing.

Typically these kind of mod groups like this mod-3 example can be done mod-N where N is a prime. Granted, it's a trick to make closure work without having one's hand forced through in an infinite number of more elements.

Thus most of the possible groups are either of the (+,Z) form addition over Z, (.,R) multiplication over reals, (+,C) addition of complex numbers kind etc. And the second major swath are groups operating over a prime modulus.

Is that it? No! The Langlands programme found there are indeed other groups which have a finite number of elements but in a way that's not contrived like the modulus example. To get a finite number of elements in a non-contrived way requires symmetry. You start with 'e' and two other elements you like a,b. As you try a+e, b+e, a+b check to see if you get resultant elements in your group. If no, throw that in. And repeat.

Now, for a while all you do is get more and more elements until suddenly because of symmetry, you don't. There's something in the nature of the elements and the operations whereby they only transform themselves into unique elements up to some point then they don't.

This is why the article plays up symmetry without really saying why. Imagine a+b means rotate a by b. Then you can do line symmetry of (a+b)+c through c and on and on an on and on ... until at some point you've played through all the symmetry on all the permutation and choices of elements until it goes back into something you started with earlier. Extending the analogy monster groups have rotation, translate, mirror, and zillion other kinds of symmetries ...

The monster groups thus are finite groups where symmetry is in play except that takes a huge number of elements -- the article mentions 10^53, a monster sized number --- at which point there's no new uniqueness. Evidently then (Z+) lacks the symmetry of these monster groups since you need an infinite number of elements there.

I can't answer in any detail how that carries over to physics except to repeat that physics people have seen the same math forms in monster groups in their theories. I also cannot answer what operation is in play in the monster groups --- well in most cases in algebra on these kinds of questions --- the group operation gets less focus. More focus goes on the form of the elements.

I don't know what an element of the monster group looks like. It almost certainly is not a single number ... it's a more complex thing like a matrix. I do know there's some ~25 monster groups ... so this process of it gets bigger until it doesn't happens in a few variations collectively called the sporadic groups. Sporadic in the sense there are but a few of them and they differ tremendously in the number of elements in their respective groups.

As far as I know the Langlands programme is done: all possible forms have been found. Thus since Mother Nature likes, for example Linear algebra, since it follows it in QM, and since sporadic groups are applicable to linear algebra maybe there's new physics there. The Standard Model is built-on Linear Algebra well in the case of non-countable infinite groups ... so the tantalizing question is: are there hidden gems in algebra of sporadic groups which we are less familiar?

I'm gonna try this link out and see where it goes. Thank you.

I would be eternally grateful to a bio-chem person to explain two facets of DNA sequencing I've never understood. To motivate the question a short quote from Wikipedia:

"For longer targets such as chromosomes, common approaches consist of cutting (with restriction enzymes) or shearing (with mechanical forces) large DNA fragments into shorter DNA fragments. The fragmented DNA may then be cloned into a DNA vector and amplified in a bacterial host such as Escherichia coli. "

Two questions:

1) OK, we cut up the DNA and replicate it. How in the heck do we assemble the pieces together to restore the original ordering? I've got three pieces A,B,C. How do I know it was originally ABC or CBA or BAC etc? I can correctly sequence a piece ... but what I want is the sequence of all base-pairs in their original order. How on earth do they do that?

2) DNA spends most of its time wrapped up around histones. How do does one get it off the histones for access to sequencing?

3) Less interesting: unless we sequence the whole chromosome researches must pick off a piece ... how do we know which piece to pick off and how do we know where it's crammed around the histones?

The post you reply to states that PRC sits on top law and that the law is designed to prop up its political power. When the two conflict the law is changed accordingly to the benefit of the PRC, although I'm sure they are nuanced enough to keep sea-changes to a minimum. Nevertheless it's there.

In the US that is not the case. Even in today's climate the Federal system does not have infinite reach into States ex. certification of 2020 vote. And there's yet broad independence and some institutional credibility e.g. Supreme court left.

However, it is applied inconsistently. The only recent decision out of SCOTUS that I think was seriously flawed was ACA: the imposition of a fee to have no health insurance was a tax. The court should have referred it back to the legislative branch for correction at its control. But even here, due process is broadly a real thing. I've also seen questionable court decisions in my personal life. I'm not enthused by the Citizen's United ruling either. However, the Congress has allowed and preferred less oversight on political speech.

In the large US corporations and the top 1% are not held accountable to the extent they should. (I am American). This broad trend started in the 2000s combined with Congress' lack of institutional credibility over the last 30 years to make a power vacuum. At the 1 million foot level, a person once argued power comes from tradition, or institutions, or personal. That vacuum that was filled by Trump's personal brand of power. Correct: his brand is no Steve Jobs, Buffet's, MLKs, or anything good. But it is power. Trump further eroded Washington's institutional power bringing it to a new low.

Wells Fargo opened up credit cards in client's names. After years of festering, the old CEO left because of this. But no criminal charges were filed. If you or I did that, I don't think we could run and hide or use shareholder cash for corporate lawyers to blunt the AG. Ditto the 2008 financial crisis: corporations got bailouts and did not face jail time under criminal convictions. These are examples of a widely complex systemic failure that probably shares blame in Congressional lobbying, corporation power, SEC failure to exact anything much more than lukewarm fines, and DOJ and State's failure to get the goods and bust the wrong doers. On top of this Congress has been no help. Another facet to this problem is the Stiglitz's observation that by defining corporation's mission as maximizing shareholder value, they have perversely come up with rhetoric that really serves to enrich themselves going a good way to explain the stupid difference between the bottom and top income rates. Further much their income is not W2 taxable, where it's hard to hide from the tax man.

Human law is not exact. Even in the most controlled, most precise, most repeatable processes e.g. statistically controlled manufacturing processes mainly in the realm of the electro-magnetic force ala condensed matter physics, there is standard deviation. And it's random. So we cannot bust the entire American system as fatally flawed because of a few bad outcomes at the personal, corporate, or country level.

Nevertheless the number of unjust outcomes where the law is more equitable to some, is a trend that's been notable, sustained, long, and extensively commented on. We know it stinks. And it's made worse socially and civilly with outsourcing to the far east and the two major political parties siding more and more with corporations. Rising healthcare costs, university costs hasn't helped either. Rising home costs associated with better K-12 schools is another big problem. Here we Americans need and deserve friendly fire: it would not kill us to rein in the excesses of money and lack of action against those with money to bring the pendulum back in the middle. And here we are stuck, flailing. It's pathetic.

Getting this back in the middle is not socialism, a repudiation of capitalism and the other variations on the same which are buttressed by vapid emotional outrage, and crap talking.

We know better: unlike the PRC there's plenty of outcry although true enough it's not translating into action. Unlike mathematics where the law of the excluded middle makes sense, we need the middle in human affairs. Perhaps the largest damage Trump has done and has further inflamed is removing the reasonable middle leaving two dumb options left over:

- go way left

- go way right

Both suck. It takes more brains, more backbone, a smarter mind, and better communication skills to keep things in balance than the bomb throwing, crap talking, lying that Trump is an expert in but which both political parties here are increasingly succumbing to. The middle in the vapid environment now looks like a cop-out to both sides. It's most definitely not.

In today's world of no pragmatic American common sense the only going currency is outrage, and talking about what we'll do in the next election e.g. in the perpetual future broad admission our institutions are lost. Do we really need to argue about who controls the paperwork for health insurance? Maybe one day. But what in the hell is the government doing today to get first and second derivative negative on health care costs? Does Congress need a balanced budget? No. We don't need a balanced budget amendment either. Running a 20-35% of GDP debt is OK. We're way north of 20% BTW ... But you can't get the morons in DC to see that closing the gap requires both MORE tax income and LESS expenditures. That requires competent management to set better priorities and a 15yr plan to right the ship. And for all the MBA's around here, we don't have it today.

Well stated. Thank you.

I like this comment a lot. It's new perspective here. Of course capitalism is great. The US is only 25% of China's population and still we produce well. China copied of lot of capitalism. Silicon valley is hard to replicate in other countries. But we Americans (I'm one at an American company) do have a penchant for confusing R&D and longer term investment distorting it through the lens of a short term bean counting dollar mentality. Usually in the medium to longer term is the loss of customers and market credibility by anemic products of crappy quality. And as far as that goes hasn't this been talked into the ground through the 1990s under the broad topics of SPC and TQM? I could mention pithy quotes from Iacocca, Ishikawa, Deming, Drucker and so on but I wont. To compete world wide usually requires deep knowledge in teams, organizations that lead to client centered services that require mature processes and engineering talent to build. You cannot buy that. That deep knowledge helps demarcate build vs buy.

Let me mention one story here to make the point in the small. During the 80s/90s HP did selectively less OEM work. They bought Fujitsu wave soldering and pick n place machines. That is something like 1million per line. That kind of equipment comes with a serious stack of user manuals. HP threw those out and provided their own set with training. Why? Any fool can plunk down money. Smart OEMs needed a way to get their line engineers to "know how the line thinks" and to move jobs in and out of the line smoothly in an integrated process with attention to spc, quality and metrics tracking. Yes they bought but not by going ignorant.

Like the post, and use of definitional concepts. Useful. Thank you.

Amen to that! Giving a damn is absolutely needed. See longer response elsewhere this comment section.

Interesting read. Coincidentally this is a current conversation at our office (10K+ FTEs): use/extend open-source or develop institutional proficiency at aspects of distributed computing?

Ours is the usual case: we have homegrown brokered message queues plus Kafka and 21 more. We have homegrown single-master replicated DB, but also use DB2, Oracle, Postgres, MySql. We have private in-core caches with speciality code to knit together data and also use Memcache, Redis. Some of that code is installed from DPKGs; some if it slightly edited code and installed as service so internal users aren't bothered with the icky-details.

We have the Jekyll & Hyde behavior mentioned in OP's write-up and from commenters: on stuff considered core to the company and clients for a sufficiently complex system, we're not going to rely on 3rd party trouble ticketing systems and support. It's in-house. But that resolve falls away in stages and never lasts. We also have people who strongly push the business practical side: we're not here to write Azure or Kafka. We're here to make business apps. Get focused, and get client focused. That comes with an interesting blend of boredom and brand awareness gone wrong: I looked around & I saw or heard people in Dept X are working on caching solutions so ... what'd be the point of you doing it?

Now, here's the interesting question: suppose we needed a distributed ledger (without blockchain) or we needed 2PC for some homegrown caching. Now what? Do we write that in-house as a reusable components? Dig it out of PG or MySql code if they have it and we know were to look? Suppose we make a business case to upgrade a cluster to kernel bypass NICs. Should we go into Redis and self-modify the code to support that I/O path? No? Frankly, what then is the purpose of a CS guy/gal with a MS in distributed computing otherwise?

My own perspective on this:

- The first 1/3rd of this back and forth is the proxy conversation that flies above reality which is more about risk management and perception of failure i.e. company reputation & gossip mongering.

- The second 1/3rd of this is what people talk about because we can't talk about the underlying CS concepts. Most company employees usually have no ability to formally describe, or otherwise even sketch 2PC giving pseudo-code for it on a whiteboard. Or take this another way: see if you can get your lead on your homegrown replicated DB to explain how it works and why it works like we'd see in a senior level CS class: clear, specific, and yet abstract enough not be talking about superfluous implementation details. Can the audience understand it?

- Insufficient grounding in customer needs so one can better determine what clients really need, and what's lacking in the current offerings. Failure here will send you on goose chases to no where.

Gedanken experiment: you and I start a new software company broadly in distributed ledgers, caches. We are able to get 25% of MS' distributed computing leads --- not all --- but none of these guys and gals are slouches. What now? Do we write it in house or expand and extend some IBM offering? The the difference is we have talent, and there's some reason to believe they can deal with a distributed system's worth of risk.

To end this with humor, here's a nice analogy I once heard: On a Saturday, mom and dad were sick of the noise of their three kids. And the house was a mess. So they send them outdoors to work their energy off. At sunset the house is clean, and they're sitting on the porch watching the sun go down over some wine. They see the kids coming back: they are filthy dirty. They see work: all 3 kids needs baths. The clothes have to be washed. And they'll probably destroy the bathrooms they just cleaned. So the father looks at the mother and says: As I see it, we could clean these kids up or make a new one. Not sure if making a new one is wisdom, but it's a hell of a lot more fun.

Some financial service providers (i.e. those who do NOT buy low sell high) might try to move into the custodial market. Assessing the risk there is beyond my pay grade I don't know how smart that'd be ... but we can observe it's not common. If that did happen clients could use that provider's IT system to do trading and voila since all data is at one provider, some kinds of reconciliation is easier. In short, market consolidation.

There's tactical steps too that can partially overcome the independent IT systems, say, getting the custodian to send data realtime, sending it realtime on the trader's behalf to the recon entity ... I'm not sure what custodial service provides think about that ... presumably they would if they could probably hampered by their own IT systems like the rest of us.

The final approach is what appears immediately above: traders and custodians --- generally any set of business entities N who need to compose data --- publish to a virtual shared DB. I'm gonna read the white papers and follow-up afterwards.

The PDF https://github.com/rodgarrison/tla_note1/blob/main/doc/tla.p... will do much better.

TLA is an acronym for Temporal Logic of Actions originally written by L. Lamport of PAXOS fame. The PDF contains numerous links to videos, books, docs, because TLA is widely supported and used.

TLA is like SPIN (http://spinroot.com/spin/whatispin.html) another well known model checker based on Promula not TLA syntax. And these tools fit into a larger universe of formal verification including, for example, COQ, Isabelle, Verdi, Dafny. The purpose of these tools (indeed they are all toolsets) is to:

- allow one to precisely state what safety and liveness properties a system should have. Sometimes we don't even know what those conditions are until we sit down and try typing it up.

- find counter examples to those safety, liveness conditions e.g. does my buffer overflow? did I deadlock? is one of my threads waiting forever? did my account balance ever go wrong? where? why?

People like these tools esp. for concurrent and distributed work where the program paths, call sequences is highly exponential and highly combinatorial and where one wants some assurance all the threads really work and get to the right post conditions and system behaviors.

Right ... the underlying issue here is that we have N entities each with their own IT systems. There is a serious and direct dependency between them in order to carry out daily trading as my custodial example shows. The way out is to have a realtime event feed between the two which requires a common serialization format, securityIds, accounts, etc. etc. Not even JPM or BNY has this so far as I know on the custodian side before we even entertain what trader X's company might have.

Therefore what tends to happen is ETL's where some middle-system imports the trader's and custodian views and tries to reconcile. Note these views are often only available after batch processes run at the end of the day ... The problems are ... tons:

- Even FIX/Swift etc. messages are prone to incomplete interpretation and mis-usage the latter hard to change once it's baked in. Setting up yet another format is a huge ask.

- Each end of the work invariably has a slightly different data model so even if one did get the data it's not like there's a memcmp of two structs at the bottom somewhere

- As I say blockchain w/ POW is not only slow, there are oodles of privacy concerns. And even if you tech'd that out blockchain would be a Merkle wrapper of something like a CSV/FIX/Omgeo/Swift message ... and what's the point then of all that crypto nonsense? Better to have a direct HTTPs connection, and skip the crypto work.

However, if counter-parties could somehow get messages from the exchange at the time the trade is done and forwarded something to the trader and counter-party (granted encroaching on the some $100 billion/yr custodian business) that might help. Indeed, other writers here make a good point: trading through exchanges is nice. Post-trade sucks.

Consider the case of a trader (trading firm) with a custodian bank. What's the best way to reconcile the custodian's view with one's own trading system and its backend? Recall this is important because, as the custodian does settlement, the trader doesn't want to purchase instruments with cash the custodian doesn't think it has nor purchase shares the custodian bank thinks it already has. Keeping these two matched is a real, pressing, daily problem.

Blockchain I think is an impractical, over-hyped solution that has no purchase in Fintech or even classical finance.

I continue to be unimpressed by articles on teams, team building in Hackernews. This article is another one. It seems more like sales and marketing article, and as a sales and marketing writeup, it is a very thin veneer with foggy bits of truth that doesn't move the bar at all.

If you want to quit messing around with fog and "hit it" right, directly, and fundamentally, then buy two books:

- Human Element: https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Estee...

- Total Quality Management the Japanese Way: https://www.amazon.com/What-Total-Quality-Control-Management...

That's what? Not even $10 total for used copies. Can't beat that! Here's why these are good books:

The Human Element book cuts through all the crap on teams, on why they work, why they don't. The central thesis: Teams are broken by individuals. Individuals are broken when they engage in defensive, fixed, unchanging behavior. And that modality happens when the context in which the individual works hits their self esteem negatively. If the individual lacks self-awareness their coping behaviors and ability to learn, change is significantly reduced. Then what behavior you'll see will make things worse. This ought to strike you as real: a manager's worse assignee is a person with whom they've had "the talk" but things don't change. Human Element is also extremely operational in nature: it provides a toolset to do, to engage, to measure, to check, and to move on beyond stuck. Once you get this, you'll be far better able to place the OP's piece in context to greater effect.

On the Ishikawa book (TQM the Japanese way) don't get too focused on "Japan", although during the 80s/90s Japan was kicking butt. In Japan the highest award for organizational and quality excellence is the Deming Award. Deming was an American who was well received in Japan. So what's at work here really are universal truths for all human organizations. It deals with teams in the larger context of human organizations. In software company culture is all the more important. TQM's focus is what quality means. Quality like "international relations" or "global economy" immediately comes with notions on what it means. But when you drill in to it, the certainty turns into its own kind of fog. This book helps you press your understanding to getting down to fundamentals that companies will never outgrow.

Both books are short reads. And very information packed. The TQM book was extremely well translated from Japanese; I applaud the translator. Ishikawa would be considered an industry leader, and an excellent example of a manager with Drucker know-how but real, on the job experience in manufacturing.

Exactly - I am also left handed. I hope my guitar practice, which I just picked up, will help train my fingers out of octopus mode where they go everywhere. That'll help a bit.

Agree! Like a Judge I was thinking: obviously there is a payment dispute since otherwise why would I be reading pleadings? But where in hell does it say what IT is?

The whole long story behind the dispute may be interesting for the writer of the story, but not in general. And those with long history, or institutional history by now the N+1th version of yet another dispute is not inherently interesting.

What is interesting is the OP's link may have discovered new area in the solution space. So please talk about that!