To add, such readily identifiable groups need not be long established or derive from previously well known categorizations of reality. It is enough that they be sufficiently obvious and readily identifiable to all concerned; the ensuing dynamic is the same. Here is a recent example. For 4 or 5 months the previous autumn and winter, we ha…
To add, such readily identifiable groups need not be long established or derive from previously well known categorizations of reality. It is enough that they be sufficiently obvious and readily identifiable to all concerned; the ensuing dynamic is the same. Here is a recent example. For 4 or 5 months the previous autumn and winter, we had massive load shedding for reasons not germane to this discussion. The utility company serving the city where I live split household electricity consumers into three groups, put up a rolling schedule, and at any given time one to two groups (depending on how severe extraneously imposed power constraints happened to be on a given day) were unpowered. Technically this meant switching off power delivery to last mile substations, each serving on the order of 10,000 households and regular consumer-oriented businesses such as grocery shops. Certain critical facilities such as hospitals, sewage pumping stations, communications hubs, the subway and so on were not unpowered, which was reasonable, easily understood by everyone and uncontroversial. Now the intention was to have the groups approximately equal in size, and from what I saw this was done as closely as reasonably possible without large changes in pre-existing wiring. However, Soviet and especially post-Soviet construction was a hap-hazard business in practice and builders sometimes connected new apartment blocks to whatever last-mile electrical distribution points happened to be most convenient, rather than what rules prescribed, and quite a number of apartment blocks ended up wired together with hospitals, phone exchanges and other such critical facilities. Nobody except electricians had any idea that this was the case, or would have cared a bent nickel about it, but once load shedding kicked in, it became glaringly obvious: every night these apartment blocks stood out shining in a lake of darkness and faint portable LED lights. This instantly created _readily identifiable groups_, and soon there was much bad blood about it, with people loudly demanding on social media that all such apartment blocks be somehow cut off and reconnected so that they'd sit in the dark like their neighbors. It was hardly reasonable to demand costly utility works for such a trivial reason and to castigate the inhabitants of those apartment blocks as if they were responsible for having ended up with their lights on, but there it was. It did not help that people had well founded suspicions that, at least initially, certain upscale neighborhoods were exempt for reasons unrelated to the realities of on-the-ground electrical infrastructure, and even when all such instances were discovered and eliminated, with at least a fraction of noisy people it proved impossible to persuade them that there was no behind-the-scenes play involved, that the reasons were really technical, and that the situation could not be corrected (if it could even be said to have been _wrong_ before) in a hurry just so that some people wouldn't have easy targets for envious vituperation. The majority of people accepted the situation as it was, whether from stoicism, fatalism, or perforce, but it did not improve anyone's digestion. I confess to having had to suppress stirrings of envy myself when I looked out of my dark windows. Fortunately, as long as relevant authorities can afford to ignore it, social media are the perfect relief valve for people most prone to such vituperation, and (despite hopes entertained in some quarters) nothing bad came of it except some ulcers, but one should remember that the cause was extremely trivial compared to ones being discussed in the OP post and comments.
Please, please, please do not use an acronym unless it is well-known to your audience. If you are commenting on a stock market blog, you can assume everyone there knows that SEC is the Security and Exchange Commission. Perhaps I am obtuse but I did not know what RIM means and after reading your comment still do not. Nothing at Acronym Finder seemed to fit.
> The root of the problem is that it's very easy to persuade people who belong to readily identifiable groups
> RIGs
I introduced it to avoid tedious repetition. Perhaps I am too used to technical writing where new notation is introduced whenever it seems to be called for. I will edit the comment to eliminate it.
To add, such readily identifiable groups need not be long established or derive from previously well known categorizations of reality. It is enough that they be sufficiently obvious and readily identifiable to all concerned; the ensuing dynamic is the same. Here is a recent example. For 4 or 5 months the previous autumn and winter, we had massive load shedding for reasons not germane to this discussion. The utility company serving the city where I live split household electricity consumers into three groups, put up a rolling schedule, and at any given time one to two groups (depending on how severe extraneously imposed power constraints happened to be on a given day) were unpowered. Technically this meant switching off power delivery to last mile substations, each serving on the order of 10,000 households and regular consumer-oriented businesses such as grocery shops. Certain critical facilities such as hospitals, sewage pumping stations, communications hubs, the subway and so on were not unpowered, which was reasonable, easily understood by everyone and uncontroversial. Now the intention was to have the groups approximately equal in size, and from what I saw this was done as closely as reasonably possible without large changes in pre-existing wiring. However, Soviet and especially post-Soviet construction was a hap-hazard business in practice and builders sometimes connected new apartment blocks to whatever last-mile electrical distribution points happened to be most convenient, rather than what rules prescribed, and quite a number of apartment blocks ended up wired together with hospitals, phone exchanges and other such critical facilities. Nobody except electricians had any idea that this was the case, or would have cared a bent nickel about it, but once load shedding kicked in, it became glaringly obvious: every night these apartment blocks stood out shining in a lake of darkness and faint portable LED lights. This instantly created _readily identifiable groups_, and soon there was much bad blood about it, with people loudly demanding on social media that all such apartment blocks be somehow cut off and reconnected so that they'd sit in the dark like their neighbors. It was hardly reasonable to demand costly utility works for such a trivial reason and to castigate the inhabitants of those apartment blocks as if they were responsible for having ended up with their lights on, but there it was. It did not help that people had well founded suspicions that, at least initially, certain upscale neighborhoods were exempt for reasons unrelated to the realities of on-the-ground electrical infrastructure, and even when all such instances were discovered and eliminated, with at least a fraction of noisy people it proved impossible to persuade them that there was no behind-the-scenes play involved, that the reasons were really technical, and that the situation could not be corrected (if it could even be said to have been _wrong_ before) in a hurry just so that some people wouldn't have easy targets for envious vituperation. The majority of people accepted the situation as it was, whether from stoicism, fatalism, or perforce, but it did not improve anyone's digestion. I confess to having had to suppress stirrings of envy myself when I looked out of my dark windows. Fortunately, as long as relevant authorities can afford to ignore it, social media are the perfect relief valve for people most prone to such vituperation, and (despite hopes entertained in some quarters) nothing bad came of it except some ulcers, but one should remember that the cause was extremely trivial compared to ones being discussed in the OP post and comments.
Please, please, please do not use an acronym unless it is well-known to your audience. If you are commenting on a stock market blog, you can assume everyone there knows that SEC is the Security and Exchange Commission. Perhaps I am obtuse but I did not know what RIM means and after reading your comment still do not. Nothing at Acronym Finder seemed to fit.
> The root of the problem is that it's very easy to persuade people who belong to readily identifiable groups
> RIGs
I introduced it to avoid tedious repetition. Perhaps I am too used to technical writing where new notation is introduced whenever it seems to be called for. I will edit the comment to eliminate it.
Thanks.