4 ms·
A few people seem to agree with me, so to flesh this out a bit: Not all of us are going to fly a unicorn to a glorious multi billionaire finish. Most of us wo
by gerdesj 4y ago
A few people seem to agree with me, so to flesh this out a bit:
Not all of us are going to fly a unicorn to a glorious multi billionaire finish. Most of us would like to be able to sleep at night, have a reasonably comfortable income and basically "get by". As this is HN, I will require a certain amount of "get up and go" but not too much!
I fell into the triumvirate thing 23 years ago. I became an IT contractor at a helicopter factory in the UK around 1996. Helpdesk n that. I learned quite a lot quite quickly and by 1999 ("party like it's") I was in the NETS team - sysadmin land. 2000 - we were Facility Managed off to ... ourselves and our company was started. I was recruited by two other NETS chaps to be the MD of their idea. It wasn't my idea.
So we have three blokes with equal shares of a nascent company. It works really well out of the box. Two can always gang up on one. We would have screaming arguments about direction or whatever but in the end there was always resolution.
23 years later, it still works. The three of us are quite different but we do completely trust each other. The trust thing is where my advice might become unhinged but the model is still very decent 8)
- Avshalom 4y ago>triumvirate thing There's a saying, I don't know if its actually old or not, along the lines of: go to sea with one watch or three the point being that with one watch you just accept whatever it says, with three you pick the closest two, but if you have two... fuck it man who knows: coin flip
- dmreedy 4y agoI like this one. The variant I'm familiar with is a little more open-ended, but I think about a lot. "A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never quite sure"
- totetsu 4y agoIf it's old, could it be about watches in the sense of a period of time that one person keeps watch on the ship. So the meaning is go by yourself or as three people. Not about teling the time.
- Avshalom 4y agoIt's about using clocks to compare local noon to Greenwich noon in order to calculate longitude. Thing is that about 50% of all English expressions relate to the British navy and the other 50% are falsely attributed to the British navy so it's hard to say if 1-or-3 was actually real advice.
- killjoywashere 4y agoNavy sailor here. Trained in celestial navigation. The 3 clocks thing is for real. On my first ship we still had mechanical clocks, on the theory that an EMP wouldn't bother them.
- cperciva 4y agoIs there any point knowing exactly where you are if the ship is dead in the water because all the electronics are fried?
- defrost 4y agoThat's an odd take. Captains have navigated oceans in rowboats to fetch rescue and survive mutiny. It all starts with knowing where you are and where you intend to go. Also: Ships aren't neccesarily killed by EMP - mechanical engines still work, they can be tuned by hand, rudders are operated by levers and hydraulics, these can be manually moved, etc.
- cperciva 4y agoYes, but the scenario where you're relying on a mechanical clock because it survived an EMP attack is the scenario where you're getting attacked with nuclear weapons. Which... I dunno, the idea of rowing to safety seems a bit implausible in that scenario? As for mechanical engines still working -- I would assume there's electronics in any modern hydrocarbon engines, for efficiency reasons (adjusting engine timing etc), never mind nuclear powered ships.
- bravura 4y agoDigging old quotes is actually one of the perfect ChatGPT use-cases: me: Quote along the lines of "go to sea with one watch or three" bot: "Take one watch or three, but always be on time." me: Origin? bot: This quote is often attributed to British admiral and explorer, Horatio Nelson. However, there is no definitive evidence to support this claim. It is possible that this phrase has evolved over time and has been adopted as a quote attributed to Nelson due to his association with naval and maritime history.
- anonymous_sorry 4y agoThis comment is the only Google hit I get for "take one watch or three". I suspect that quote should be attributed to ChatGPT.