Author Topic: A philosophical question - Is lateral thinking a valued trait in engineering?  (Read 8218 times)

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Offline Nominal Animal

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I do not know of any jobs where a specific personality type was a requirement, or more useful than say personal motivation and interest.
I don't know, I think narcissistic megalomania and psychopathy are pretty much prerequisite personality traits for any actual or 'want to be' totalitarian dictator.
Actually, no.  You see, they can be considered personality disorders that develop when a single person is given too much power, and incentives to twist that way.

It also explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  If you give a human totalitarian powers, there is a very high chance they become a totalitarian dictator and an utter dick, no matter how good their initial intent.
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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In a work environment, you see something similar between bosses who lead from the front, and the bosses who lead from the back.
 

Offline e100Topic starter

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My innate suspicion on encountering the sort of person who starts with telling you "I'm good at lateral thinking" is that they have left out the second half of the sentence "but I'm terrible at logical thinking or actually getting on and doing something".   >:D

If you were stuck on a particular engineering problem and such a person offered to help you find a solution, would you automatically reject their offer because of your suspicions? The consequence of rejecting that offer could be that you never find a solution, or it takes much longer to find a solution.

I think I've just created a new catch phase, I shall call it "anti-engineering" - the processes by which you fail to achieve an engineering goal because you distrust or dislike someone and therefore you avoid them even though they may be able to help you.


On a related theme there seems to be a correlation between people who have achieved guru status in their particular field and a reluctance to have an open mind to new or alternative ways of doing things. Some of that is due to the ageing process, as we get older we become risk adverse but there's more to it than that. I'm a guru of nothing so am happy to listen to anyone. I reserve the right to reject their advice, but at least I make an effort to listen. Is it not better to have an open mind rather than a closed mind?
« Last Edit: March 01, 2022, 05:01:31 pm by e100 »
 
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Offline Nominal Animal

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My innate suspicion on encountering the sort of person who starts with telling you "I'm good at lateral thinking" is that they have left out the second half of the sentence "but I'm terrible at logical thinking or actually getting on and doing something".   >:D
If you were stuck on a particular engineering problem and such a person offered to help you find a solution, would you automatically reject their offer because of your suspicions? The consequence of rejecting that offer could be that you never find a solution, or it takes much longer to find a solution.
You mean, like "Have you tried turning it off and then on again?"

Or perhaps "I use crystals to cleanse the vibrations in my body.  Perhaps you could do the same here?"

On a related theme there seems to be a correlation between people who have achieved guru status in their particular field and a reluctance to have an open mind to new or alternative ways of doing things.
No, that's what social games and confusing popularity with usefulness/experience/correctness leads to.
 

Offline fourfathom

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On a related theme there seems to be a correlation between people who have achieved guru status in their particular field and a reluctance to have an open mind to new or alternative ways of doing things.

Not in my experience.  The recognized gurus I've known were smart, curious, creative, and experienced.  By their very nature they were open to new ideas.
We'll search out every place a sick, twisted, solitary misfit might run to! -- I'll start with Radio Shack.
 

Offline Cerebus

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My innate suspicion on encountering the sort of person who starts with telling you "I'm good at lateral thinking" is that they have left out the second half of the sentence "but I'm terrible at logical thinking or actually getting on and doing something".   >:D

If you were stuck on a particular engineering problem and such a person offered to help you find a solution, would you automatically reject their offer because of your suspicions? The consequence of rejecting that offer could be that you never find a solution, or it takes much longer to find a solution.

I think I've just created a new catch phase, I shall call it "anti-engineering" - the processes by which you fail to achieve an engineering goal because you distrust or dislike someone and therefore you avoid them even though they may be able to help you.

I haven't suggested anything like that, you've put words in my mouth by hugely extrapolating from something that, quite obviously, is a mere quip. Moreover, you've suggested that a mere suspicion would motivate me to reject someone's help. It wouldn't, my judgement would only be formed by the quality of their suggestions, not a mere initial suspicion. I'm hugely against the idea of jumping to conclusions from insufficient evidence, whereas you seem to have done exactly that.

Let me guess, you like to go around telling people how good you are at lateral thinking.  >:D

Anybody got a syringe I can use to squeeze the magic smoke back into this?
 

Offline Cerebus

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In a work environment, you see something similar between bosses who lead from the front, and the bosses who lead from the back.

I used to have a boss who led from another continent, or somewhere on the road, and he was supposed to be in the same office as me. His boss was frequently heard to ask "Remind me, what exactly is that Edward is actually supposed to do?".
Anybody got a syringe I can use to squeeze the magic smoke back into this?
 

Online tggzzz

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At the best these methodologies sometimes work by mere coincidence because they make people think about and analyze what they are doing, at their worst they destroy any chance of success by being followed religiously, thereby excluding any exploration of solutions that might actual work but aren't part of "the process".

The "sometimes" had a 100% hit rate, with the right interpreter and right division of roles. I could never understand the standard roles such as "plant".

In your experience – probably just of one place that used it and had a culture that was the real cause for success.

Those are strawman points, if you read the bits you snipped.

I was explicit that it was my experience, it was two places (HP Labs and Cambridge Consultants), they did not use it during work, merely as an adjunct to interviewing. The culture was, unsurprisingly, the dominant factor in those two places' success, and Myers Brigg paid no part in it (because it wasn't used).

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Overall it is very useful mechanism for realising that different people have different strengths and weaknesses, and you need to cover one person's weaknesses with another person's strengths.

You don't need Myers Brigs to tell you that, and it doesn't purport to exist to remind you of "different strokes for different folks", it purports to provide an accurate personality analysis and any psychologist will tell you that it does not and if that is what you want that there are modern personality inventory tests that will (for some probabilistically quantifiable value of "will").

All the engineers that went to the talks found it very interesting and enlightening.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
Glider pilot's aphorism: "there is no substitute for span". Retort: "There is a substitute: skill+imagination. But you can buy span".
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Online rstofer

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A thought and a tale:

In my view, July 20, 1969 proves that we should remove "can't" from the dictionary.  Really, the concept just keeps getting in the way!  Every time I hear "I can't..." or "We can't..." it's all I can do to stop myself from going non-linear.

So we're pouring foundations for steel columns and the standard concrete spec is 2500 PSI compressive strength in 28 days.  Now, the project isn't being built for the greater glory of mankind, it is going to save the company about $3000 per day.  So that 28 day wait is going to cost us about $84k.

The "never say can't guy" (who knows diddly about concrete) grabs the concrete design manual off the shelf and looks at some graphs.  Did you know that you could just add a little more cement to the mix and have 2500 psi by the next morning?  Apparently neither did anyone else.  But it's true, we had the samples at the lab first thing in the morning and they passed testing.  We hung the steel that very day!  Saved the company $84k!

And, yes, that kind of stuff will get you a raise and a reputation.  There is no such thing as "can't".


 
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Offline Cerebus

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At the best these methodologies sometimes work by mere coincidence because they make people think about and analyze what they are doing, at their worst they destroy any chance of success by being followed religiously, thereby excluding any exploration of solutions that might actual work but aren't part of "the process".

The "sometimes" had a 100% hit rate, with the right interpreter and right division of roles. I could never understand the standard roles such as "plant".

In your experience – probably just of one place that used it and had a culture that was the real cause for success.

Those are strawman points, if you read the bits you snipped.

No they are not strawman arguments, and I snipped the bits that I had no objection to. You've snipped lots, is that evidence of fallacious argument, as you imply it is?

Two places that you worked is still as much anecdote as it would be if it was just one. If you want to claim that Myers Briggs is anything other than undiluted hooey, you need to cite properly conducted surveys, from unbiased sources, that demonstate that. Reiterating "It worked for me" isn't evidence.

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I was explicit that it was my experience, it was two places (HP Labs and Cambridge Consultants), they did not use it during work, merely as an adjunct to interviewing. The culture was, unsurprisingly, the dominant factor in those two places' success, and Myers Brigg paid no part in it (because it wasn't used).

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Overall it is very useful mechanism for realising that different people have different strengths and weaknesses, and you need to cover one person's weaknesses with another person's strengths.

You don't need Myers Brigs to tell you that, and it doesn't purport to exist to remind you of "different strokes for different folks", it purports to provide an accurate personality analysis and any psychologist will tell you that it does not and if that is what you want that there are modern personality inventory tests that will (for some probabilistically quantifiable value of "will").

All the engineers that went to the talks found it very interesting and enlightening.

"interesting and enlightening" is not evidence of any kind of truth, it's a subjective opinion. It's the sort of polite phrase that gets used about a vicar's sermon in the parish magazine, which I suggest is quite an apposite comparison.
Anybody got a syringe I can use to squeeze the magic smoke back into this?
 

Online coppice

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In my view, July 20, 1969 proves that we should remove "can't" from the dictionary.  Really, the concept just keeps getting in the way!  Every time I hear "I can't..." or "We can't..." it's all I can do to stop myself from going non-linear.
The obvious response to "I can't" or "We can't" is "for what set of constraints?". The initial statements don't usually specify those. Unless a request defies basic laws of nature, a thing only can't be done because of perceived or real constraints. Usually, when you flush out the constraints some are completely bogus, and some can be talked through and addressed. If you talk things through, and the constraints can't be sufficiently relaxed with reasonable resources, then you have a properly specified statement, like "This can't be done with the resources we can throw at the problem". That's the most effective thing a good manager can bring to the conference table.
 

Online rstofer

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In my view, July 20, 1969 proves that we should remove "can't" from the dictionary.  Really, the concept just keeps getting in the way!  Every time I hear "I can't..." or "We can't..." it's all I can do to stop myself from going non-linear.
The obvious response to "I can't" or "We can't" is "for what set of constraints?". The initial statements don't usually specify those. Unless a request defies basic laws of nature, a thing only can't be done because of perceived or real constraints. Usually, when you flush out the constraints some are completely bogus, and some can be talked through and addressed. If you talk things through, and the constraints can't be sufficiently relaxed with reasonable resources, then you have a properly specified statement, like "This can't be done with the resources we can throw at the problem". That's the most effective thing a good manager can bring to the conference table.

I like the idea of "change the rules!".  Find another way to describe success. Sounds weird but it really boils down to "find another solution".

Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where the rules are more important than meeting the goal.  It's time to change jobs...

 

Offline armandine2

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Of Tyros

is a chapter in Vannevar Bush's autobiography "pieces of the action", in which he lambastes the ingenious Geoffrey Pyke for wasting everyone's  time on the "ice island" plan. A lateral thought needs to be nipped in the bud early doors.
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught - Hunter S Thompson
 

Online coppice

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I like the idea of "change the rules!".
That sounds good.
Find another way to describe success. Sounds weird but it really boils down to "find another solution".
That sounds bad. The way most people find to redefine success has a very bad outcome. E.g. "A does better than B. Make A come up to B's level" usually gets redefined to "A does better than B. Make A and B level". This is almost universally implemented the easy way - kneecap B until they fall to A's level.
 

Offline snarkysparky

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Whats the definition of lateral thinking.   I could not find any significantly qualitative description.

After interviewing a candidate for a programming position i asked whether he could problem solve with code.   His resume was filled with all the stuff he had done, which seemed mostly like read the manuals and perform the correct setups.

We need a person who will "design"  a robust system by understanding basics of algorithms and core coding practice. 

Am i asking for lateral thinking ?

 

Online RJSV

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NICE !
  A very good post, as an Engineer I think (or try to think), about both existing / mundane, and about new/ unformed.
   I think, maybe too much like East Asia folks; Thailand, Vietnam, India. But a good thing, avoiding (extreme) superstition.
   But I need to comment: This thread is already going to take some days, to read, proper.

  I think about seemingly TRIVIAL and meaningless factors, to creative success.  What about a 'clean', tidy DESK... (So What ?)
My opinion, clean-tidy, AND EMPTY work areas 'INVITE' creation...a sort of VACUUM pulling, out of 'nowhere'...
Try, leaving your desk piled high, crap on crap, and an old sandwich half, in there ...
Then, start your creative efforts, for the day...

   "LATERAL ...?" golly, that's a Hallmark, of inventors like Edison, Tesla, even artists like Mark Twain and...my favorite: Stanley Kubrick.

Don't forget Jimi Hendrix, helped usher in the 'feedback' thing, in popular music.

(Photo shows YOGA, stokes the flame of 'Lateral Thinking, big time...).

-Rick B.
 

Offline e100Topic starter

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My innate suspicion on encountering the sort of person who starts with telling you "I'm good at lateral thinking" is that they have left out the second half of the sentence "but I'm terrible at logical thinking or actually getting on and doing something".   >:D

If you were stuck on a particular engineering problem and such a person offered to help you find a solution, would you automatically reject their offer because of your suspicions? The consequence of rejecting that offer could be that you never find a solution, or it takes much longer to find a solution.

I think I've just created a new catch phase, I shall call it "anti-engineering" - the processes by which you fail to achieve an engineering goal because you distrust or dislike someone and therefore you avoid them even though they may be able to help you.

I haven't suggested anything like that, you've put words in my mouth by hugely extrapolating from something that, quite obviously, is a mere quip. Moreover, you've suggested that a mere suspicion would motivate me to reject someone's help. It wouldn't, my judgement would only be formed by the quality of their suggestions, not a mere initial suspicion. I'm hugely against the idea of jumping to conclusions from insufficient evidence, whereas you seem to have done exactly that.

Let me guess, you like to go around telling people how good you are at lateral thinking.  >:D

No, I tell people  that I'm good at breaking stuff because I know engineers don't spend much time thinking about edge cases.
Take for example the apparently simple task of establishing the identity of a person within a family. Is first name, last name sufficient?
The first thought is yes, but what if a family member gets married and changes their surname, it's still the same person right? That's 50% of the people in your database, not just an isolated case.
What if a family adopts a child that has the same first name, last name and date of birth as one of their existing children. How do you tell them apart? The engineer will say that will never happen and therefore there's no point thinking about it. I'll say, you may be right, but what if it does happen, will your system be able to cope or will it get horribly confused?
« Last Edit: March 02, 2022, 05:34:19 am by e100 »
 

Online coppice

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No, I tell people  that I'm good at breaking stuff because I know engineers don't spend much time thinking about edge cases.
Competent engineers spend much of their time thinking about edge cases. The common cases aren't usually that challenging. Maybe you've encountered too many bad engineers.
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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No, I tell people  that I'm good at breaking stuff because I know engineers don't spend much time thinking about edge cases.
Competent engineers spend much of their time thinking about edge cases. The common cases aren't usually that challenging. Maybe you've encountered too many bad engineers.

And this gets back to the heart of the OPs question.  Lateral thinking is an important and useful skill.  But most people who are good at it don't last long doing the repetitive center case work.  The read the standards book and generate the answer guys are also valuable (and therefore competent in their domain). 

The problems always come when people are mismatched to their jobs.  If Briggs Meyer doesn't work for you as a framework for accomplishing that, fine, but something does have to be done.  Good management is as challenging as any other job.  As can be seen by how uncommon it is.
 

Online RJSV

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By the way, Cerebus and others, interested in concept, of non-achieving IDEA Man:
  I felt that, partially, am one of 'those', having to push, for any practical side, for approaching business and science.  Looking and 'talking' like an 'impractical' idea flapper...
BUT, I'm remembering the older work, PC Board repair Technician, Teletype electronics troubleshooting, in factory.  Managers had my numbers, (units repaired per quarter, etc).  They were pretty impressive, I heard.
   But that side takes work...Where's my staff, my coffees getting cold, here ?
 

Online RJSV

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   One sincere question I have might seem out of place, but what about the disfunctional players who, not on their own merits, still manage to hold on, to jobs and responsibility...
That's the sort of imperfection that goes on, if you observe for a while.  I had a lawyer once, hired part of my team.  But he had a drinking problem, not at work, but he needed 'time off', to be elsewhere, a bit too much.  Those edge types, not too extreme but sometimes undependable, those types exist, around big office settings.
  Where would the 'mostly OK but sometimes not OK', where did those types 'fit' the team types...because they DO persist.
   The guy doing legal work for a small entity, partially because he can't hold a main-stream regular job.  A guy with no school, besides high school, doing fine in software, (despite prison record, for narcotics).
These sorts of workplace 'landscape' are just as much a part of (our industrial) history, as a story about Steve Jobs is.
  Put everybody working in the ORG chart, is all I'm saying...They are already contributing, so...
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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For what it is worth:

I have worked quite a bit with visual artists, on things that needed engineering of some sort.  When we formed a team where I could provide the logical and rational feedback to the 'vision' –– and quite often very lateral ideas! ––, the results were impressive, and the work was fun.  (When I was instead seen as a hindrance, 'mundane', artless, the work was horrible and destroyed peoples creativity and will.)

The key point is that lateral thinking cannot shortcut the hard work, and the limitations of the resources at hand.  All 'visions' must be tempered by logic and hard work to become implementable with the given resources.

This means that lateral thinking is useful and valuable, but only in conjunction with rational thought and applied logic.  It radically expands the achievable solution space, but without the logic and rational thinking and hard work, it alone will not reach a solution.  At best, it can suggest a solution, but without any basis as to why that solution should be better than any other solution.
« Last Edit: March 02, 2022, 07:25:51 am by Nominal Animal »
 

Offline e100Topic starter

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   One sincere question I have might seem out of place, but what about the disfunctional players who, not on their own merits, still manage to hold on, to jobs and responsibility...

If you have someone in your team who is dead weight, then the quickest way to get ride of them is to get them promoted out of your team to be the manager of another team. Much easier than getting HR involved and going through the long winded and soul destroying process of trying to get them kicked out due to poor performance. Of course things could backfire and they end up back in charge of your team, so it's a calculated risk.

Obviously from a company perspective this a bad thing, but if you're a humble cubicle dweller then all you really care about is making life easier for yourself. It's the office survival instinctTM.
« Last Edit: March 02, 2022, 10:12:57 am by e100 »
 
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Offline penfold

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Whats the definition of lateral thinking.   I could not find any significantly qualitative description.
[...]

You're right... definitions look a bit sparse. Reading between the lines of a few articles...
Conventional, logical, verticle thinking would be to solve a problem using defined rules, such that each step of the solution had a very clear and rational trace to the previous steps. The value of a solution would be measured (also in the lateral case) by its usual merits of meeting spec, BOM-cost, time to implement and risk (which puts a high weighting towards historic implementations). Lateral thinking would be where the "lateral thinker" is able to see solutions that might logically not, initially, be a strong solution can still become much stronger than a direct logical solution... and is able to evaluate their merits before anyone has realised they deviated from the programme.

So lateral thinking could be quantified by the number of apparent logical absurdities if you were to describe it in abstract-ish terms i.e. not how you'd sell it to a project manager. Perhaps "we are going to produce a solution that uses a totally new design, employing a much larger BOM-count and won't have any programmable components", the reasoning might be "because the old design was too expensive to manufacture, component shortages were killing production schedule and validation cycles for software were too slow". And that involves thinking outside the box in so much as considering broader benefits to the company and how resources can be better utilised.

With that example, I'd say that a lot of people don't necessarily realise when they are laterally thinking and it's just part of good engineering generally. There's also a lot of people who think they're laterally thinking when indeed they're just having crazy random stabs in the dark. Thinking outside the box could just be questioning a spec, in an intelligent way, to intelligently ask "is this genuinely a requirement the customer needs" and whether it is improperly constraining a solution where a much better one would result by relaxing that requirement slightly.

Firmware may be a good example also, I rarely write good code first, second, third time around, it always seems logical to me, but lots of nesting and too many repeated logical tests and can always be refactored better. I think the refactoring is a good example of lateral thinking... if not only that my original logic (whether wrong or not) didn't produce an optimal solution but revised to a different pattern produced much better. This is again something that some people can just do automatically, some people can't and some people just think they do.

How's that for a definition? Apologies if I've just repeated a few things that others have said along the way.
 
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Offline e100Topic starter

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Whats the definition of lateral thinking.   I could not find any significantly qualitative description.
[...]

Firmware may be a good example also, I rarely write good code first, second, third time around, it always seems logical to me, but lots of nesting and too many repeated logical tests and can always be refactored better. I think the refactoring is a good example of lateral thinking... if not only that my original logic (whether wrong or not) didn't produce an optimal solution but revised to a different pattern produced much better. This is again something that some people can just do automatically, some people can't and some people just think they do.


The first time I heard engineers talking about refactoring code I had no idea what they were talking about. It was only later that realized that it was just a fancy buzzword that could of been dreamt up on the Starship Enterprise.

Spock: Captain we're going to have to refactor the code
Kirk: I have no idea what that means, but if that's what you need to do, then do it, do it now!
Spock: Captain, it just means we have to re-write it because we did it wrong last time.
Kirk: <Places hands over ears and turns away> Noooo, don't tell me these things. Too much information. I'm just a middle manager.


I'm a rubbish part time self taught programmer. My struggles aren't so much with algorithms and bugs, its just getting the goddam code to compile so refactoring is basically a cleanup process where I take my ugly inelegant code and make it slightly less ugly and inelegant. Sometimes I even put comments in!

Currently I'm working in an OO language so have all my numeric values hidden inside self reporting objects that monitor for min max violations, have reporting thresholds and check for expired data. Essentially the system logs all changes to everything so I can step back in time and slowly replay events without having to jump into the debugger. It's taken years to get to this stage, perhaps I'm re-inventing the wheel, I don't know however it's the first system where I can actually say, "I think I know why its doing that, it's because <reason>" without having to step through code.
« Last Edit: March 02, 2022, 01:15:17 pm by e100 »
 


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