The hardest thing you ever learned to do is to walk and to talk. You tried and failed a hundred times, but that did not stop you from thinking that one more attempt and you could succeed. You certainly did not wait around for anyone to tell you how.
Quite frequently the team in place doesn't have a lot of incentive to have that will -- if the software is ever actually good, it would threaten those fat paychecks they collect for maintaining the mess.
IMHO you are ending a pretty insightful post on an unnecessarily cynical and misleading note.
Messes do not get fixed for reasons. Lazy programmers are not the primary reason. The biggest reason is fixing the mess is expensive in man-hours with approximately zero returns in new features over the short term. An engineer so brave as to take on that task without very strong backing from the CEO better keep his resume handy, because he will get hammered for the smallest slip up that "breaks stuff that was working, when there already are so many other bugs to fix".
It is the company leadership who must decide that they are willing to give up the slow and painful progress they can squeeze out of the entire next year or so of the engineering department's effort, in the hope that the company will be much better off, in terms of being able to be reasonably responsive to customer requests for bug fixes and new features, 3 or 4 years down the road. CEOs who are under pressure to show growth see such efforts as very risky, and may even be correct about being cautious when viewing the fate of the company as a whole.
The reason the engineers may act "lazy" is there sense correctly that a small effort will fail, and a big effort will be sabotaged without executive team support. They may think about such things explicitly, but they know that refactoring projects have a way of getting the necessarily resources stripped away from them a few months down the road, before they produce much in the way of useful improvements. Why bother?
You do not pay extra for "double stuff". The costs of the ingredients are a miniscule costs compared the larger marketing and distribution infrastructure costs, and more stuffing and less cookie is not even necessarily more expensive to produce. You can browse over at Walmart online and see for yourself that double-stuffed, triple-stuffed, chocolate, original, etc. all are very similar in price.
It certainly will not discourage the professional trolls. They will hide their assets by creating small corporations who have "bought" specific claims. When they win, the profits will quickly flow upwards to the business owners. When they lose, there will be near nothing liquid to seize.
This can happen, of course, but if one does not have any confidence in the court to render a fair and just verdict, then why would one try and use the court system at all unless they were actually hoping to use the court system to render what they believe may be an unjust one?
It is not a simple either/or question. The court system, being imperfect, is always a gamble to some degree. Therefore you must look at the situation with the dispassionate eyes of a professional gambler. I may risk $50k for a chance to gain justice and a big check for compensation. How I assess the odds is very different if my loss would not be just the $50k for my lawyer, but $50k for my lawyer plus $200k for BigCo's "reasonable expenses" plus $50k for court costs instead.
A loser pays system will inevitably cause some legitimate claims to be dropped. (In fact, it is probably already happening.)
The system that exists will inevitably cause some dodgy claims to be put forward.
There is no simple answer that guarantees the system will be fair to everyone.
There is also the view frequently seen on slashdot that we don't need to worry about climate change because technology/human ingenuity/clever programming will provide a solution at some point before it all goes too seriously wrong.
In terms of unfalsifiability, it is up there with more obviously religious beliefs.
Having a semi-religious "faith" in the power of technology to save us is an error.
However, I would point out that sometimes efforts to reduce atmospheric CO2 look like a mindless sledgehammer attack on a big problem that also would be an error. I am all for unleashing significant resources and ingenuity to attack this issue in a broad and open-minded way. But when, for example, as a citizen of California I get a ballot proposition that would write into law that significant resources get plowed into carbon sequestration, still a very unproven technology, I do want to gag.
The topic is most ancient. Apparently it is a very common taboo among hunter gatherers all over the world against having intercourse with a menstruating woman. It is plausible that this is a tradition steeped in matriarchal power, as it gives the women inside knowledge about who was likely fertile when they slept with which man. In fact, since a group of women who lives close to each other 24 hours per day tend to sync their cycles, the women simply demand all the adult men go off hunting and not come back for at least a few days, and they keeps valuable information about the fertility of all the women hidden from men.
Whether there is a coherent reason in Judaism for a similar rule is unknowable. But there are telltale remnants of matriarchal religious traditions in Judaism. The Sabbath begins with the woman lighting the candle, which bears an interesting semblance to traditions in honor of Hestia (the goddess of the hearth, which is the foundation of civilization).
And then when you submit your results for publication, it will again be sent to a (smaller) panel of us to review your work and suggest changes. Again, we only publish the top quarter or so, and if you disagree with our established view, you just watch how we can always find things to object to.
Your use of "always" here is provable incorrect. Surprisingly results are getting published all the time, even if every surprising result is not.
If you look at science as it is practice with a sober eyes, it is clear that there are strong incentives both for and against being a maverick. Outliers have to meet a slightly higher standard of quality, or every field risks being throttled by a flood of sloppy research with "exciting" results.
That the company failed is not really a surprise. Silicon Valley physically co-exists in a region that is the greatest biotech hub on the planet. They did not hand money to a proven brilliant organic chemist or similar because the drop out was more reckless.
What is interesting is how this demonstrates the corporate governance of the investors. A number of pharma companies told Theranos that they simply will not write a check to a company that cannot show peer reviewed papers or similar proving the basic technology, and that was that. Some companies did other than the industry standard practices, and handed Holmes money.
My family has decided to avoid Amazon as much as possible because they changed their billing system in a manner guaranteed to confuse customers..
First, they do not just ship an order, but ship by some magic optimization algorithms, where they might pick and choose between various of our open orders and ship opportunistically. We do not like that change, but we recognize there is a legit business reason or going that way, so we are okay enough with it..
Second, they do not send you a bill that says "We sent you item A and item B, and we are charging your credit card X and Y". No, they just charge you account. And they send an email "Oh, we just shipped A and C.".
So if you are curious about any of the charges to your account, you must manually correlate (1) your credit card bill and its many entries by date, (2) all your original order that have info on item cost, and (3) the various emails about stuff getting shipped to you. If you have many orders, that can be a 4 hour process. If you want to call Amazon and have a question, the friendly person on the other end will be more confused than you, and you get to spend 2-3 hours on the phone, and they still may not have a clue. So you get to have multiple phone calls..
BTW, it is pretty obvious that Amazon must track "We charged X for item A and shipped it date D" for accounting purposes. But they do not want you to know anything about that. You are supposed to obediently pay whatever they feel like charging your account.
I would guess a lot of people realize that a woman who is interested a married man is disproportionately likely to be carrying a lot of emotional baggage, or worse. Yes, there do exist women who are happy fairies who flounce through life bringing joy of the moment to whomever they meet. But that is also the story the very wounded tell themselves. Can you know the difference from text messages or a chat over a few drinks?
I do not believe the reasons offered. Most likely, it is personal revenge against the company for a perceived slight, and the moralizing is just a clever way to grab headlines and crush this company's IPO in a very public way. Just as the management was anticipating the coming sweet financial success, they will get to have 100 annoying meeting with lawyers on how to put "we are wide open to millions of lawsuits if this stuff is disclosed" on their S-1. It is over. Time to close shop, and open up again with a different management.
There are stark differences between what a private individual can do for family and friends, and what a business owner can do when serving clientele from the general public. For example, it is not illegal to be a raging racist in one's personal life, but bringing that to your business relationships may have negative legal ramifications -- that is how it is.
Now, it is true that the difference be a private activity and a licensed public business is not 100% clear. But that is not the issue in this case here. The restaurant owner runs a licensed public business.
Establishing intent in a "beyond a reasonable doubt" argument is usually pretty problematic for the prosecution. Unfortunately for the defense, the prosecution can point to the alleged aid to a future fighter as demonstrating that defendant had a particular intent in one instance. If the jury were to believe this other charge, the defense that helping terrorist was an accidental effect of free speech is just not going to fly. Cutting a plea deal is the obvious choice.
I think that the gov't would have a lot of trouble nailing someone who simply offered advice on how to use cryptocurrencies, if that person otherwise kept their nose clean. Lots of activities that are usually legal or slide under the radar look different under the bright lights of a courtroom, when other credible charges are on the table.
You cannot accumulate assets under you name, because assets can be seized, which means you are destined to die poor once you are retired, unless you have family who will take care of you (or are competent/trusthworthy enough to hold your investments in their name).
You can hold a bank account, but you must keep the balance down where it the dollar figure is less than the hassle of the debt collector to file the paperwork to seize your account. So either you must be very exacting in your bank bookkeeping (it is easy to screw this up), or you give up on credit cards and checks entirely, and stick with cash.
Some of these things you can work around by having helpful unofficial arrangements with a roommate or spouse (e.g. how to get the phone or ISP bill paid).
It is an interesting question on how you are going to get paid, because wages can be garnished. But if you do nothing but contract work or irregularly earn commissions, it becomes very difficult for the debt collector to track down your sources of funds. "Hey, that contract is over. I do not know when I am going to get paid again."
Among other things, the private schools can fire their students. In the Good Old Days, the public schools had that power implicitly, too, because we as a society accepted drop out rates that would be considered sky high today.
Kudos for actually trying to think through the situation as it might appear in the minds of the students. One of the big advantages that upper middle class students have is that they have easy access to many, many living and breathing examples of why there is likely to be a good payoff to hitting the books. In a very poor neighborhood, a good job that you have seen around the neighborhood might literally be a janitorial job, running a register, mowing lawns for a landscaping contract outfit, or running a quasi legal sandwich cart. Beyond very minimal reading skills, what does school offer, from this point of view?
Is this gap rectifiable? Possibly. But education software does not address the heart of the problem.
Your argument is with the CIA, which simply failed to put forth your purported "facts" to the State Department or White House, within hours or within 24 hours. That is the fact based historical record. I cannot prevent you from pretending otherwise, if you insist. But you are simply, provably wrong. If you care about such things as reality, that is.
Everyone on the US side new within hours (even as it was happening) exactly what had occurred.
The CIA disagrees, and the opinion of the CIA at the time is demonstrated by what they actually included in their summary talking points bulletin. That it was a well planned attack was a completely obvious hypothesis, one among numerous competing hypotheses, that was not substantiated by collaborating facts within the time frame you are talking about.
Big data is also going to make these customers extra sticky. When you have exabytes of customer data sloshing around a thousand AWS servers, and you rely on them to deliver critical insights for competitive advantage, how long does that take to migrate out, even if you have the hardware and software all configured right now? Even if everything is set up perfectly and all the technical wrinkles ironed out, it may be a long and ugly process, because you need the big data analytics to be running at full efficacy every day.
Not quite. Theory says that the cloud is compelling when it reduces costs, however that might happen. More efficient use of hardware is a possible means of reducing costs. Putting the management of the physical servers in the hands of people who have superior technical chops for managing servers by the thousands is another. These mega-server farms are surely getting some advantages of scale, too, because the people writing the hardware checks have incentive to deliver value, where up front capital, reliability, and computing power are all carefully monitored factors. The reality is that cloud computing is delivering on some of its promise to reduce costs, thus demand is going up.
I find I am getting much more conservative as I get older, and I am voting against the existing Republican Party with ever greater zeal. I live in California, and due to the peculiarities of Prop 13 and tax policy, the GOP shifted towards being the Party of No 20+ years ago, while the state as a whole drifted slightly leftwards. The result is the CA GOP has hollowed out. The state could use a competent loyal opposition party, but we are not going to get one until the old men die off.
Nonsense. CC is silent on the manner of grading teachers. That is simply a choice on the part of the state legislature and local school district. If the state legislature decides to enact a Procrustean regime that squashes the ability for teachers in the trenches to enact amendments to the class curriculum, then that itself is a problem regardless of whether CC is endorsed or not. In fact, we are already on that road, unfortunately, and ditching CC is not going to move us in another direction.
To look at the failure modes of the material is a known thing since the sinking of the HMS Sheffield in the Falklands War. One of the reasons that ship sunk so quickly is the fire softened the aluminum superstructure, causing the various firebreaks to fail. (With the electrical system down and no way to provide substantial water, that ship was probably doomed anyway. But the concern was a similarly damaged ship even with a working water system might be doomed anyway.)
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The hardest thing you ever learned to do is to walk and to talk. You tried and failed a hundred times, but that did not stop you from thinking that one more attempt and you could succeed. You certainly did not wait around for anyone to tell you how.
Quite frequently the team in place doesn't have a lot of incentive to have that will -- if the software is ever actually good, it would threaten those fat paychecks they collect for maintaining the mess.
IMHO you are ending a pretty insightful post on an unnecessarily cynical and misleading note.
Messes do not get fixed for reasons. Lazy programmers are not the primary reason. The biggest reason is fixing the mess is expensive in man-hours with approximately zero returns in new features over the short term. An engineer so brave as to take on that task without very strong backing from the CEO better keep his resume handy, because he will get hammered for the smallest slip up that "breaks stuff that was working, when there already are so many other bugs to fix".
It is the company leadership who must decide that they are willing to give up the slow and painful progress they can squeeze out of the entire next year or so of the engineering department's effort, in the hope that the company will be much better off, in terms of being able to be reasonably responsive to customer requests for bug fixes and new features, 3 or 4 years down the road. CEOs who are under pressure to show growth see such efforts as very risky, and may even be correct about being cautious when viewing the fate of the company as a whole.
The reason the engineers may act "lazy" is there sense correctly that a small effort will fail, and a big effort will be sabotaged without executive team support. They may think about such things explicitly, but they know that refactoring projects have a way of getting the necessarily resources stripped away from them a few months down the road, before they produce much in the way of useful improvements. Why bother?
You do not pay extra for "double stuff". The costs of the ingredients are a miniscule costs compared the larger marketing and distribution infrastructure costs, and more stuffing and less cookie is not even necessarily more expensive to produce. You can browse over at Walmart online and see for yourself that double-stuffed, triple-stuffed, chocolate, original, etc. all are very similar in price.
It certainly will not discourage the professional trolls. They will hide their assets by creating small corporations who have "bought" specific claims. When they win, the profits will quickly flow upwards to the business owners. When they lose, there will be near nothing liquid to seize.
This can happen, of course, but if one does not have any confidence in the court to render a fair and just verdict, then why would one try and use the court system at all unless they were actually hoping to use the court system to render what they believe may be an unjust one?
It is not a simple either/or question. The court system, being imperfect, is always a gamble to some degree. Therefore you must look at the situation with the dispassionate eyes of a professional gambler. I may risk $50k for a chance to gain justice and a big check for compensation. How I assess the odds is very different if my loss would not be just the $50k for my lawyer, but $50k for my lawyer plus $200k for BigCo's "reasonable expenses" plus $50k for court costs instead.
A loser pays system will inevitably cause some legitimate claims to be dropped. (In fact, it is probably already happening.)
The system that exists will inevitably cause some dodgy claims to be put forward.
There is no simple answer that guarantees the system will be fair to everyone.
There is also the view frequently seen on slashdot that we don't need to worry about climate change because technology/human ingenuity/clever programming will provide a solution at some point before it all goes too seriously wrong.
In terms of unfalsifiability, it is up there with more obviously religious beliefs.
Having a semi-religious "faith" in the power of technology to save us is an error.
However, I would point out that sometimes efforts to reduce atmospheric CO2 look like a mindless sledgehammer attack on a big problem that also would be an error. I am all for unleashing significant resources and ingenuity to attack this issue in a broad and open-minded way. But when, for example, as a citizen of California I get a ballot proposition that would write into law that significant resources get plowed into carbon sequestration, still a very unproven technology, I do want to gag.
The topic is most ancient. Apparently it is a very common taboo among hunter gatherers all over the world against having intercourse with a menstruating woman. It is plausible that this is a tradition steeped in matriarchal power, as it gives the women inside knowledge about who was likely fertile when they slept with which man. In fact, since a group of women who lives close to each other 24 hours per day tend to sync their cycles, the women simply demand all the adult men go off hunting and not come back for at least a few days, and they keeps valuable information about the fertility of all the women hidden from men.
Whether there is a coherent reason in Judaism for a similar rule is unknowable. But there are telltale remnants of matriarchal religious traditions in Judaism. The Sabbath begins with the woman lighting the candle, which bears an interesting semblance to traditions in honor of Hestia (the goddess of the hearth, which is the foundation of civilization).
And then when you submit your results for publication, it will again be sent to a (smaller) panel of us to review your work and suggest changes. Again, we only publish the top quarter or so, and if you disagree with our established view, you just watch how we can always find things to object to.
Your use of "always" here is provable incorrect. Surprisingly results are getting published all the time, even if every surprising result is not.
If you look at science as it is practice with a sober eyes, it is clear that there are strong incentives both for and against being a maverick. Outliers have to meet a slightly higher standard of quality, or every field risks being throttled by a flood of sloppy research with "exciting" results.
That the company failed is not really a surprise. Silicon Valley physically co-exists in a region that is the greatest biotech hub on the planet. They did not hand money to a proven brilliant organic chemist or similar because the drop out was more reckless. What is interesting is how this demonstrates the corporate governance of the investors. A number of pharma companies told Theranos that they simply will not write a check to a company that cannot show peer reviewed papers or similar proving the basic technology, and that was that. Some companies did other than the industry standard practices, and handed Holmes money.
My family has decided to avoid Amazon as much as possible because they changed their billing system in a manner guaranteed to confuse customers..
First, they do not just ship an order, but ship by some magic optimization algorithms, where they might pick and choose between various of our open orders and ship opportunistically. We do not like that change, but we recognize there is a legit business reason or going that way, so we are okay enough with it..
Second, they do not send you a bill that says "We sent you item A and item B, and we are charging your credit card X and Y". No, they just charge you account. And they send an email "Oh, we just shipped A and C." .
So if you are curious about any of the charges to your account, you must manually correlate (1) your credit card bill and its many entries by date, (2) all your original order that have info on item cost, and (3) the various emails about stuff getting shipped to you. If you have many orders, that can be a 4 hour process. If you want to call Amazon and have a question, the friendly person on the other end will be more confused than you, and you get to spend 2-3 hours on the phone, and they still may not have a clue. So you get to have multiple phone calls..
BTW, it is pretty obvious that Amazon must track "We charged X for item A and shipped it date D" for accounting purposes. But they do not want you to know anything about that. You are supposed to obediently pay whatever they feel like charging your account.
I would guess a lot of people realize that a woman who is interested a married man is disproportionately likely to be carrying a lot of emotional baggage, or worse. Yes, there do exist women who are happy fairies who flounce through life bringing joy of the moment to whomever they meet. But that is also the story the very wounded tell themselves. Can you know the difference from text messages or a chat over a few drinks?
I do not believe the reasons offered. Most likely, it is personal revenge against the company for a perceived slight, and the moralizing is just a clever way to grab headlines and crush this company's IPO in a very public way. Just as the management was anticipating the coming sweet financial success, they will get to have 100 annoying meeting with lawyers on how to put "we are wide open to millions of lawsuits if this stuff is disclosed" on their S-1. It is over. Time to close shop, and open up again with a different management.
If recycling is not economical, we can release those BTUs in a modern clean furnace, and then the disposal costs are miniscule.
There are stark differences between what a private individual can do for family and friends, and what a business owner can do when serving clientele from the general public. For example, it is not illegal to be a raging racist in one's personal life, but bringing that to your business relationships may have negative legal ramifications -- that is how it is.
Now, it is true that the difference be a private activity and a licensed public business is not 100% clear. But that is not the issue in this case here. The restaurant owner runs a licensed public business.
Establishing intent in a "beyond a reasonable doubt" argument is usually pretty problematic for the prosecution. Unfortunately for the defense, the prosecution can point to the alleged aid to a future fighter as demonstrating that defendant had a particular intent in one instance. If the jury were to believe this other charge, the defense that helping terrorist was an accidental effect of free speech is just not going to fly. Cutting a plea deal is the obvious choice.
I think that the gov't would have a lot of trouble nailing someone who simply offered advice on how to use cryptocurrencies, if that person otherwise kept their nose clean. Lots of activities that are usually legal or slide under the radar look different under the bright lights of a courtroom, when other credible charges are on the table.
You cannot accumulate assets under you name, because assets can be seized, which means you are destined to die poor once you are retired, unless you have family who will take care of you (or are competent/trusthworthy enough to hold your investments in their name).
You can hold a bank account, but you must keep the balance down where it the dollar figure is less than the hassle of the debt collector to file the paperwork to seize your account. So either you must be very exacting in your bank bookkeeping (it is easy to screw this up), or you give up on credit cards and checks entirely, and stick with cash.
Some of these things you can work around by having helpful unofficial arrangements with a roommate or spouse (e.g. how to get the phone or ISP bill paid).
It is an interesting question on how you are going to get paid, because wages can be garnished. But if you do nothing but contract work or irregularly earn commissions, it becomes very difficult for the debt collector to track down your sources of funds. "Hey, that contract is over. I do not know when I am going to get paid again."
Among other things, the private schools can fire their students. In the Good Old Days, the public schools had that power implicitly, too, because we as a society accepted drop out rates that would be considered sky high today.
Kudos for actually trying to think through the situation as it might appear in the minds of the students. One of the big advantages that upper middle class students have is that they have easy access to many, many living and breathing examples of why there is likely to be a good payoff to hitting the books. In a very poor neighborhood, a good job that you have seen around the neighborhood might literally be a janitorial job, running a register, mowing lawns for a landscaping contract outfit, or running a quasi legal sandwich cart. Beyond very minimal reading skills, what does school offer, from this point of view?
Is this gap rectifiable? Possibly. But education software does not address the heart of the problem.
Your argument is with the CIA, which simply failed to put forth your purported "facts" to the State Department or White House, within hours or within 24 hours. That is the fact based historical record. I cannot prevent you from pretending otherwise, if you insist. But you are simply, provably wrong. If you care about such things as reality, that is.
Everyone on the US side new within hours (even as it was happening) exactly what had occurred.
The CIA disagrees, and the opinion of the CIA at the time is demonstrated by what they actually included in their summary talking points bulletin. That it was a well planned attack was a completely obvious hypothesis, one among numerous competing hypotheses, that was not substantiated by collaborating facts within the time frame you are talking about.
Big data is also going to make these customers extra sticky. When you have exabytes of customer data sloshing around a thousand AWS servers, and you rely on them to deliver critical insights for competitive advantage, how long does that take to migrate out, even if you have the hardware and software all configured right now? Even if everything is set up perfectly and all the technical wrinkles ironed out, it may be a long and ugly process, because you need the big data analytics to be running at full efficacy every day.
Not quite. Theory says that the cloud is compelling when it reduces costs, however that might happen. More efficient use of hardware is a possible means of reducing costs. Putting the management of the physical servers in the hands of people who have superior technical chops for managing servers by the thousands is another. These mega-server farms are surely getting some advantages of scale, too, because the people writing the hardware checks have incentive to deliver value, where up front capital, reliability, and computing power are all carefully monitored factors. The reality is that cloud computing is delivering on some of its promise to reduce costs, thus demand is going up.
I find I am getting much more conservative as I get older, and I am voting against the existing Republican Party with ever greater zeal. I live in California, and due to the peculiarities of Prop 13 and tax policy, the GOP shifted towards being the Party of No 20+ years ago, while the state as a whole drifted slightly leftwards. The result is the CA GOP has hollowed out. The state could use a competent loyal opposition party, but we are not going to get one until the old men die off.
Nonsense. CC is silent on the manner of grading teachers. That is simply a choice on the part of the state legislature and local school district. If the state legislature decides to enact a Procrustean regime that squashes the ability for teachers in the trenches to enact amendments to the class curriculum, then that itself is a problem regardless of whether CC is endorsed or not. In fact, we are already on that road, unfortunately, and ditching CC is not going to move us in another direction.
To look at the failure modes of the material is a known thing since the sinking of the HMS Sheffield in the Falklands War. One of the reasons that ship sunk so quickly is the fire softened the aluminum superstructure, causing the various firebreaks to fail. (With the electrical system down and no way to provide substantial water, that ship was probably doomed anyway. But the concern was a similarly damaged ship even with a working water system might be doomed anyway.)