Peopleware is indeed still very relevant. Always felt Slack by DeMarco made important points around efficiency seeking damaging actual effectiveness, which I always found very convincing and chimed with my own experience.
Banks printing money means the burger is more expensive for everyone who uses the denomination that the bank printed money for surely?
It increases cost and consequently reduces the incentive to produce outputs? So less incentive to produce, but if produced the result is a more expensive burger would be my read on this.
Because it doesn't just increase the supply of money--it increases the supply of burgers as well :-)
Sure, the money is created out of thin air. But that money gets invested in things which actually increase productivity and increase the GDP. E.G. a factory borrows money to buy new machines, which makes their workers more productive.
If the increasing money supply does start to cause excess inflation, the Fed tamps it down by increasing the interest rates. From Volker to Covid, it did a remarkably good job of keeping the inflation under 2%. Plague and unfunded tax cuts have pushed that up closer to 3%, but it is dropping.
Are there any stats that burger availability increased?
My observation is that quality, affordability and availability of burgers have went down whilst price has increased since 2008, the date I became aware of th use of printing money.
I attribute this to the printed money being kept to a large degree by banks instead of going into the wider economy. Most of that money has led to increases in housing stock value/cost and subsequently unavoidable cost to most, than contributing to the wider economy.
I'm not in the US so maybe have a different experience from yourself, but printing money has largely just devalued money and decreased wages as opposed to ending up benefitting burger availability :-)
> Most of that money has led to increases in housing stock value/cost
You're of course correct in general about asset prices. The entire game over the past 2 decades or so of low interest rates has been: borrow money and acquire more assets because U.S. monetary and fiscal policy has mostly only cared about the U.S. stock market (despite what pronouncements about other priorities might be made, the effect was the same).
We all knew this and it was almost irresponsible to do anything other than keep acquiring assets. The government will inflate their prices for you so why fight the Fed?
One didn't even need to gamble by trading, just accumulate.
People buy gold because, over the long run, gold has traditionally had a stable value.
But that is just another way of saying that in the long run, gold does not appreciate or depreciate. "Stable" means "it doesn't change a lot". And an asset's value has to change in order for you to realize a gain on it.
But gold's value doesn't change that much, in the long term. Therefore, gold is not a way to make money. At best, gold is a way to preserve your money. This has been true for thousands of years, which is why we all have confidence that gold can preserve our wealth.
cf. with Bitcoin. We do not have thousands of years of experience with it. You can't make pretty jewelry out of bitcoin. Bitcoin is not an excellent conductor of electricity, like gold is.
Bitcoin has value by consensus gentium. It has less backing it than any fiat currency on earth. At any time, countries could ban its use. Advances in decryption will eventually render it unworkable.
It mystifies me how anybody who is afraid of fiat currency could be so comfortable with bitcoin.
> It has less backing it than any fiat currency on earth
Amusingly HN commentators have been saying exactly the same thing since the launch of Bitcoin and they've been wrong the whole time.[^0] It's crazy how people are unable to update their priors or recognize the dissonance between their mental model and reality. Oh well.
And those monetary properties are based on proof-of-work.
> At any time, countries could ban its use. Advances in decryption will eventually render it unworkable
You have no idea what you're talking about. I don't mean that as an insult. I mean it literally. These are not points a serious knowledgeable person attempts to make.
You can't "ban" mathematics or code. And being code, cryptographic protocols are continuously updated. In fact, we added new cryptographic primitives to Bitcoin just 2 years ago, which you would know if you were actually honestly knowledgeable about what you're talking about.
Handwaving about cryptographic advances only tells me that you don't actually study cryptography. Perhaps you read a luddite talking point somewhere and were gullible enough to believe it?
> It mystifies me how anybody who is afraid of fiat currency could be so comfortable with bitcoin.
And that information asymmetry is what creates a market: those who understand an asset better own it and profit from it while those who don't or can't hold a less valuable commodity. That's how wealth is transferred to more knowledgeable people from less knowledgeable people in every aspect of life.
Anyway, Satoshi wrote:
"
The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work.
The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.
Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.
" [^1]
Bitcoin's supply can't be manipulated. It's permissionless, censorship resistant, a non-custodial bearer asset, independently auditable, decentralized, programmable. It's the best form of money ever invented. That's all.
> cf. with Bitcoin. We do not have thousands of years of experience with it. You can't make pretty jewelry out of bitcoin. Bitcoin is not an excellent conductor of electricity, like gold is.
Central Banks don't buy gold because of the awesome chains and bracelets they will make nor because they want to have a supply of good wiring.
Throwing around Latin phrases doesn't make your point more credible.
There is no such thing as intrinsic value; all value is subjective and relative, which I think you know.
// It is backed by only thing rfst backs any form of money: the credibility of it’s monetary properties //
Of course. That doesn't mean that all currencies are equally soundly backed, now, does it?
Bitcoin doesn’t even have any intrinsic properties. Its properties are also set by consensus genius.
// you can’t ban mathematics or code //
You can’t ban physical laws either, but somehow we manage to have speed limits. You can’t ban the laws of chemistry but somehow we manage to have laws banning drugs.
// . . . All value is subjective and relative . . . //
I'm sorry. I can't respectfully continue this conversation with you. It simply won't be productive for us because I don't believe you're a serious or intellectually honest person nor that you have the technical knowledge to discuss these things competently.
I'll just end up annoyed and my goal in 2025 is to be less annoyed and less annoying online.
I main ffs, the United States president owns Bitcoin (and just launched his own meme coin) and the largest asset manager in the world has well capitalized spot Bitcoin ETF but you're still regurgitating anti-bitcoin talking points from a decade ago about bans? Grow tf up!
Nonetheless, thanks for the conversation and for your time.
// I can't...continue...I don't believe you're a serious or intellectually honest person //
Exactly the right move. Don't waste any time with somebody who doesn't argue in good faith. Heck, these days, you have to worry about wasting time arguing with an LLM.
// Thanks for the conversation and for your time. //
You are welcome. here's a freebie: conversations on the internet never end in one person admitting they are wrong. Instead, as long as the two participants have rational reasons to disagree, they offer those rational reasons to each other. When one party runs out of such reasons, well...they insult the other guy and break off the conversation ;-)
The UK already has sovereign compute capacity. Just it's excessively expensive, mostly legacy and expensive to run and maintain. Crown hosting initiative 5 - 10 years ago was an attempt to solve some of that but not heard much positive about it.
Recently one of the more successful UK hosting partners went bust as it's really not possible to compete against the offerings of AWS etc for a lot (most) government uses. There are obvious exceptions where cost Vs functionality Vs security trade-offs kick-in and security wins.
My understanding is that original meaning was that pair programming requires the pair work together at the same desk and machine.
With the ability to share screens/IDEs remotely the need to be at the same desk may have shifted, but working together is intrinsic to pair programming I believe.
The original text went into some detail about making the desk work for 2 people, and having screwdrivers available to do so, which for some reason always amused me.
The article doesn't really touch on it directly but I do wonder if these types of integrations can start to provide additional context to coding tasks upfront from JIRa and/or feedback that normally takes human interactions to achieve or a CI pipeline to guarantee the check happens, such as running security scans on local changes.
The odd thing about working in an office for global companies like JPMorgan is that so many daily interactions happen with colleagues who are in a different location and/or timezone. Remote communication is part and parcel of the setup so much more than many/most other companies.
The associated benefits of being in a company owned location are almost negligible, at least in the areas I've experienced. Having worked in these types of companies almost all meetings are online anyway even if some of the people are sitting close by, not all are.
> many daily interactions happen with colleagues who are in a different location and/or timezone
I don't work for JPMorgan, but I experience this every day. My boss is in another state. Fellow team members are in other states. Folks in departments we work closely with are in other states or even countries.
The top brass loves to talk about the supposed benefits of talking shop with colleagues in line at the coffee shop in the lobby. But they tend to forget a few things: a) I'm not interested in talking shop standing in line for coffee, b) I'm not paid enough to live near or commute to HQ, and c) normies like me make up the majority of the company.
I like my job. I like my company. I just wish the bigwigs would get a clue that they don't, in fact, have all the answers, and they never will.
> But they tend to forget a few things: a) I'm not interested in talking shop standing in line for coffee, b) I'm not paid enough to live near or commute to HQ, and c) normies like me make up the majority of the company.
And d) the security awareness e-learning they make you do every year says not to talk shop while you're in line for coffee.
A good example of socialism in practice would have been to give the defaulted housing stock to people to stay-in surely? As opposed to underwriting the debt loaned by purely capitalist companies?
I'm not an expert in socialism but governments underwriting a capitalist housing market does not appear close or aligned with socialism at all.
I will say I've never associated the US government with socialism, at any level, so perhaps this bias is part of why I find a difficult argument to envisage.
Actual socialism requires collective ownership of the means of production, especially factories and farms. It's believed that private ownership of those things will inevitably result in abuses so ugly that the entire capitalist system will collapse.
"Socialism" in common parlance means "the government does stuff. Any stuff. With the possible exception of things that benefit them, which are of course right and necessary.
What a lot of people want is "democratic socialism", which is actually capitalism with strong government regulation and safety nets. It often includes strong mandates about the necessities of life: food, housing, health care.
There are few genuine socialists any more, though many democratic "socialists" take note of the failures of capitalism and try to mitigate them.
This lines up with my understanding, which is why underwriting monetary loss of banks does not appear anywhere close to being socialist.
The worlds governments intervention in 2008 and since seem closer aligned to propping up capitalism, whilst ironically also invalidating a lot of the basis that capitalism actually is a coherent system.
There's a bitter joke about privatizing profits and socializing losses. It's not exactly true, but it's depressingly close.
It's not entirely incoherent to be prepared to backstop losses when they would become systemic. But that mandates limits on risk, or it just tells people that the joke is actually reality. Balancing that requires constant vigilance... which corporations deter by calling it "socialism".
It's the old classic Eustace Mullins theory that the Fed are secret judeo-bolsheviks working to bring about world communism, using the blacks as their pawns. They just disguise themselves as rich guys and focus all of their policies on making the rich richer as an extremely deep cover.
Seeing this exact effect where I am currently working. Main available CI/CD tool is a customised and centrally managed Jenkins fleet. It's pretty much impossible to avoid using and seldom needs changed - until it does. Some attempts have been made at centralised libraries and patterns - but even that requires knowledge and study that most won't know is available or be given time to acquire.
So when the inevitable tweak or change is made it's made in the easiest, cheapest way - which is usually copying an existing example, which itself was copied from somewhere else.
I see exactly the same in other teams repositories. Easiest path taken to patch what already exists as the cost/benefit just isn't perceived to be there to worth prioritising.
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