What you've said echoes the concept behind the quote "I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one." This, or some variation of it, has been around for quite a while. I think this reveals a fundamental truth about knowledge based work that is inherent to humans. Purposeful simplicity is harder than accidental complexity.
> This approach of course takes more time and requires that your management trusts you and is willing to compromise on timelines.
I would say that most management and even most programmers don't see the value in this. In my experience focusing on simplicity gives much better long-term results but it has higher and more unpredictable upfront cost. Blasting code onto main is seen as being more productive even though long-term it seems to have much higher overall costs.
> Because money is just a tool for allocating resources.
> often devolves into rationing
Just to expand upon what you're saying a bit; most people don't view things in such terms which I think is unfortunate. You often see discussions about waiting times in single payer healthcare systems and cost in more free-market systems. The fact of the matter is that if demand is greater than supply you must ration the supply somehow. Prices are one way but not the only way. Waiting lines, by need, randomly, etc... are all valid rationing mechanisms as well.
What I've noticed is that when people don't view this is a resource allocation problem they are able to always see the greener grass somewhere else. They see the lack of treatment of a person or group of persons as a failing of their system where those people would have received treatment in a different system that uses a different rationing mechanism. The issue is that in a different system there would still be people who don't receive treatment, they would just be different people.
By not viewing it as a resource allocation problem I think it gives the appearance that there is a perfect solution and that its just political will halting its implementation.
> This is logic of post-2008 fail-capitalism instead of 1970’s and China’s aspirational, problem solving capitalism.
No, this is reality. It does not matter if you're working under capitalism, socialism, communism, mercantilism, or some as yet unknown system since economics is the “study of the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses.” You cannot deny resource scarcity anymore than you can deny natural selection or gravity. To do so leads to a lot of tragic consequences.
> You don’t address shortages of healthcare, housing or food with an elegant and fair system to decide who starves and dies.
Food is an excellent example to use. In order to guarantee that no one goes hungry, or is well fed, or whatever metric you want to use how much food should be produced? Please find a way for this seemingly simple solution to not devolve into rationing by some mechanism.
> You expand supply to make sure no one has to. You examine supply chain and figure out the bottlenecks.
By expanding supply of healthcare you are taking resources away from somewhere else. Everyone can become a doctor and the nation will have very cheap and plentiful healthcare. Of course no one will be building houses, repairing roads, generating electricity, making MRI machines, refining helium, building the equipment to do the above, or countless other economic activities required for society as we know it to exist. There are limited resources, people, and time. You can’t do everything all at once.
> For example China has started mass producing MRI machines, that’s one way you adress a problem.
How do you know how many MRI machines you need? How do you know if you have too many? What about doctors, nurses, gloves, defibrillators, etc… Prices are actually a mechanism that communicates where more resources need to be allocated and where less are needed. What you’re talking about sounds more like central planning or some subset of it.
> expanding supply of healthcare you are taking resources away from somewhere else
This is totally wrong.
It takes 5 years to get planning approval in UK, it takes 1 year in France. Tunnelling costs are 3x higher in Uk than in europe. Building a tram takes 3 times less. Lower Thames crossing has been in planning for 15 years and we have spent 300 million on lawyers, more than Norway has spent on building an actual tonnel of comparable size.
If UK has economy of France but infrastructure worse than Poland, maybe we are doing something dumb.
If USA has expensive insulin and poor Bulgaria has cheap insulin and it works just as well, maybe you are doing something dumb.
You can expand supply of housing in UK without damaging other sectors of economy: introduce statutory right to add an extra story on your op if your house. Remove green belt protections, introduce 1 month limit on review of any planning application, after which it is automatically granted if valid objection is not found.
Introduce a single planning portal and standardise software for planning applications across the whole country instead of every Shropshire and Wolverhampton having their own practices. Purchase perpetual license for such software as a country and make it freely available to every citizen.
Introduce favourable mortgages for self-building.
Produce detailed, pre-approved designs for standardised homes and bulk purchase materials or modular components for them.
Organise mass production of
high-speed trams and make them available to local government with favourable, pre approved finance terms, so that larger areas of housing are accessible by high speed transport.
All of the above is implemented in different countries around the world, whether it’s France, China or someone else.
>If USA has expensive insulin and poor Bulgaria has cheap insulin and it works just as well, maybe you are doing something dumb.
The insulin example always drives me nuts. The type of insulin you get in Bulgaria is also cheap in the US. In the US, you can get a months supply of generic off patent insulin at Walmart for $40. You can also get extremely fancy insulins for $1000, and $10,000 insulin pumps.
It’s not a binary decision. Healthcare is a gradient of treatment options and outcomes. The concept you are missing is called economizing which includes substituting services, adjusting time preferences, sharing, expanding network of providers, etc.
> post-2008 fail-capitalism
You mean the one where government agencies were taking the risk of bad mortgages from sellers?
We don’t have anything close to a capitalist market in healthcare or finance.
> Although the period from 1837 to 1864 in the US is often referred to as the Free Banking Era, the term is a misnomer in terms of the definition of "free banking" above. Free Banking in the United States before the Civil War refers to various state banking systems based on what were called "free banking" laws at the time. These laws made it necessary for new entrants to secure charters, each of which was subject to a vote by the state legislature with obvious opportunities for corruption. These general banking laws also restricted banks' activities in important ways.
> The term "assault weapon" usually indicates larger magazines and higher rate of fire than firearms that are typically used for self defense or sport.
This is incorrect. An "assault weapon" is semi-automatic and it has no intrinsic rate of fire. The National Firearms Act of 1934 already regulates automatic firearms at the federal level. The definition of an assault weapon varies by state, but usually comes down to cosmetic and minor features such as a pistol grip, a shrouded barrel, a folding stock, a threaded barrel, etc...
> The definition of an assault weapon varies by state
Yet you define it concretely in your first line, and immediately contradict that statement in your second like. You seem more focused on arguing than being logical.
> If you instead use your resources to deliver new features that might have a nonblocking bug here or there, you're improving your position over the competitor's.
In the short term. Features can attract new customers but software that is frustrating to use due to a lot of low level bugs will repel existing customers towards competitors over the long term. If you've simultaneously decided tech debt isn't worth addressing then your competitor can easily overtake you. Furthermore adding feature after feature eventually leads to a kitchen sink product where potential customers are put off by the learning curve. This is really just a variation on the quantitative fallacy that ignores qualitative aspects.
As Jeff Bezos said a few days ago: "Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first."
This is not an election where we can afford doubt.
Bezos? What the hell would a tech/business guy have to say about elections and why would anyone listen? He has a newspaper to speak for him, why is he saying this stuff under his own name?
Edit: i was out of the loop but apparently bezos decided to throw his chips out the window for little benefit to himself (or anyone). Just goes to show the wealthy are just as capable of being morons as the rest of us
There's a corollary to the fallacy of appeal to authority, which is that it's also a fallacy of rejecting an idea outright on the grounds it doesn't come from an authority. It's an insightful observation whether or not you like Bezos.
I don't really have an opinion about the man outside of "growing a business", but how on earth does this benefit him? I don't know where on earth you got "authority" from as i didn't invoke this concept at all.
It seems like people are trying to min-max their lives and in doing so are missing the forest for the trees. Not a single drop of alcohol is healthy, not a single photon hitting bare skin is healthy, etc.
In the end life is full of unknowns. There are people in their 90s who drink like a fish and smoke like a chimney. There are people who led a very healthy lifestyle and died in their 40s. Don't forget to enjoy life while trying to make it last as long as possible.
"Everything in moderation, including moderation." -Oscar Wilde
This- people are 'min-maxing' on single isolated dimensions, and not looking at the bigger picture. Sun does a lot more than increase vitamin D, it also increases metabolic rate by acting directly on the mitochondria, lowers blood pressure, calibrates the circadian rhythm, coordinates eye development, and many other vitally important things.... and it turns out the most of the most deadly types of skin cancer aren't even caused by sun exposure.
When you unnaturally radically alter your diet, physical environment, or lifestyle to an extreme outside of normal human experience based on trying to optimize a single variable in attempt to be healthier, it is almost guaranteed to backfire.
I think you're making the parent's point that you should be suspicious of the extremes.
But just for completeness: you can satisfy your vitamin D need through diet, particularly oily fish like sardines and salmon. At least I hope so, because for various scheduling/remote work/family reasons I don't get a lot of daylight these days. I run and bike outside, but generally not during peak daylight hours.
Perhaps I was vague. Sunlight is usually vital. Alcohol is never necessary, at least not in this modern age of refrigeration. (Tolerating it is likely a side effect of needing to consume fermented fruit to survive.)
So trying to debate extremes may become a straw man that diffuses useful discussion around alcohol.
I don't think the market is broken, I do think it has been heavily distorted by government intervention though. I think you are correct that credentialism is a problem here. For those who suggest free tuition for everyone (government funded), I would ask how that would solve this particular problem. It seems like it would worsen this problem and probably lead to an even larger shortage of people going in the trades.
I would consider distortion at this magnitude to be broken. It's pretty much stuck in a vicious cycle of number of degrees increasing from accessibility, businesses increasing demand for credentials because there are more of them, demand for easy loans increasing, etc. It would take a monumental shift to fix this from multiple areas of society.
I'm going to have to disagree with the entire premise of this piece.
If you are a cabinet maker you have many individual clients who all want what you're producing. They each have their own budget and preferences that you can work with to get them something they want to buy. The incentives and constraints are clear here. If you can make something the client wants at a price and quality point they can afford you will do well.
Many (most?) software developers create a product to satisfy the needs of many customers and non-customers simultaneously. Furthermore you almost never interact directly with customers; instead developers interact with a panoply of different business interests such as engineering managers, product managers, project manager, product owners, etc. Even worse software doesn't have to be done to ship it as it can always be fixed "later". With the advent of Agile, Scrum, and SAFe it's clear what the business wants is not someone good at a craft; they want an assembly line.
So what are the incentive structures and constraints here? Every other person has incentives for career advancement, bonuses, raises, etc. Most people are too far removed from customers to be directly affected by them. How many times has a cabinet maker been told that the hope chest they're working on for one client also needs to double as a bank vault. Oh and by the way it needs to be done by the end of the quarter (right after layoffs of course) because they are hoping to be bought out. Code bases end up being a fractured mess of bad abstractions, infinite abstractions, and rewrites because developers are trying to accommodate the impossible demands set forth by the business in a way that doesn't cause their job to be abject misery.
TLDR: most software developers are not expected to be craftsmen (or women). The company determines, through incentives and constraints, the quality of code it will produce. An individual software developer risks burnout if they think quality above and beyond what the company allows is within their responsibilities or capabilities.
What I've seen mostly is developers bringing complexity, then cutting corners after that because they don't want to deal with it. In Coders at work, Douglas Crockford said to spend the sixth cycle - whatever the cycle is - on refactoring. It's a sound advice if you care about technical debt as an engineer. Spend some time to revisit the code architecture to see if it still fits the problem you're solving. Instead of spending three cycles on something that could have been done in one because of how fragile everything is. Or having a long list that is tied to the same root cause.
Sometimes it means redo your React marketing website in Node and EJS (or the equivalent) instead of trying to make it SSR too.
> In Coders at work, Douglas Crockford said to spend the sixth cycle - whatever the cycle is - on refactoring. It's a sound advice if you care about technical debt as an engineer.
My point is that very often it's not up to engineers. If a company doesn't incentivize this refactoring and engineers have to - as some sibling comments suggest - inflate their estimates then the code base will deteriorate over time. Even if your team sets up a policy of doing refactoring ~15% of the time this will be overridden by business interests more often than not.
This is essentially a corollary of Conway's Law. You should not expect code bases to be better than the business incentivizes it to be. I'm speaking from personal experience here; this is burnout territory. Keep in mind these are very general observations and every company is different. In some companies what you and Crockford suggest is possible. I'd wager it's the exception rather than the rule though.
> There are outstanding systemic inequities at every level of American society.
I think this needs to be backed up with evidence rather than merely asserted. I've been reading through a number of books by Thomas Sowell lately and he presents enough statistical evidence to explain disparities without any hint of racism, sexism, etc. Regardless of if you agree with him or not, the mere fact that alternate theories exist that explain why society looks as it does today should be enough to question the foundational problem that DEI claims to address.
Take as an example the gender pay gap which is presented as women earning 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. While statistically true in aggregate, DEI tends to treat this axiomatically as a sign of sexism. If you dig into the statistics the vast majority of this difference is due to the fact that many women voluntarily take time off of their career to raise children.
> many women voluntarily take time off of their career to raise children
Expect there is evidence to suggest that women that earn a higher income are less likely to leave the workforce, which is further influenced by access to affordable childcare and dual incomes.
The point is that when you control for these factors, a woman with the same title and responsibilities as a man will earn less for the same work.
> The point is that when you control for these factors, a woman with the same title and responsibilities as a man will earn less for the same work.
That can't possibly be true, because in a market economy, the more-expensive workers (men) would be laid off and replaced by less-expensive, equally-capable "same title and responsibilities" workers (women). This doesn't seem to be the case on a grand scale, which means it's more deep/complex than the "men get paid more than women" headline we're all used to seeing.
Are you arguing that society operates from a position of optimal market theory, and that cultural norms, prejudices, and biases play no role in salary or pay rates for anyone It's not particularly hard to find examples of disparity or exploitation.
Disparity and exploitation are not the same thing as ignoring an obvious way to reduce labor costs. Why would companies be smart enough to outsource labor overseas, but somehow lack the know-how to simply hire women and save 23% of labor costs? Because the "women make 77 cents on the dollar" meme is just looking at raw incomes, and not adjusting for type of job and experience.
So you've done more search than everyone else putting out data? Maybe you can share all your hard-earned discoveries on the subject, since so you're so confidently well-informed.
Men account for 13% of nurses, but average $90k vs $76k for women.
Then why don't they just hire women to do the exact same jobs as men and save a ton of money? You're still not offering a rationale for why companies aren't making use of an easy way to reduce labor costs. Which is more likely: that companies hate women so much that they're willing to ignore an opportunity to make a massive leap in profitability? Or perhaps you need to read your studies more closely and it's not the case that men and women are paid differently for the same work?
Your study on nurses offers an explanation in the article:
> Male nurses also reported working more hours per week, at an average 39 hours plus five hours of overtime, while female nurses reported working an average of 37 hours plus four hours of overtime.
I agree that if you just count the W-2s and ignore hours worked, subfields, travel, etc. then men make more than women. My whole point is that this kind of comparison is naive.
Likewise your study on lawyers grouped a hugely varied profession all into the same category. As an analogue, take doctors. Yes male and female doctor have different average incomes even for the same level of experience. But that doesn't capture the fact that over 70% of anesthesiologists are male while in pediatrics it's the opposite. This one will have an income disparity even when men and women are equally paid for the same work. It's a similarly naive analysis to lump together all lawyers into one category.
It's a fantasy world to believe that people operate purely on rational and logical long-term thinking. What's your rationale for slavery? Why couldn't women vote until recently? What's your rationale for why American women couldn't go to bars unattended as late as the 1970s? There's literally no shortage of examples showing the mistreatment of women, yet it's hard to believe that pay discrepancy remains till this day?
The entire premise if flawed if your operating under the assumption that people think in market and game theory. Prejudices and biases easily overcome rational thinking.
> Your study on nurses offers an explanation in the article:
The differences in hours doesn't account for the difference in pay.
> over 70% of anesthesiologists are male while in pediatrics it's the opposite
Show me a single study that reinforces the data that backs up your position that satisfies the level of granularity you're grasping at. Until then, the research and data that's in supports only one of our positions.
There's a vast difference between suboptimal decision making and ignoring a massive cost saving. The line that "went make X% as much as men" is widely spread, it's inconceivable that executives haven't heard this line. And the profi gains from a 10-20% reduction in labor costs would be staggering. No, prejudice doesn't cut it as a rationale.
Slavery existed because preindustrial societies were heavily labor intensive and the returns on more skilled labor was marginal. The industrial revolution changed this, which is why abolition movements largely coincided with industrialization.
Restrictions of women's liberties stem from thousands of years of family dynamics where child mortality rates meant that women had to spend most of their fertile years bearing and caring for children. The replacement rate in preindustrial societies was something like 5-6 births per woman due to such high infant mortality rates.
> The differences in hours doesn't account for the difference in pay
It actually does, men work 2 more normal hours and 1 more overtime hour on average. Assuming overtime is paid at 2x normal wages this is about a 10% disparity in paid hours. And again, there's more than just hours worked there's travel nursing, different metro areas, and more.
> Show me a single study that reinforces the data that backs up your position that satisfies the level of granularity you're grasping at.
You're asking me to prove a negative. I don't doubt you can find individual instances of discrimination against women (and against men), my point is that the large disparities between men's and women's average wages overwhelmingly stem from differences in men and women's behavior rather than discrimination.
> The line that "went make X% as much as men" is widely spread
It's not "widely spread", it's widely researched. Show me a study that explains the pay gap as owing to mostly to behavior.
You've provided post-hoc academic rationale, rather than something the average person would have been operating under. People simply do not make decisions the way you seem to be under the impression of. I'm sure the average slave owner used your explanation rather than believing that subset of the population was sub-human chattel.
An example of a behavioral difference is salary negotiation, where assertive women are viewed negatively while a man chest-thumping is viewed positively. Tell that woman who took a lower salary because of cultural stigmas and traditions your rationale and see how far that goes. I've been in the room when a man waved off a woman because of such behavior.
> You're asking me to prove a negative.
I'm asking you to back up your claim with evidence, which you have thusly been unable to do. What you have done is nitpick specific details like that's a gotcha, rather than owing to statistics and population sampling.
> I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second. By the law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind. -Thomas Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population [1798]
> The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate. -Paul Ehrlich The Population Bomb [1968]
Of course there's a limit. What that limit is no one knows and most predictions will be wrong. Some day someone may be right in their prediction given the right conditions.
> This approach of course takes more time and requires that your management trusts you and is willing to compromise on timelines.
I would say that most management and even most programmers don't see the value in this. In my experience focusing on simplicity gives much better long-term results but it has higher and more unpredictable upfront cost. Blasting code onto main is seen as being more productive even though long-term it seems to have much higher overall costs.
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