riprowan

The point isn't to optimize for contentment at the end of life. Rather, it's a technique for getting to the 50,000-foot view of one's life.

There's a saying "what you focus on gets bigger." If you live in the day-to-day, it's easy to turn the minutiae into your whole life.

Also, "pleasure" and "happiness" are fairly orthogonal. Living in the day-to-day arguably prioritizes pleasure over happiness.

... and therefore, if you actually do see more colors (since you were given more names for them) then you're more likely to need a new name for the new color that you just saw that nobody has named yet, leading to even more color-names and even greater linguistically-enabled color vision among all your peers.

In fact, at this moment, a united Europe may represent the last significant hope for Western liberal democracy.

Past Europe, the superpowers are USA, Russia, China...

> Why would I even bother "owning" a car?

Talk about superficial thinking.

Half the time I get in the car it's for a spur-of-the-moment run to the store.

And while the bus stops 300 ft from my house I've never ridden it.

I don't want my car off earning money when I need it for something important like running up to Home Depot so I can finish whatever project I'm working on.

"The ideal state of a resource is idle and ready for work."

I spend a fair amount of time outside the USA. Your comments are representative of how most Europeans see the entire USA.

So I guess everything is just a matter of perspective once you start overgeneralizing.

Also, what's the problem with Hispanics? Wrong kind of heterogeneity? Honest question.

I think if you look at the demographics of Los Angeles and Dallas you'll find them shockingly similar:

% Hispanic: LA 47% DA 42%

% Non-Hispanic White: LA 29% DA 29%

% foreign-born: LA 39% DA 25%

% Black: LA 10% DA 25%

% Poverty: LA 19% DA 18%

> What you're seeing is a backlash to the way GANTT charts have been misapplied to projects that are less well defined, and to managers that ask for estimates and then are unpleasantly surprised when an estimate isn't entirely accurate.

You think I don't know this?

I think you missed the point :(

(As an aside, in my experience, network diagrams and user-story maps pale in comparison to Gantt charts, as they do not effectively communicate timeline expectations IMO.)

The answer to al your questions is: in a perfectly competitive market, the two pricing strategies lead to the same price.

However an hour of one person's life does not have the same market value as an hour of another person's life.

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - Blaise Pascal

I think a lot of people crave work or spend all their "alone" time having a relationship with a computer because they are not comfortable in their own skin.[0]

[0] I say that because it applies 100% to me.

I've long told my recording clients, "real musicians have a day job" because it described so much of the best talent to come through the studio.

Everything you build becomes your code library that you carry forward.

Smart devs know this and cultivate their personal repetoire.

For example in the veeeery first days of .NET I had the opportunity to build a nice internal application for a client. Of course I didn't have a .NET library - the tech was just coming out of beta - but Microsoft was nice enough to provide a bunch of "example code" and "starter sites" to give all us noobs some patterns we could work from - at least most of the skeleton of a working, database back-ended website with a working security model.

From this .NET project it was easy to find another, and now I had a complete .NET library with solutions to all kinds of problems - how to do doc management, how to solve image resizing problems in .NET, how to talk to all kinds of heterogeneous systems using .NET, how to implement webservices, etc. because I'd built these once. With that toolbox I could easily solve all kinds of other problems with only a little creative remodelling of the skeleton app.

Then in 2007 when I jumped into OSS I got to start an all-new library building solutions on the LAMP stack. By 2009 I had a nice little library built up again.

The pattern is amenable to any software tech. Every project builds from the last one, if you do it right.

I started to make a witty post implying that you just signalled for some sort of terrorist attack using an encoded message, then I checked the calendar and posted this instead.

Excellent anecdote, thanks for sharing.

Sure, any amount of work could have been done to replatform the app.

They were already using WordPress for blogging. A custom WordPress implementation would have easily solved their CMS problems and devs are trivial to find.

The point was that the thing had just been rolled out the prior year. There was no budget or appetite for throwing the thing away. It did work. So there it stands, aside some dozen WordPress sites...

In theory, an open blockchain like Bitcoin eliminates the need for a trusted authority to be the system of record. A spreadsheet needs someone to manage it. That person, and that data, must be very trustworthy, else they can simply change the data for their benefit. The compliance procedures that assure trustworthiness cost money. Lots of money. And they still fail.

Blockchains, in theory, could also serve as a voting mechanism on splits, which could be manifested as blockchain hardforks. As Satoshi Nakamoto wrote:

> The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it.

Essentially a blockchain can codify the ownership of a stock share into a smart contract.

That's the theory, and only insofar as it applies to a Proof of Work blockchain like Bitcoin.

A private blockchain is more likely to be a Proof of Stake blockchain, in which shares (or tokens of other sorts) are issued in a "premine" which creates all of the tokens that will ever exist. These are then distributed to the initial group of trusted members of the private blockchain. From there, the blockchain can eliminate the need for a trusted authority to serve as the system of record of ownership.

I appreciate your different perspective enormously.

I have spent the bulk of my career working in larger, team-based environments. In my experience, being able to conform to cultural norms is essential to being a high-performing team leader or member.

Many, many teams have prejudices and / or litmus tests. For example, I've spent decades doing project management. I use Gannt charts. Why? Because they are the best way to communicate timeline expectations with stakeholders. I don't use them to manage the project. But I've encountered more than one Agile team that flat-out considers the use of these charts to be anathema. You might as well crap on the rug.

That's just one example. Obviously there are also the buzzword technologies. Here's an overgeneralization you might agree with: young developers tend to naturally gravitate towards newer, less proven tech. Us older developers naturally gravitate towards more mature, established tech. This creates a source of age-related friction.

Then there's the inability of others to grasp the applicability of your experience. For example in the 1990s I built a lot of actually awesome Lotus Notes/Domino applications. Now that's a technology that, if you mention it in various meetings, will get you laughed at. However, Domino was kind of the original "noSQL" / "BigTable" world, and it turns out that my application architecture experience in the Domino world translates meaningfully into these "newer" (ha!) database technologies. But try to tell that to team members.

So I guess my comments are orthogonal to yours. I agree with pretty much everything you write, but it leaves out the important social aspect.

> Ranching. Not farming.

Not two things. One thing. Polyface is a farm and a ranch. How can you do sustainable farming without animals?

You were the one asking for examples, so you should have used Google yourself. I thought about replying with a LMGTFY link, but I don't like being a dick.

You say you were trying to get me to think? That works both ways.

> Once you learn anything about current ranching practices, you realize its at least as bad as current farming practices. Totally unsustainable.

"Current" practices. Interesting modifier. I thought we were talking about ranching generally.

Please define what the "current" farming and ranching practices are in the USA. Please be sure that your definition includes the practices of everyone currently ranching or farming in the country. Obviously nobody can provide this definition. So let's drop the "current" modifier.

You challenge the idea that ranching - even in the abstract - can be "sustainable." To me the question is absurd, because animals and carnivores exist sustainably in nature.

The question is, what are the practices that will allow animals to continue to exist in nature, with humans as one of their predators?

Also, what sort of environmental impact will exist if farm animals go away? Where will all the animal manure come from to grow sustainable produce? Sustainable farming requires animals. Imagine if all the US heartland was sustainably fertilized. That's a lot of manure, man. There used to be a couple million (sustainable) bison that provided that manure. Humans sustainably ate them for tens of thousands of years. Then came fences and the end of bison herds. To replace them, it'll take a few million head of cattle.

Nobody here was arguing that "current" ranching practices (whatever that broad term means) are "sustainable." I am simply pointing out that there exist millions of acres of ranchable but not farmable land in the USA which can obviously support edible grazing animals sustainably without competing even with even one acre of arable land; and that sustainable farming requires grazing animals. If you question these obvious facts, then I suppose we're done here.

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Oh, also. It's "buried lede."

> Ok. I'm being a dick. I should calm down. I apologize.

Apologies always accepted here. No problem.

> I predict ranching will become a niche source of protein as vat-grown meat comes online (20 years) and taxpayers decide to stop subsidizing it (10 years?).

Even if all of this comes to pass, why will the resulting ranching industry be unsustainable?

I am working on a project now that bears some study.

I built this extranet app for a Fortune-class / NYSE company in 2001. They were a Lotus Domino shop so for that and various other reasons the extranet was deployed in Domino. The initial rollout was considered quite successful, but it was definitely "v1" code, and I'm being really generous with the code quality. Plus, Domino.

The application was considered a stopgap until the shop had become fully Microsoft-centric, at which point it was expected to be migrated to .NET. That was expected to be in ~5 years.

The result was that no investment was made into the app for over fifteen years. Every now an then an enhancement would be needed, and a contractor would be called up to bolt on a feature in shockingly slipshod manner (this app is much too complex for the average Domino dev). But no technical debt was ever cleaned up, because "meh, we're going to replace that app by 2007."

2007 was 10 years ago. In the meantime two projects to replace the app were spun up and killed. The app is finally being retired this year. I was called up at the 11th hour to jump back in (15 years later) to help support the thing through the conversion, as the one existing Domino dev they had on staff finally (wisely) jumped ship.

I cannot even begin to describe the state of this app.... it's a case study in "how to not manage IT."

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Another recent client was a content-creation shop (think glossy magazines). Their outgoing sr dev had deployed a CMS that nobody had (or has) ever heard of. This CMS was originally developed during the glory days of XML. Believe it or not, the app worked by loading all of the CMS content into a single in-memory XML document. This was probably OK for a brochure site, but this was a site with hundreds of thousands of pages of content. As a result the application required a server with 64GB of RAM just to launch. Also - launching the app took about ten minutes after the server OS was loaded. And there was no server farm, just the one server. If the app was ever stopped, it would stay down for at minimum 10 minutes.

I came in to fill in temporarily and to try to find someone to staff the position permanently. Even with a competitive salary, nobody qualified wanted the job.

Meanwhile, the same company also had a set of blogs that they managed in WordPress....

So what about the Music Genome project?

http://www.pandora.com/about/mgp

It even goes past that.

Try doing sustainable farming without animals. It can't be done. Animals are a requirement for sustainable farming.

Sure, here's the first two that I looked up:

http://juharanch.com/

http://www.yellowstonegrassfedbeef.com/node/100

QED. I'm sure if you bother to research this you'll find many others.

If you stop and think about your question more deeply I think you'll unask it.

Organic produce farming requires manure. Something like 1/4 of the land mass of the USA requires grazing animals to maintain an ecological balance.

That manure and those animals are requirements, not luxuries.

Sustainable produce farming requires sustainable animal farming, because nature is inherently symbiotic.

> In Texas you have two kinds of diversity: white and Hispanic

uffi... where to start?

Maybe you exhibit prejudice and ignorance of your own?

Did you know that, for example, Dallas has one of the largest gay communities in the USA?

I'm sure Texas could use more diversity, and I won't try to convince you otherwise since your mind appears quite made up, but your comment adds negative value to the conversation.

I must add that I have undergraduate and graduate technical degrees and spent from 1983-2005 building lots and lots of apps (I started coding at ~ age 15). So I pursued "generalism" only after being a reasonably qualified (but not specialized) technologist.

Ah, I see. I agree. I think "management" includes lots of quasi-technical roles, in which people and project leadership are the core skills, with one's technical base serving as a platform for managing others with highly focused technical skill sets. Hopefully you are also right that these jobs are increasingly in demand.

> As a coder it is important to understand that most problems in technology are not solved with more code, but less. That you will generate less code at 50 should be seen as a benefit.

This is precisely my argument as a generalist.

I may not write code as fast or even as elegantly as I once did, but I'm much, much better at "seeing around corners" to avoid problems, and I'm much more likely to "build the right thing" due to my very broad but not deep technical base. I do not fall into the trap of "when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail."

> there is very little that's happened in the last 30 years that is genuinely new

This is true, but try to convince your 20something peer group of it. They are all convinced that their technical skills are revolutionary.

I studied waterfall systems engineering in 1998. But at the same time they also taught "RAD" iterative waterfall, or the precursor to Agile. I ran with RAD, and made it mine, so I've been doing something very similar to "Agile" for two decades. However, I still think that Gannt charts and top-down planning have value.

Showing that shit to the wrong 20something developer is a great way to be excommunicated.

I don't understand the question.

Can you help me understand why the idea that raising animals cannot be sustainable, when clearly grazing animals can live perfectly well on their own with no care whatsoever from humans (as they have for millennia) on areas of land that are not suitable for farming?

I think the direct answer to your question is that clearly carnivorism is environmentally sustainable, as it has been practiced by millions of various species for hundreds of millions of years.

Maybe your greater question is, "is a constantly growing human population sustainable?" which is outside the scope of this discussion.

Thank you very much for sharing that.

What ever happened to "small is beautiful" and "less is more?"

These used to be core "hacker" values.

Had Twitter followed such a strategy it might still be sustainable.

Edit: as an aside, consider the parallel in the music business. It is now possible, thanks to technology, to self-produce and market one's own music without "VC funding" from a record label. However, it's almost impossible to gain meaningful exposure, without which it is impossible to earn a sustainable income.

It turns out that few people want to listen to unknown artists. What most people want to listen to is whatever is most popular. And to be the most popular requires massive marketing, which requires a record label. No surprise then that the big labels - which were supposedly destroyed by the internet - are actually stronger than ever before.

We seem to be an a race for hypercentralization - a race empowered by the internet that was supposed to decentralize things.

I'll also add that the rise to stardom and "riches" in the music business comes with similar creative and ethical compromises discussed in the article.

I agree with you on most of your points including that grass-fed beef is not sustainable at the current rate of consumption, but that does not mean that it isn't sustainable at a lower rate of consumption / higher price.

I completely agree with you.

I started in this field in 1992. I've seen the coming and goings of many flash-in-the-pan technologies.

If you are a dev and are selling yourself on your skillset, ask yourself, "is this sustainable?" The answer is "no." A fifty-year-old brain simply does not absorb new technologies as fast as a 25-year-old-brain. If your plan is to continually adopt new cutting edge technologies in order to stay marketable, I politely submit you need to rethink your long term plan.

As an almost 50-year-old, I promise you that the world is not a gentle place for older devs. Plan your exit into management, a related field, or some other job altogether. If you expect to be a coder at age 50 you're going to be disappointed.

As for me, I jettisoned the "technical skill set" war decades ago. I do not sell myself on my technical skill set. I sell myself as the ultimate generalist. This comes with its own set of problems. However, it has allowed me to age more gracefully in my field, because I do not create the expectation that my primary value-added is code generation.

I've never understood this argument.

Probably the best thing about being a cutting-edge dev is the ability to work from anywhere. Heck, I've only worked onsite for a handful of my clients. Some of them (including my current client) I've never even met.

Why this need to co-locate everyone - in the most expensive city we can find? Why the need to work so hard - just to transfer your hard-earned wealth to a landlord?

You say Texas has no infrastructure - well, we do have running water, paved roads, electricity, cheap homes, and internet - everything the modern IT professional needs to work and live. And we also have airports, for getting the f__k out of Texas, which is easy and fun with all the rent money you'll save :)