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Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

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Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#121

Post by abalashov »

fiatjaf wrote: post #116
dismantlethesun wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Nannies make the world go round. Without them, half the workforce would be stuck at home" For my entry to Improbable Ideas day.... why don't we bring children to work? After they're no longer infants, its' plausible for children to simply run around the office, sitting quietly in the same rooms as their parents, and perhaps doing odd-jobs. It'd require a more holistic attitude to education than is presently allowe…

I agree with you. All people here are complaining with status quo bias in control of their minds. I think work can be much more interesting to a child than school or a nanny and the playground. Also, it would be so much cheaper to spare school/nanny costs that a lot of money could be spent to make the environment better for the child. We're talking about children older than 7 or so, right? I think children from 7 to…

All depends on how you raised the children before 7-10. They don't magically become a certain way at 7-10. ;-)

I mean, to some extent they do. Kids are born with an amazing amount of cognitive bootstrapping and initrd. But by elementary school years, the difference between children who were reared in intellectually stimulating ways and ones who weren't become patently obvious and to a larger extent entrenched.

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#122

Post by flohofwoe »

e2e4 wrote: post #113
Nomentatus wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conquered countries that were stripped of a good part of what they had, largely.

would appreciate a reference. p.s. many parts of eastern europe has been destroyed during the war as well; and was getting rebuild themselves.

Most of what was left of factories in the Soviet occupation zone (the later GDR) was dismantled and moved to the Soviet Union as reparation in the years after WW2. Here's some info in English about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_German_Democrat...

When I was young I heard a lot of crazy stories about the Russians in Germans (I grew up in the Erzgebirge mountains where the Russians mined the Uranium for their atomic bombs, think of an Eastern 20th century gold rush), some of those stories are how entire production lines were moved onto trains and to the Soviet Union nearly over night (they had a lot of experience with this since a few years earlier the Soviet Union basically moved their entire military production a few thousand kilometers eastward, out of the war zone).

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#123

Post by abalashov »

taneq wrote: post #79
dismantlethesun wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Nannies make the world go round. Without them, half the workforce would be stuck at home" For my entry to Improbable Ideas day.... why don't we bring children to work? After they're no longer infants, its' plausible for children to simply run around the office, sitting quietly in the same rooms as their parents, and perhaps doing odd-jobs. It'd require a more holistic attitude to education than is presently allowe…

You've never tried to work around small children, have you? I work from home and let me tell you, if our nanny has a day off it's absolutely impossible for me to get anything done beyond a couple of emails if I'm lucky.

... and the few e-mails I manage to send sound pretty ludicrous and ill-considered.

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#124

Post by bryanrasmussen »

stonogo wrote: post #75
dismantlethesun wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Nannies make the world go round. Without them, half the workforce would be stuck at home" For my entry to Improbable Ideas day.... why don't we bring children to work? After they're no longer infants, its' plausible for children to simply run around the office, sitting quietly in the same rooms as their parents, and perhaps doing odd-jobs. It'd require a more holistic attitude to education than is presently allowe…

> sitting quietly ...what does this mean? Is this something that children can do?

yes, for minutes at a time!

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#125

Post by jansho »

whack wrote: post #50

You could say the same thing about any non-glamorous/lucrative position. "Garbagemen make the world go round. Without them, we would drown in our own filth" "Nannies make the world go round. Without them, half the workforce would be stuck at home" "Auto mechanics make the world go round. Without them, we would have no way of getting places" Ultimately, all such arguments are inane and pointless because every single j…

Yes all roles are important.

If elephants get wiped out, there will be some consequences.

If insects or algae gets wiped out, the world is apocalyptically screwed.

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#126

Post by cgio »

Or as I like to say, "incompetence makes the world go round". Extracting little glimpses of functionality out of a chaotic mess is a challenging, at times satisfying and definitely valuable exercise that keeps many people at work...

Maintenance is not the opposite of innovation, it is the opposite of good design.

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#128

Post by blowski »

cgio wrote: post #126

Or as I like to say, "incompetence makes the world go round". Extracting little glimpses of functionality out of a chaotic mess is a challenging, at times satisfying and definitely valuable exercise that keeps many people at work... Maintenance is not the opposite of innovation, it is the opposite of good design.

I'm not sure I understand your point - the best built system in the world still needs maintenance. Parts go rusty. Requirements change. Those are not results of bad design, but the inevitable consequences of the real world.

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#129

Post by rusk »

maehwasu wrote: post #98

This is like saying LeBron James is less important than Cleveland's role players, because you need five people on a side to have a basketball team. The question isn't who's "necessary", since everyone who is necessary, no matter in what way, is necessary; necessity is a tautology. The question is whose contributions are more replaceable.

I'm not so up-to-date with Basketball, but certainly in Soccer and Rugby you need both. You need the disciplined engine-room of the defence and centre-field to maintain control of the field and prevent concession. At the same time however you won't get anywhere without the big-name points-scorers.

Similarly, businesses need the sales guys to go out there and get the customers. But without disciplined design, engineering and maintenance you're going to end up leaking all your revenues in support costs, not to mention intangibles such as reputation.

Re: Maintainers make the world go round: Innovation is an overrated ideology

#130

Post by rusk »

maxerickson wrote: post #92
theprop wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's hunter-gatherers! That's more than 10,000 years ago before agriculture developed...

Sure. How do you get from there to a city without any innovation? How do you even get to a sharp stick without innovation?

>How do you get from there to a city

Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

Basically peasants, once kicked off the land end up herded into cities.

Presumably the thinking at the time (beyond "lets make ourselves rich") was that agricultural production is more efficient when undertaken as a large-scale concern rather than by scattered small community holdings.

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