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The whole system where all of these projects generally go towards some form of advertising where we convince people to buy things they don't really need is a far worse form of heat loss than this. Buying the latest shiny smartphone every year isn't just the heat loss of thousands of engineers making it slightly thinner, it's the actual loss of all the resources that went into last year's batch of smartphones that end…
The whole system where all of these projects generally go towards some form of advertising where we convince people to buy things they don't really need is a far worse form of heat loss than this. Buying the latest shiny smartphone every year isn't just the heat loss of thousands of engineers making it slightly thinner, it's the actual loss of all the resources that went into last year's batch of smartphones that end…
The core business of advertising is making people chronically dissatisfied with their life. Not only does it cause economic waste, but it brings people down. Ad blocking (online and IRL) is not only a matter of privacy, it is a matter of sanity.
On your original point, please sing along gaily...
Grow theee...
Grow theee...
Grow the economy
Exponentially
we rise and we rise
and we tear up the skies
we...
Grow theee...
Grow theee...
Grow the economy
Like a kick-ass cancer
Hyperinvasive
And when everything's ruined
What will we do?
What will we do?
Cancer thank you!
Grow theee...
Grow theee...
Grow the economy
Just like rabbits in Australia
Grow the economy
Wildfires in California
Grow the economy
Nagasaki, Hiroshima
Grow the economy
The earth is like an apple pie...
Let's eat it and let's die!
Do you want some more? It's delicious :-)The whole system where all of these projects generally go towards some form of advertising where we convince people to buy things they don't really need is a far worse form of heat loss than this. Buying the latest shiny smartphone every year isn't just the heat loss of thousands of engineers making it slightly thinner, it's the actual loss of all the resources that went into last year's batch of smartphones that end…
Life has no meaning, and there's no inherent value in anything. How people decide to spend resources that they have is their responsibility. Thankfully, money, together with open markets is an extremely effective mechanism of conciliating millions of such decisions. So, if millions of people decide that they would rather buy a new phone than, I don't know, help starving children in Africa – it's their responsibility. Blaming it on advertisement is a view that presents these millions of people as helpless children, who are so easy to manipulate that they can't even be responsible for their own decisions – which is very far from the truth.
Same thing really -- it comes out better, the same or worse but the underlying principles are identical. You could avoid the "heat loss" by just hacking on the old crufty code or redesign it into a fancy-smancy state of the art system.
I would also bring up The Economic Calculation Problem and how it applies to large monolithic corporations equally as well but that's a discussion for another day.
The example with the halved memory space isn't a good one. There might be a real net benefit to society by using up less resources.
> The process of changing the system to have a new balancing point took work. It involved investments of engineer time, design work, tech writers and documentation changes, and all kinds of other "meta" stuff.
In most places I've worked, this involves investments of two interns' time and a few design meetings which result in a design document, half of which will never make it into the actual implementation. If it's a customer-facing thing, it will result in documentation changes -- otherwise, it won't. There will be no time to adjust the documentation and internal knowledge about how we do it now is going to float around as oral wisdom. Why we do it like that is going to be folklore two years down the road.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can you have a market inside a company? Markets depend on having multiple suppliers and multiple customers. Nokia tried having internal competition and it didn't go well. Something like it can work though. Many years ago I worked for Philip Semiconductor at the Mullard factory in Southampton in a department that designed and built production and test equipment. We had a formal project process where if the custome…
Its not a market so much as an economy. Instead of necessarily saying "you must do things this way" its "you must meet these requirements and these SLAs/goals/dates, and you have this many Magic Corporate Resource Bucks to spend". Those Magic Corporate Resource Bucks aren't real dollars necessarily, but they are representative of the costs of things that other divisions of the company may provide. You can swap your M…