261–270 of 335 posts
One of the uncomfortable conversations we're going to have to have soon is about how 'Flow State' is efficient but ineffective. One of the characteristics of Flow State is a diminished sense of considering the consequences of an action. Exactly the "so busy figuring out if they could do it that they didn't stop to think if they should do it". In particular I've noticed that people get extremely defensive about code t…
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> industry socializes the cost of its pollution and takes a private profit Um, isn't this what is happening now, with centralized regulation?
No, proper regulation either forces companies to curb their emissions or taxes it. In other words, to internalize it.
No, in other words, to pass on the costs to society, because the cost of whatever they are providing goes up. Plus, since the companies are a concentrated interest, it's easy for them to buy regulations from the central authority that are favorable to them and unfavorable to potential competitors.
A proper regulation would look more like this: a company cannot even build a factory to begin with until it can convince all the parties who could potentially be impacted by their operations to agree. No centralized authority (like, say, a government) can agree on behalf of those parties, because no centralized authority can possibly properly represent all of their interests. So either every single party agrees, or nothing happens.
The usual objection to this is that no factories would ever get built, because there will always be some party that is simply unwilling to agree. But that objection ignores basic economics. If the factory really is a profitable venture, even with all of the potential impacts taken into account, the factory owners will be able to bargain with the other parties to some kind of mutual agreement. In some cases, they might just offer to buy land outright from parties that are unwilling to agree to having the factory built next to them. Or they might offer shares in the enterprise to neighboring landowners in exchange for permission to build. There are plenty of possibilities; the key point is that the economics of the situation forces the people who want to undertake the enterprise to show good evidence that the benefits really do outweigh the costs. Whereas under the centralized regulatory regime we have now, the burden to be met is much lighter and does not really do anything to ensure that the benefits outweigh the costs.
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To me, the web page nearly is always faster than asking a human. Even setting aside the phone trees designed to slow me down, I'm more comfortable with the bloated, user-hostile page than trying to understand a human voice through a 4000 Hz telephone channel. I like not having to try to explain to them what I want. With the web I can do it whenever I want, at my own pace. It feels like a voice call is an admission of…
> There is never anything I want from the phone tree except a human operator. If you could automate my request then you should have done it over the far clearer interface of the web page. This. It's particularly infuriating that now many phone trees don't even have a built-in "I want to talk to a human, now" option. Hitting "0" used to be a fairly common way to do that, but doesn't appear to be any more. Often I have…
(In reality, you lie to get through to a human, but come on.)
Also, the difference between talking to somebody reading a script in Bangalore and someone on the inside who actually knows what they are doing (if you can manage to convince someone to connect you to the latter) is crazy. The drones handling customer support info often have essentially zero information on top of what's given to the customer.
One time UPS lost my package (bona fide lost in a warehouse, maybe stolen or something) and the phone CS drones assured me that it was on the way, just running late, was on the truck now, etc. etc.
I managed to berate them into connecting me with a US-based operator who, after asking how the hell I actually got her number, gave me the real tracking info, which is completely hidden from consumers and made it very clear that my package was gone.
It's important that your bottlenecks are never waiting for a task to complete. It's important that firefighters of your organizations are ready for anything that could block important processes or bottlenecks. It's important that certain tasks are ready to accept a new job so WIP doesn't accumulate and lead times are kept low.
Something that I've noticed recently is that in my work life, I'm finding there's more bureaucracy in what I do, mostly in the name of "efficiency". When you encounter a problem to solve, there's often a process already defined that is most efficient (or at least thought to be most efficient), when accomplishing tasks, there's a pre-defined way of laying out the tasks (i.e. tickets), updating them, reviewing them, an…
What's bad are people that have "append-only" minds, rarely thinking about how to simplify things (be it code, documentation, tickets) and instead just thinking of adding more and more and more...
Live organisms do not work that way. Organisms have anabolic (constructive) and catabolic (destructive) processes. The anabolic processes construct and repair while the destructive processes get rid of the stuff that's no longer needed.
Unbounded repositories of code, documentation and tickets suck. I think every team needs full time people doing "catabolic" work on those. Break down tech debt into proper code, break down articles that are hard to read and get rid of obsolete articles, make tickets better and remove the ones that are redundant.
The "append-only" mentality is what making people their own enemies.
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The thing that kills me about the ticketing systems is that they are often put into place in a way that is locally efficient but does not make sense globally. For example, an application owner might have to submit a ticket to request an upgrade once a year (or when a new OS is supported). What often happens is that the application owner now has to know about, find, and correctly understand a form that they see once (…
> all of the systems that were designed to take away the need for administrative assistants may once again require an assistant to navigate efficiently Made me laugh. My org has a completely automated online self-service travel booking system that even includes dedicated support from a corporate travel agent - and I recently needed a single flight booked for a day in another city (about the simplest travel you can do…
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No, proper regulation either forces companies to curb their emissions or taxes it. In other words, to internalize it.
> proper regulation either forces companies to curb their emissions or taxes it. In other words, to internalize it. No, in other words, to pass on the costs to society, because the cost of whatever they are providing goes up. Plus, since the companies are a concentrated interest, it's easy for them to buy regulations from the central authority that are favorable to them and unfavorable to potential competitors. A pro…
Here’s a counter argument: maybe Gloria doesn’t need to have defined tasks for every hour of every day, but it absolutely could not hurt for her to make proactive decisions that fill her time when she isn’t busy tending to Tony’s schedule. Ideally, an organization would be able to attract the candidates that would spend their free time doing constructive things. This _would_ be an org where everyone is busy all the t…
The value of your employees voluntary contributions are capped at the least valuable thing you put on their list of things to do. If your employee’s best chance at success are in the success of your business, they’ll do great things without being asked, that you don’t even know about. If not, it doesn’t matter what you ask them to do.
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> Federal regulations prevent a race to the bottom for things like pollution, labor rights, etc. Not really. Local people suffer the most from local pollution and low local wages etc., so they have the most incentive to strike a reasonable balance. Federalizing e.g. minimum wage is just an excuse for high cost of living areas to screw over low cost of living areas by depriving them of their natural cost advantage, pr…
Not necessarily. Before the EPA, states would often put their toxic dumps close to the state line, where the winds and the current would take their crap into the next state. Incentives only work if there are no externalities (sticking someone else with the bill). And moving power from the cities to the state level tends to screw the city, especially in heavily gerrymandered states. You're certainly right that NIMBYis…
The answer to this is to let states sue each other in federal court for any pollution that crosses state lines. Not companies in the states, the states themselves. Then states can prevent that from happening however they like, but if they don't, the state itself owes the neighboring state(s) billions of dollars. Strict liability. And then you don't need any federal regulations telling anybody how to do it.
> And moving power from the cities to the state level tends to screw the city, especially in heavily gerrymandered states.
On zoning rules? It's hard to imagine people getting screwed much worse than they do now.