At least California's infrastructure will last the test of time. If China's railways are anything like there global infrastructure then it will probably fall apart in less then 10 years. Autocracy gets shit work done.
I went from San Fransisco to Shenzhen. This is the kind of lies Americans tell themselves to make themselves feel better. Chinese infrastructure is 2-3 decades ahead of US in major cities - the only way you to deny this is to put your head in the sand.
Yes, those comments are typical from people who have not experienced the progress in other countries.
Major one missing: China built 5,000 miles of high speed rail in 6 years. In California, it's been 15 years and we have 0 miles complete. Also built numerous hospitals during pandemic in a couple weeks. Demolished and replaced a bridge in 43 hours: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a... . General pattern of completing infrastructure projects at a blistering pace - and they work. Also landed a…
The US also has billionaires and billion-dollar companies deliberately trying to sabotage these sorts of issues. Elon Musk and his 'Boring Company', for example, going around promising a revolution in transportation and then just... ghosting people.[0] "Don't start your public transport infrastructure, we'll build you something objectively worse and far less scalable for a fraction of the price! Uh actually never min…
Absolutely agree regarding ISPs and Intuit/TurboTax but Boring is not a good example.
Eh, I can squint and see that as a special-case of moving your head to another ref - the `-b` merely flagging "if this branch doesn't exist, create it instead of erroring".
It's a bit like building a train station is a special case of arriving to it :)
> But Git was initially written by one cranky Finn, in ten days. It totally changed the way we all work. To be fair, Linus was trying to replace Bitkeeper, a proprietary DVCS which he'd been using to maintain the kernel for several years at that point. Mercurial, which runs on similar principles, was around at the time too. He didn't just make a quantum conceptual leap straight from SVM to git on his own in 10 days;…
I see this as kinda the flipside of "how to draw an owl" [1]. A smarter programmer than me once described software as "do 90%, then do the other 90%" - the mvp, first functional prototype, heck, even the first deliverable is great and all, but then it's time for the thing to live and breathe and go out in the real world and learn all about what it'll become someday. Thus was born semantic versioning. On the other end…
Back in the early COVID days, an airplane with PPE landed in Prague. Responsible agency has been short handed so the staff of national budget oversight agency came to help in what was a prime example of violation of budgeting discipline and just unloaded the airplane. I could not stop laughing about that for days. Other ministries were literally excusing themselves since "they were not allocated funds to deal with th…
Isn't that always the case? Government guys in charge of enforcing something always give themselves a pass. Generally considered a perk of the job.
E.g. policeman pulls over another person for speeding. Which of following do you think is more likely situation and for policeman to issue a warning and let them go without a ticket:
Major one missing: China built 5,000 miles of high speed rail in 6 years. In California, it's been 15 years and we have 0 miles complete. Also built numerous hospitals during pandemic in a couple weeks. Demolished and replaced a bridge in 43 hours: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a... . General pattern of completing infrastructure projects at a blistering pace - and they work. Also landed a…
> Autocracy gets shit done.
Yeah yeah, I've heard that story before. "He made the trains run on time." Then we found out there were no trains at all.
Autocracies have always had a knack for really good marketing, gotta admit that.
Ordinary employees can't choose to break the rules, the boss can, that's ... how everything works?
In a well-functioning org, every employee should be empowered to not let rules impede progress.
It's not a problem when "progress" is easily determined. But regulations are famously "written in blood", created after some employee was a little bit too empowered and caused an accident.
For example, I'm very happy that employees of the nuclear power plant approval committee don't ignore safety rules even if it does impede the progress of the building process.
There was a Grand Jury report analyzing the causes of the delay in the Van Ness project. While the unexpected conditions of the underground utilities is cited as the primary cause, it does touch on some project management aspects that you mention as opportunities for improvement: https://civilgrandjury.sfgov.org/2020_2021/2021%20CGJ%20Repo... Ironically, more planning and analysis at the beginning of the project (e.g…
I worked on that report! (Throwaway because, well, my real name is on the second page...) The lack of meaningful technical planning was a big part of it, and so was the contract-awarding math, but I think the most striking - and generally applicable - behind-the-scenes stories were about what happens when trust breaks down at a human level. The city's internal back and forth on approving and then un-approving a subco…
I was once told that Supply Chain and logistics are a people business. And it's true, for the very reasons you mentioned, the moment partners work according to the letter of the contract, and not the spirit, things become difficult. Trust is so easily lost...
Back in the early COVID days, an airplane with PPE landed in Prague. Responsible agency has been short handed so the staff of national budget oversight agency came to help in what was a prime example of violation of budgeting discipline and just unloaded the airplane. I could not stop laughing about that for days. Other ministries were literally excusing themselves since "they were not allocated funds to deal with th…