Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

As Joel Spolsky once commented, , all non-trivial abstractions are, to some degree, leaky.

This is because reality itself is leaky. Or another way to put it, reality itself is non-trivially complex.

And any sufficiently long-lived production system that works at scale necessarily has to accommodate that complexity, to some degree.

Yes, some of these systems are sub-optimal, but nonetheless, they work, to the extent that they are production systems.

And, as anyone who has worked on legacy production systems, that complexity is itself mired in complexity, often due to weird edge and corner cases that reflect the complexity of the world that the system is attuned to.

And then, to come in with the mentality of a cocky intern with delusions of grandeur and simply shut off these systems indiscriminantly.....

and yes, I am asserting that this is being done indiscriminantly.

It is foolish on a scale I can't fathom, as an engineer who appreciates the complexity of systems beyond my level of comprehension. Organic systems that have grown to accomodate reality, warts and all.

And to simply shut things off, indiscriminantly, is beyond foolish. It is reckless, and eventually, as the body count rises, evil.

In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP.

In 2024, the government of France spent 57% of GDP.

Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA?

It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government,

And more people should consider backing off from political-media consumption as it is clearly toxic to the soul.

The reality that counts most is the one around you, and I see far too many people destroying their relationships with family, friends, and colleagues over national politics when there are much bigger fish to fry in one's own garden.

Here's a pretty large fish to fry: the breakdown of democracy, and a shift towards autocracy and dictatorship.

This is a fish that affects everyone's gardens, like it or not.