dood

Multiple trends combining to reach a tipping point, mainly decreased appetite for capital investment by the west, inflation expectations becoming increasingly embedded and pandemic destabilization constraining supply/strengthening opec.

It's hard to see the era of cheap oil making a sudden comeback in this environment so this speculation doesn't seem unreasonable, though may be a tad overeager since winter is coming.

Some interesting parallels between the 1970's and the 2020's, both seeing global economic growth stagnating after a protracted boom period ending in major economic crises, inducing a kind of awkward period of digestive realignment.

It is remarkable how overlooked that era is today, despite it being a highly transformational time and economically very distinct, yet it's remembered mostly just by disco and unusually gritty movies.

Perhaps because compared to the revolutionary 60's (and later rebuilding of the 80's) it's a more confusingly anarchic time with no clear narrative to grasp a hold of to make sense of it.

More like a messy organic reorganisation as both the counter-culture and traditional culture lost coherence in the face of high unemployment & high inflation, and with society's rule book torn up but no clear path to a better one.

Maybe being a time of social fragmentation and escalating ambient mayhem from crime, hijackings, bombings etc, the best way to make sense of it is actually to watch those great auteur movies unique to the era dripping with atmosphere and mood. Less of a narrative, more a vibe.

We've been in a deflationary cycle (driven by technology & globalisation) for decades, so inflation hasn't been so relevant.

With that cycle now concluding it's likely that inflation concerns will soon be making a major comeback, already some observable echos of the stagflationary 70's: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/06/18/archives/how-carter-can-s...

"The map is not the territory" is so widely known as to be almost a truism, but the post's conclusion is an excellent, pithy summary of the practical implications of this idea:

you do not understand a model, map, or reduction unless you understand and respect its limitations

This simple but powerful corollary is easily and widely overlooked, perhaps because the mind's use of maps and models as stand-ins for reality runs so deep that the full import of this statement about the profound unknowability of the world around us is too terrifying to permit contemplation.

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I think there is a simpler explanation, that has nothing to do with technology, productivity, or society: big companies are naturally inefficient internally (due to complexity) but as a whole are best optimized for capturing and retaining markets/regulators.

Another example: if somebody asks you to do a random task (which is essential, very important, top priority), then a tiny amount of push back - e.g. sending an email asking for clarification of what is needed and why - often makes the task suddenly become unnecessary.

The broader principle is that if a request for expenditure of time/effort/money has minimal cost or risk to the requester, they are incentivized to request unlimited expenditure if it has any potential to benefit to them.

Could you give an example of this please?

I almost reflexively closed the tab just from reading this comment.

Probably too late to this thread, but anyway - the key to understanding agile tomfoolery is that processes are most effective if they evolve to meet the needs of the people in the team.

A process will always feel like a burden (and be less effective for it) unless it is co-created by the people right in the middle of it. Most people like doing a good job if they're permitted to, and like supporting their colleagues if it doesn't prevent them doing a good job. Few people want to make their colleagues' job harder or get in fights - much of this is friction caused by bad processes.

Given a chance to talk over problems faced by each team-member and to discover fair solutions, a team that dislikes agile may themselves choose to adopt parts of agile if it is obvious that it solves real problems and makes the team more effective.

The difference between a pointless, painful, morale-destroying standup and a fun, useful, team-building standup is that one is imposed from outside and the other naturally arises from a team allowed to figure out for themselves how best to work together.

One of HN's favourite quotes applies here too:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Ironically, the incentives for economists to understand booms and busts are much weaker than the incentives not to understand.

The term refers to people who don't try to get into the art world in-group but still create interesting things, so "outsider" is an accurate and literal description of their status. However the in-group is uncomfortable with consciously engaging with this dynamic and the dysfunction it points to, so engages in a little double-think and invents more palatable justifications for using the term "outsider".

The idea of ignoring in-group games of meaning and status, instead creating works entirely from playful self-expression, is so alien it is best left outside.

From a little personal experimentation I've been surprisingly impressed. It helps winding down before bed after a hard day, but also helps to settle the mind for work, and doesn't interfere with concentration. Unlike other health fads (e.g. coconut oil, tumeric) it appears to have a quickly observable effect.

I theorize it may work by reducing or helping to manage stress. This could explain why it has raving supporters for a wide variety of real problems in distinct online communities, since stress is such an important factor in many kinds of physical and mental health issues. Admittedly it is hard to detect the placebo effect, but the indications so far are promising.

If it lives up to half of the promise of the online claims by people with significant problems, it is going to be huge. I'm wondering if there is an investment opportunity there somewhere, but don't know enough about that sort of thing.

It should be pointed out that there are a lot of bad or fraudulent products available, the market is immature and full of hype. But there are quality oils which taste good and work well. Also worth noting that much less is absorbed by drinking rather than than putting under the tongue.

There are also some bold claims flying around about it's effect on the Endocannabinoid system [1], and how improvements to that can improve many aspects of health and self-regulation. Whatever it does, I have a hunch that science is going to turn up some interesting results from looking into it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocannabinoid_system

I was curious about this since it seems unlikely SF can be so much more expensive than London. When I looked into it a couple of months ago, I found zone 1 London rents are a fair bit higher than equivalent apartments in SF if you compare by square-footage and quality. I speculate that the idea SF is much pricier than London is caused by significantly lower standards/expectations for London.

Those numbers look quite wrong, I don't think they're comparing like-for-like.

For consumer goods it seems they're comparing a cheap UK supermarket to Whole Foods in SF, and for rents they must be ignoring square footage and/or using different definitions of city center to get those comparisons. I checked out rental prices in SF on a recent visit and found SF pretty good value compared to London.

Make a Mess, Clean it Up! http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Make_a_Mess,_Clea...

Documentation has some great properties as something to work on in early days (so long as you aren't immediately firefighting).

* Documentation always sucks, no-one wants to do it, and everyone knows it has room for improvement. It shows you're willing to roll your sleeves up and do the less glamorous stuff.

* Working on it prompts you to ask simple questions so is a good way to get to know people on the team, and in the process learn the history of the team, why things are the way they are, and where the dark corners are.

* You're immediately creating value, rather than doing bugfixes no-one cares about or having meetings about things which are months away from fruition, and demonstrates you're here to make things better for everyone.

The idea that vegetarians/vegans need to be "counting amino acids" is a myth - any reasonable diet containing grains and legumes will give sufficient protein. For example rice and beans, chickpeas and bread, lentils and pasta. They don't even need to be consumed at the same time, the body doesn't care as long as grains and legumes are consumed at some point. Even better if you throw in some vegetables and nuts, you've got a balanced healthy diet without needing to count anything.

This article is about the UK, where adult ADHD is very rarely diagnosed, let alone medicated, compared with the US.

OKRs sound like a reasonable idea, but in my experience appear to be prohibitively difficult to implement successfully, imposing a considerable burden across the organization which isn't at all commensurate with the value they deliver.

I've seen them done in a few places, each time they tend to be delivered late and/or be constantly shifting, are constantly in conflict with important but unstated objectives, are often hard to measure and inevitably used to judge performance despite protestations to the contrary and so are subject to gaming, are bad for morale, and for all those downsides seem to have somewhat limited effects on output.

The primary benefits are aligning people, giving people clear goals to focus on, and giving people a justification for not doing unnecessary work. All of those things could be achieved at far lower implementation cost by ditching the key results and just establishing clear goals at the top and allowing them to semi-formally cascade with some kind of regular but very lightweight process.

Wow, sprint retrospective retrospective sounds nightmarish. I've never worked in a team nearly that dysfunctional, but I wonder if the blame is due to agile, or perhaps that team would end making any process or system into a horrorshow. It may even be that the agile process provides at least some bounds to the effects of the dysfunction, if it prevents such discussions occurring otherwise in the workday.

The primary purpose of Agile ceremonies (if done correctly) is to provide a structured way to surface and resolve resource and process issues (as well as prioritize) in a way that allows team-members to otherwise get on with their work as they see fit - without the constant threat of distraction by product/delivery managers' concerns about resources, processes and ever-shifting priorities.

If Agile ceremonies don't achieve this or otherwise excessively waste time, they're just a form of cargo-culting.

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” - Mark Twain

It's both hard and underrated - it's underrated because it's so hard that a lot of developers haven't developed the skill of writing simple code, and so don't recognize the value when others do it.

The drug system in the UK is quite funny - the politicians pretend drug use needs to be treated criminally, the police pretend to enforce drug laws, and the voting public are satisfied with the status quo because if they dislike drugs they can buy into the pretense, if they like drugs they can mostly use them without much bother, and if they are indifferent to drugs they have better things to worry about.

I don't think it is even authoritarianism, we've become stuck in a strange cycle - people think drug use needs to be treated criminally because that is what they've been told for decades, and politicians keep repeating the falsehood because that's what people expect to hear. Neither voters nor politicians are even thinking about it, both just react as they've been conditioned to by the other. It'll take something dramatic to break out of this bizarre self-perpetuating cycle.

It's bubble-compensation all the way down.

Considering the colony as a superorganism, this could be primarily to serve the purpose of redundancy/slack, so that losses or shocks can be continually replaced/responded to, in order to maintain a systemic homeostasis. Though 40% of individuals inactive does seem a large proportion, but perhaps they use little energy.

Nah, don't worry about it. If anything people will respect you for following your passions, but more likely they just won't care. Strong developers are rare, no-one will question how they arrived in their interview room, they'll just be glad you're there.

There are always extraordinary claims like this in big threads about salaries, but they never seem to be backed up.

My guess is it is mostly unusual situations which can't be easily explained or replicated.

people will just not understand why I quit "major search engine"

Don't know how you got this idea. No-one will care.