Coordinated opposition campaigns against misinformed and dangerous legislation has been effective in stopping bad laws [1]. After a website blackout, including a Wikipedia shutdown, lawmakers in Washington decided not to proceed with the Stop Online Privacy Act in 2012.
There were proposals to do this, using encrypted containers of data that would let users authorize apps to use just the data they needed, but the idea got tied to Web3, which got some intense public blowback between the Crypto and NFT hype cycles.
And let’s not forget: fertilizer. About half the world’s population is fed with foods produced from the Haber-Bosch process, which makes nitrogen fertilizer [1]. This relies on hydrogen inputs primarily from natural gas. The fact that we’re burning this resource that our highly populated planet depends on is suicidal.
“The output constitutes many terabytes of data and requires a high-performance computing system to run,” co-author Pawlok Dass, a SICCS research associate, said in the release.”
The largest zip file I see on the zenodo link is 404 MB in size, I’d be surprised if it unzips into anything more than a few gigabytes.
Padding ties up capital, it reduces credibility, it delays deployment, it adds costs through delay. It is bad for organizations. However, it is a great solution if you're a worker in a bureaucratic environment that can tolerate large costs, but is intolerant of 1-day of schedule slips. It's a great solution for complacent management, who are confused about the game they're playing and wants to report that they're "on track", which means "not late".
The agile solution of incremental value delivery is a compromise, and can produce good outcomes for functional changes. But agile has unacceptable failure modes when working on infrastructure and satisfying system constraints. Agile can work okay for programmers, but it's not a solution for engineers. Acknowledging, owning, and managing risk is more scalable, but you have to have leaders who acknowledge that they exist and have the maturity to take on that responsibility.
As a project manager, it sounds like you're making excuses. Just give me a number, trust your gut!
We have a fundamental failure to communicate, what we're doing. The game project managers and finance believe we're all playing is a regression towards the mean, where everything is additive and rounds up to nice consistent formulaic sums. Whereas software development follows power law distributions. A good piece of software can deliver 10x, 100x, or 1000x the cost to produce it (ex: distribution, cost of delivering another copy of software is near 0 once written). You don't get that sort of upside with many other investments. Finance is happy with an NPV 8% above what they invest in. This means that when software people talk, everything they say sounds foreign, and everyone assumes it's because of jargon. It's not. The fish don't know they're swimming in water. When the fisherman comes, everyone is caught off guard.
So we get what the author talks about
> The estimates stopped being estimates. They became safety railings against being held accountable for unreasonable expectations.
We. Pad. Like. Crazy. Yes this is inefficient. Some project managers recognize this. We get theory of constraints. But rather than cull the layers of hierarchy that lead to the padding in the first place, all the blame for failure goes back to developers. Get hit on the head enough and you will stop acting in good faith and pad to save your ability to feed and cloth yourself.
Although personal responsibility is a factor for emissions, my thesis is that it’s not the primary factor.
When I talk about systemic issues, I talk specifically about the distribution of personal choices people can make that lead to outcomes. Taken into context, this means that if I only have one choice for electricity provider, and my investor owned utility makes a decision to burn coal to generate electricity, there’s very little I can do to change that. If the area I live in has only single family zoning, things are so spread out that it means that most people need a car for basic human needs like going to work and getting groceries. In my city electricity and transportation represents 80% of emissions. These systems have big impacts. You can throw all the personal responsibility that you want at that and not make any meaningful changes.
We don’t have to have these systems, you could empower the community to make power purchasing agreements to buy electricity on the wholesale market that would be cleaner than what the utility provides. You could pass mixed use zoning to allow developers the autonomy to build commercial/residential mid rise buildings. People could walk to a lot more stuff. We just choose not to do that.
This is a matter of waltzing into your town hall, state legislature, and congress and demanding that we allow people the ability to make better choices. If people had real choices, we’d have better outcomes.
You’re right about the acute pollution from the fossil fuel industry. The affects are not distributed evenly. We need to solve that.
Climate change is already affecting us, we’ve lost a lot of agricultural productivity because of it, and it’s going to get worse faster than it has in the past.
Both these issues have their roots in fossil fuel extraction. If we can eliminate the extraction, we solve both issues.
Not op, but no, they don’t do it for fun, they do it for money.
Emitting carbon has negative externalities (climate change) that are not priced into the emissions, rather they are passed onto the future you and future generations. We can change this by putting a price on carbon. This will incentivize the growth of cleaner alternatives, give Joe an opportunity to not contribute to emissions, and this will affect the profits of the “dirty industry”.
The “dirty industry” wants to keep profits as high as possible for as long as possible, it’s just business. Blaming average Joe on the problem is a distraction. Blaming individuals for systemic issues is fruitless. Industry knows this. The longer policy can be delayed, the longer profits can be made.
I wish adults understood the realities of being young in 2020. Even when I graduated HS in 2007 I could tell my experience and the academic expectations I needed to live up to were much higher than it was for my mom. After I graduated I saw younger friends take more AP classes than I did and do more leadership activities than I did. Expectations are always ramping up. It is no party.
Our laws and bureaucracies haven’t caught up to life from 50 years ago, and that is something young people today have to deal with too. There are a lot of incongruities in programs offered. One example is Federal Work Study. In college I qualified, it was a benefit, and my attitude was to not leave anything on the table. In reality the money I made was not enough to make a difference and the time I spent working could have been spent taking another class. If I didn’t do work study I could have graduated a semester sooner and that would have been much more valuable financially. The only reason to work in college would be at a job that is directly related to your field.
And of course the adults don’t get it. Every once in a while you’ll hear about a congress person or a business leader say that college students aren’t pulling their own weight in society. The friends of your parents will ask you how you like going to college parties. Reality is you have a deep backlog of work from 6 classes, which are related but have very different concepts and you need to master them all in four months.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act