imperfectcats

3 jaar geledendiscuss

That's rather ironic, because I read your comment you linked to, and it is pure speculation.

The Goodreads dev said "the site was originally built as a giant pile of Rails spaghetti with views mixed with business logic and such and then a fuck ton of weird features built and left to sit there". I'm not sure why you think that is or ever was "the Rails way", but it seems more like the classic "move fast and break stuff" startup engineering than anything resembling rails to me.

imperfectcats

3 jaar geledendiscuss

Until they ant to retire. Then what do you do?

If you are happy to walk away and hand the "business they work at" for free to someone, flame on. Thing is, unless that is family, who would you give it to and why?

imperfectcats

3 jaar geledendiscuss

Ditto - and the same with the claims of solar and wind companies because of - [Goodhart's Law - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

      - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

But even if we take that view, how many deaths would nuclear have to have caused to break even with fossil fuels? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... puts nuclear at 0.03 and hydropower at 1.3. So it is ~50 times less than hydro. That's a lot of wiggle room!

imperfectcats

3 jaar geledendiscuss

I wish regulation worked that way! Regulations change all the time - if not in law certainly in practice/interpretation.

That is what makes industries with heavy regulation such risky investments.

imperfectcats

3 jaar geledendiscuss

Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

Any ESG system that uses a calculated number composed of many areas will quickly fall prey to Goodhart's Law. With an E, an S and a G to work on, the areas for change are numerous enough that Goodhart's Law holds even in a non-cynical world.

When an edict that "We need to increase our X score this quarter" is handed down, the real, living people who have to improve the ESG rating are likely limited in what they can do. A combination of pre-existing contracts and commitments, difficulty in changing large systems and problems with multi-department co-ordination means that most changes will be small and isolated, i.e. things where one department or small team can implement the entire change.

imperfectcats

3 jaar geledendiscuss

I wish articles like this had prominent dates!

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