It goes beyond that. $175 trillion includes all future entitlement spending not debt, it’s crazy to call all future entitlement spending for every living person debt. By that metric there’s essentially no such thing as a solvent government anywhere in the world and there never has been in modern history.
The NATO treaty says that we have to maintain our ability to resist armed attack, so there is some minimum. And we’ve made public commitments to spend at least 2% of GDP (though that isn’t part of the treaty).
SS and Medicare aren’t debts either in that sense. Congress can reduce benefits if they please.
In Flemming v. Nestor SCOTUS ruled that SS benefits are not guaranteed contractual rights but are instead statutory entitlements that Congress may modify or revoke.
This I believe is lowkey one of the core ways design broke at tech companies. There are other big ones, design (really product) is broke deeply, but once mockups became easy we stopped having discussions about information architecture and UX. We're talking about whether we think this looks nicer in blue or green. Happened before Figma, but Figma really grew it. The designers that tried to hold onto wireframes (or went to mockups, but tried to still have architecture discussions with them) fought an uphill battle—what were these guys even talking about? Even the other designers thought this.
Once mockups became easy, that little bit of vocational gate (as in gate-keeping) that was holding the wall for UX work went away. Execs and PMs could make decent looking rectangles, so designers became the people who could make especially nice looking rectangles. So you got a lot of product/UX designers that were much more visual designers. That matters, but the prior part was bigger in that the product processes and sprints often started to have little design in them at all. What was a two or three phase process was one, designer got requirements and made design—often they didn't even really get requirements before design. The design was the impetus for the requirements not the other way around.
This is what became standard: Leader would give something vague because they didn't have much idea or vision yet. They probably had something blue-sky-ish, meaning they had a bunch of ideas, which in amorphous abstract blue skies come together. Once those things appear side by side on paper/screen, they're off putting and contradicting. There are problems not just with how to fit the pieces, but with the pieces. The visual the designer provides triggers this. Designers being visual people can see a lot of that in their head beforehand, but won't be heard until they show "bad work." It's pretty common though to see the PM or the leader look at it and say it wasn't the vague requirements, it's that the designer didn't get it. Anyways, it's that design that then kicks off some assessment against reality. Then you have a little bit of a shot at real requirements starting to leak out.
It’s a bit like having a 1:1 scale architectural model made of cardboard. You walk people through it and everything looks good on the surface so they start asking “when can we move in?” skipping all of the hidden engineering that still needs to be done and in some cases pressuring you to just waterproof the exterior so they can live in the model instead of building the real thing.
I've noticed and felt this trend, but I haven't ever seen it put so well or really connected the dots with figma & pretty rectangles.
I remember discussions over relative easy of use of gray box wireframes... and that led to better products.
Now I've got designers vibing monstrosities that would have fit right in in the Flash era, I guess in order to draw even nicer rectangles now that execs than wave at AI and get a design.
Yes, though this has been a problem long before Figma or AI. Photoshop enabled pretty pictures of what a website / app / service might look like, and then these often became set in stone.
One solution is to keep all mockups / prototypes strictly grey scale using bare bones vectors until every stakeholder has weighed in / signed off.
You definitely can sue a large corporation and win or force a settlement. The “we’ll drag this out until you are bankrupt” thing is more bluff than reality. Courts do not react favorably to that. Especially when they have direct evidence of those threats.
A corporation may have a litigation cost advantage, but they’re still
going to spend more than the $180k or whatever that they owed to execute this drag it out forever strategy.
Very rarely do corporations act like this once there’s any sort of spotlight on them. Especially over such a relatively small number. This is nothing to do with any standard corporate tactics and everything to do with the guys in charge being complete dick heads.
There’s definitely some of that. Relatively in most places in the US, it’s safer now than it has been since the 60s.
But the relative comparison works over distance as well as time. For example in the city center 25
minutes from me the violent crime rate is about 1,000 per 100k people. In my suburb, it’s 80. The difference in property crime is even worse.
Edit: 80/100k is also an overestimate because they included simple assault, and the violent crime stats I was looking at for the city center only included aggravated assault. Also if you look at murders, we haven’t had one since the late 80s.
So apples to apples it’s essentially 0 compared to 1000/100,000
If that was the case, you wouldn’t expect property crime like motor vehicle theft to follow a similar trend, but it does. A very large chunk of the crime is gang related, and there is no gang violence in the suburb I live in.
Bars are also disbursed all over not just in the city center. We have bars here, and they produce essentially zero crime.
But even if all of the crime was alcohol related, all of the crime isn’t occurring inside bars.
I don't think you have an accurate and full understanding of the issues plaguing some areas of American city centers. I can't even recall the last time I saw a person who was drunk in public causing a serious issue after leaving a downtown bar. It just doesn't happen. Besides, you don't need to go to the city center to get drunk, we sell full proof booze in the supermarkets here.
People go to the city center to buy their fentanyl and their P-2P supermeth, shoot up, and zombify the city streets. I see that on a daily basis. If you are not familiar with this phenomenon, go to YouTube and search for Kensington, Philadelphia. Most American cities have similar areas, For example Pike/Pine in Seattle, Tenderloin in SFO, and Skid Row in LA, but the scope of the situation is of a different magnitude in Philly.
The real problem with these conversations is that code quality isn’t something we have any kind of consensus on.
To a lot of engineers code quality means upper-case C Clean Code. Other engineers are in the Grug brain camp where they think that premature abstraction is the worst kind of code.
But to your point I think the majority of engineers think they high quality code is anything that compiles or passes their (almost definitely insufficient) test suite.
Yeah, it’s not even consistent with their own incident history. I spot checked it and consistently found incidents with downtime/elevated error rates in months listed as 100.00000% uptime on that chart.
The unofficial and offical charts are both lying. The GitHub one ignores actual outages and the unofficial ones count minor display bugs in minor features as a “github outage”.
Just vibes wise, before Microsoft acquired GitHub, they added almost no features on a regular basis. These days they are adding tons of stuff every month.
When I dug in to the latest outages, they were almost all in small newer, features like all the AI stuff. The actual core GitHub platform seems much more stable than the unofficial uptime trackers propose.
I’m not sure about how stable it seems. I’ve been running into to slow or not working at all GitHub issues constantly over the last few months.
There’s also this blurb from a story on HN the other day that supports what I’m seeing.
“ I've felt this way for a long time, but for the past month I've kept a journal where I put an "X" next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work2. Almost every day has an X. On the day I am writing this post, I've been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage3. This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.”
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