Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
3people
2024–2025years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Another recent book along the same lines would be "Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Get It Back" by Marc Dunkelman:
"When he looked into the history, Dunkelman realized that progressives have long swung back and forth between two opposing impulses. One is what he calls Hamiltonianism: the desire to achieve progress by empowering government and institutions to tackle big problems at the direction of strong leaders (like Robert Moses) and informed experts. The other is what he calls Jeffersonianism: the desire to prevent unaccountable centralized authorities (also like Robert Moses) from abusing ordinary citizens by empowering them to fight back."
-- https://www.niskanencenter.org/why-nothing-works-with-marc-d...
- I mean, this is right out of two books: Abundance, and Why Nothing Works. Both spend maybe 1/3 of their pages detailing the excesses and legalistic nature of env reviews. They are weaponized for political reasons and cause an insane amount of delays. They are put in place for the right reasons, but are too effective at slowing projects down.
- The book Why Nothing Works is worth a read.
- As a crazy fast reader I liked it but now that I think about it, problems with product quality were a major preoccupation of the 1970s. There is a triangle between
in that these all stem from the same root and the proportion in which they manifest depend on the system (e.g. in Soviet Russia they could legislate prices but couldn't legislate availability of products) It was the decade of Ralph Nader. Seeinflation <-> poor quality <-> shortageshttps://www.amazon.com/Why-Nothing-Works-Anthropology-Origin...
https://www.amazon.com/Out-Crisis-W-Edwards-Deming/dp/052130...
https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Narcissism-American-Diminishi...
A few themes could be broken out, not least "mongo sucks" (I never worked at a company that didn't trust the database they used at all until I worked at one that used mongo) and a meditation on "buy" vs "build" that leans heavily towards build. (When I hear the word "integration" I reach for my keyboard and code up a 15-line python script while management is on hold waiting to hear what the "call us" price is)
