6 ms·

On Cultures That Build (2020)

67 points by vwoolf 3y ago

reidjs 3y ago
This article really did not age well. As misguided as our policies were during the pandemic, It’s sort of ironic reading this article knowing that American companies “built” the coronavirus vaccine.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- creer 3y ago
  American and european companies yes, public institutions maybe less so - What public institutions did do, for once, is decisively pour money at these private companies and letting them do their thing. And that does count. But it's not exactly the common course of action.
- kragen 3y ago
  lots of countries built covid vaccines; moderna in the usa was probably the first, but weren't allowed to provide the vaccine to people who wanted to vaccinate until november, long after the prc had vaccinated its entire military and political class, as well as any students studying abroad moreover, even inside the usa, moderna's vaccine was only made publicly available months after covid had killed most of the most vulnerable people here in argentina our first vaccinations didn't come until the next year, and they were russian sputnik v, not pfizer or moderna, because the companies in the usa couldn't produce enough to meet demand. the russians struggled with this too, but were still able to deliver earlier of course the following statement is even more true of the chinese and russian covid vaccine efforts > In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not “how do we make that happen?” but “how do we get management to take our side?” This is a learned response whether it is true in general or not of the chinese or russian economies, i cannot say. the article argues that it is false in china, but virtually everything it says about chinese history is so wrong as to be nearly the opposite of what I understand to be the truth, so I don't trust it the fact that you couldn't get chinese and russian vaccines in the usa (and apparently don't know about them) has nothing to do with who could and couldn't build covid vaccines and everything to do with whose side management took
shadowgovt 3y ago
> today’s children rarely leave the sight of adult authority figures, and have learned instead to solve conflicts by appeal to authority My niece who dealt with the kid hitting her on the playground every day by throwing a cinderblock at his face respectfully disagrees. I'm not sure this author has seen a modern public school.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Playground fights are almost as old as playgrounds themselves.
- itishappy 3y ago
  How'd that go for her? I've heard stories like this typically end with both children receiving a stern reprimand from authority figures, which may end up reinforcing the behaviors from the article. I'd hope that's not the case, but it's been a while since I've seen a modern public school.
toolz 3y ago
> Private enterprise was caught as unprepared as everyone else, and has subsequently struggled to produce a tenth of the innovative counter-virus workarounds their Chinese counterparts managed to dream up (and that under much greater time pressure). It's absolutely mind-boggling that the first 3 countries hit hard by covid were China, Korea and Italy. China and Korea appeared to keep it contained and given everything we know about trusting these two countries, we chose to trust the Chinese model? In Feb of 2020 the U.S. committee of foreign affairs was posting documents detailing some of the lies China has told[0], but we chose to trust their data in one of the biggest crisis of our lifetime? Meanwhile, Korea was being pretty open with their approach and while I don't think it would've been effective in the U.S. it was certainly the more palatable approach and less damaging to the poor and most vulnerable population. We also saw Italy using the Chinese model for containment and it failed miserably, yet the U.S. stood firm in following their failures. Insisting that we protect the middle and upper class while demanding the lower class keep the "important" jobs running and giving the poverty class nowhere to turn. [0] https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Lies-Spread-by-the-Chinese-Communist-Party-CCP-V2-2.pdf https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/...
- chongli 3y ago
  This piece hasn’t aged well. What worked for China in the beginning of the pandemic had the opposite effect later on. While the West was opening back up and getting on with life, China was in the throes of a second wave while at the same time battling serious internal resistance to “Covid Zero” policies. In the end, the government relented to the pressure.
  - toolz 3y ago
    Indeed, and that was always the logical conclusion. We've never made perfectly effective vaccines that fast and we knew the virus was global. It was always going to find its way into China and run rampant to everyone without immunity whenever society opened back up and all of that is assuming their isolation actually works to begin with. There was no other option and I struggle to understand how that wasn't plain to see even in early 2020 when we had confirmed cases all around the world. Were we really banking on making a perfect vaccine before the world couldn't sustain lock-downs? If not, what was the "real" plan? I believe it was probably all just political game-theory, but it's hard not to wonder if there were people at the top hoping poor people could take the brunt of the contagion and die off before the rich people started going back into public.
lsy 3y ago
While I agree that much of what is wrong with society boils down to a lack of civic participation and familiarity with institution-building, what I think this article perhaps misses is that social and technological changes militate against the effectiveness of a robust civil society. As conglomerates and governments can expand their reach through communications and management technologies, it becomes more feasible for institutions to manage large jurisdictions at a distance without intermediaries. And that same ability to grow to a large size also prevents smaller organizations from arising and seeing any effectiveness in their efforts. I also disagree that Silicon Valley represents any kind of solution to this issue. The centralization of power in the Valley is almost more extreme than in the "old world", as multinational companies dominate the industry and destroy competition. Most people will do better for themselves financially by joining the elect of the fiefdoms of FAANG than by fruitlessly attempting to build a smaller company or product, and the big companies keep it that way through massive networks of financialization and regulatory capture. In order for civic and social institutions, or small self-built institutions, to be attractive to Americans, people who join them have to have some experience of succeeding in their aims, and I think this is less and less the case, as the institutions that already exist suck the oxygen out of the space of potential action.
- creer 3y ago
  Silicon Valley is (still) an example of vitality. You don't have to join small companies as a founder or for more than a reasonably well paying job. You don't have to be part of the few who will rack their brains trying to find ways to sneak in between the FAANGs. Civic participation, by constrast, is difficult because it runs into the giant morass of public institutions laws and rules. Well serving the political forces in places but again not much to do with the FAANGs. (For example, while the city of Mountain View professes its pride in Google, it fights everything that Google wants to do inch by inch. Google doesn't exactly find much "proud cooperation" with its city.)
  - throwaway626 3y ago
    [dead]
- 3y ago
_xnmw 3y ago
Best part was in the footnotes. > There was a time when average Americans could get together and, in one afternoon, build an entire barn. > Yes! A barn! Can you imagine average Americans doing that today? Not a chance! > They’d spend weeks debating the membership and organizational structure of the Barn Architect Selection Committee, whose members would then get into a lengthy squabble over the design of the logo to appear on their letterhead. Ultimately this issue would become a bitter and drawn-out dispute, be taken to court, and the people involved would start complaining of depression and anxiety, and psychologists would announce that these people were victims of a new disease called Barn Committee Logo Dispute Distress Syndrome, or BCLDDS, which would become the subject of one-hour shows by Phil Donahue and Sally Jessy Raphael, after which millions of Americans would realize that they, too, were suffering from BCLDDS, and they’d form support groups with Hot Line numbers and twelve-step programs. That’s what we modern Americans do.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jrumbut 3y ago
  The Logo Subcommittee of the Barn Architect Selection Committee actually sounds like something Americans would form back in the halcyon days when we did build things. Some mediocre little guy got to call himself "subcommittee chairman" and be king for a day while he made pronouncements on barn logos (and got a little experience in leadership for future occasions). Everyone who cared about the barn logo had their say, got to give input and be heard, and so they felt they owned the end result. The committee was inefficient as hell, but the end result was that people were bought in because they got a little slice of the power and prestige. They didn't just get paid, they got a little standing in the community. They made their mark of the whole project and that feeling is one of the greatest motivators to work in the world. So when it came time to raise the barn they were dynamos because they wanted to see their logo on high. Compare that to today when I give my TaskRabbit barn raiser $200 to raise my barn. They aren't invested in the success of the barn, they just want to do the least barn raising for the most money while I want them to raise the most barn for the least dollars. Our relationship is adversarial. I'm under no obligation to listen to anything the barn raiser has to say and the only way they can express dissatisfaction is by quitting.
creer 3y ago
Cultural sclerosis may "simply" be a mix of unintended consequence and deliberately intended consequence (sabotage). The impetus for much of our legal system might be fine but not paying attention to unintended consequences then results in sclerosis. This is easy to achieve in an accreting system of rules and laws: "Let's just add one more rule - that will sort it out right up". There are fields of (american) activity that clearly understand the strength in building things fast - and that are designed for that. The startup world is still one of these - both for starting a new venture and for deploying fast and sorting out the details later. This is about the "rules of the game" and the infrastructure (funding, legal entity formation, getting people to join, hosting, software tools...) All around, the infrastructure and culture support the principle. Other institutions seem built as-if for endlessly delaying projects. In most cases this was not the goal. And in some cases, that IS the goal: it works so well that some don't let it go to waste. Still other institutions DO exist so as to allow moving legislation at a decent pace but have fallen out of favor - with the executive prefering endless ad-hoc informal processes in the vague hope of achieving unity, consensus, peace well in advance of actual change. With not much change possible as a result. That is not to say that "emergency committees" don't make plenty of harm. Brings to mind the ruling against fat and in favor of carbs: [Senator: I do not have the luxury. My constituents are dying. I can't wait for your scientific data.] But this should be a deliberate area of effort: improving institutions for time effectiveness and correctness. Even from a basic economics point of view, there is quite a bit of economic growth potential that comes merely from responsiveness. Same from a quality of life point of view. When need is recognized, pouring money in study (scientific, engineering, legal...) including study of unintended effects, then moving on with a ruling. Which does not mean in the sense of "environmental impact study" which seems to have become a weapon: a financial barrier against doing anything. In other cases, strength should be in recognizing that headline cause X is not actually an emergency and tabling it until it naturally accretes more data or is simply forgotten.
innagadadavida 3y ago
We don’t appreciate the maintainers much. Look at Linux, Git or any other open source project. The initial inspiration was absolutely needed but continued maintenance culture is what made them successful and have lasted decades.
- creer 3y ago
  It's maintenance but this one is "responsive" maintenance. It's not aiming at the status quo. The current Linux is serving the current mix of Linux applications - much broader and different from the "old" one. It's not just keeping it going until better replaces it. It is ITSELF the better thing that constantly replaces it. Which is all the more admirable. And results is well deserved increased market share. It is "building".
- kragen 3y ago
  free software licenses means that any person or company can maintain their own fork of linux or git, and if the software is useful to them and nobody else maintains it to their satisfaction, probably will. git means they can easily incorporate the work of other people who are doing the same thing instead of duplicating it the maintainers are doing excellent and praiseworthy work, but this is not just a result of 'culture' but also incentives: if they aren't sufficiently responsive to user needs, they'll quickly find themselves maintaining software with a user base of only themselves the problem with this theory is that it can't explain the absence of successful forks of python 2, wikipedia, and firefox
jonstewart 3y ago
The old Sam Huntington cultural determinism nonsense…
Animats 3y ago
"While this was happening, the civic and religious institutions that Americans traditionally relied on to manage their own affairs were quietly disappearing. Some organizations, like religious boards, unions, and bowling clubs, declined in number; others, like charities and NGOs, switched from a model of mass participation to a model of mass donations. Add it all together and you find that the percentage of Americans expected to be familiar with Robert’s Rules of Order shrunk precipitously." This is a good point. Do you belong to any non-governmental organization where the members can vote to fire top management, and this happens once in a while? A golf club? A maker space? A gym? A homeowners association? A mutual insurance company? A savings and loan? A school? Anything? Such institutions used to be common for non-profits. Now they are rare. Robert’s Rules of Order is for meetings where the members hold the power. Motions are voted upon and then are binding on the organization. Unless the members have power, it's just a talk shop. When someone set up a local maker space, they set it up as a nonprofit with a self-perpetuating board. That is, the management chooses its own successors. I declined to contribute.
- kiba 3y ago
  My makerspace is member elected.
- svnt 3y ago
  The management isn’t the board, that’s the point. The management is overseen by the board and the board entrusts the function of the organization to management while they help set direction. Separately, I can’t find the example but Robert’s Rules for Order can be trivially DDoSed and have been in order to bring down or paralyze organizations. I think there was a conversation here about it some time back. Nonprofits are legally required to have boards, AFAIK. What would you have preferred the nonprofit do?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
dang 3y ago
Discussed at the time: On Cultures That Build - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23569638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23569638 - June 2020 (189 comments)
3seashells 3y ago
Taxation by a extractive hacking mindset disconnected from societal feedback by still working abstractions like money?
bluGill 3y ago
Robert Moses and a few others like him are why we don't build fast. We can - we have just learned the hard way that some things are not worth building and so we threw roadblocks in the way to prevent those abuses. (safety standards are another thing we threw in that makes building take longer for what I think we would all agree is good reason) Sometimes I think we went too far the other way, but lets not swing too far back.
javajosh 3y ago
Productivity takes two forms: building new things and optimizing old ones. The former is not sustainable, but the latter is. Nature will not permit unbounded growth, but she will permit the pursuit of arbitrarily tight tolerances. To me, this is the key cultural shift that America requires: not to build to expand, but build to improve. There is a feeling of compression, intricacy, delicacy here. That is, we can stay legitimately busy increasing the fractal complexity (and beauty) of society and infrastructure without expanding. If we nostalgically fetishize growth, we may feel better in the short term but we become a destructive virus in the long term.
m0llusk 3y ago
This could just be a bunch of errors. The subway issue is a good example of this. The initial NYC subway was put in place with cut and cover construction. Because it was so long ago there were minimal obstacles. The Second Avenue subway was proposed early on, but even back in the day it was rejected as being far too expensive because of the complications caused by the soils, existing subway routes, and other infrastructure. Over the years the possibility of a Second Avenue subway was repeatedly raised and rejected as being far too expensive because of unavoidable complications. Then in the 1990s NYC politicians decided that miraculous new tunnel boring technology would make the Second Avenue subway easy and cheap. Modern technology solves all problems. It was a "no brainer". They decided to it was time to be a culture that builds. And the result was a terrible mess. The tunnel boring technology eventually worked, but only after much complication and multiple explosions of costs. So what is being advocated here appears to be the opposite of the truth. In the past things were relatively quick because we knew our limits and when to stop. We used to be a culture that could refuse to build. In contrast, this modern idea of being the culture that decides now is the time to build leads us astray so vast fortunes end up being spent on misguided adventures. Want to be a culture that is good at building quickly? Start by saying no to most things. And try to understand history as it is and not through meaningless comparisons of cut and cover subway construction to the modern wonders of tunnel boring machines.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I'm a big believer in infrastructure. Slow building in layers, with each layer providing a context and a foundation for the next. That takes time, and can be V E R Y, V E R Y, B O R I N G. In order to do infrastructure successfully, we need to commit to a long, protracted development process, with a shitton of testing at every stage, and refusing to go on to the next stage, until we have the one we're working on, now, complete. And we may not even see the final results. We may simply be the first-stage booster of the project, and our name may be buried in the dust, raised by the folks that stand on our shoulders, and get the credit. It's not easy. I've done it, multiple times. American culture, as it stands now, is no so good at this kind of mindset.
throwaway2037 3y ago
This article reads like typical doomerism. Can we replace the United States with any other highly developed (G7-level) nation and get the same result? Yeah, pretty much. For example: Swap in Germany or France. What big stuff have they built that amazes the world in the last 30 years? Not much. "Oh no, Germany/France is doomed." No, they are doing fine. These article presuppose that China will grow fast and endlessly and "take over the World" (economically, then perhaps militarily). Haven't we seen this before? Oh yeah, Japan in the 1980s. Now for my ad hominem attack: The about page on this blog is hysterical. Choice quote: taught Homer to the children of Beijing billionaires

67 points by vwoolf 3y ago

This article really did not age well. As misguided as our policies were during the pandemic, It’s sort of ironic reading this article knowing that American companies “built” the coronavirus vaccine.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
creer 3y ago
American and european companies yes, public institutions maybe less so - What public institutions did do, for once, is decisively pour money at these private companies and letting them do their thing. And that does count. But it's not exactly the common course of action.
kragen 3y ago
lots of countries built covid vaccines; moderna in the usa was probably the first, but weren't allowed to provide the vaccine to people who wanted to vaccinate until november, long after the prc had vaccinated its entire military and political class, as well as any students studying abroad moreover, even inside the usa, moderna's vaccine was only made publicly available months after covid had killed most of the most vulnerable people here in argentina our first vaccinations didn't come until the next year, and they were russian sputnik v, not pfizer or moderna, because the companies in the usa couldn't produce enough to meet demand. the russians struggled with this too, but were still able to deliver earlier of course the following statement is even more true of the chinese and russian covid vaccine efforts > In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not “how do we make that happen?” but “how do we get management to take our side?” This is a learned response whether it is true in general or not of the chinese or russian economies, i cannot say. the article argues that it is false in china, but virtually everything it says about chinese history is so wrong as to be nearly the opposite of what I understand to be the truth, so I don't trust it the fact that you couldn't get chinese and russian vaccines in the usa (and apparently don't know about them) has nothing to do with who could and couldn't build covid vaccines and everything to do with whose side management took

shadowgovt 3y ago

> today’s children rarely leave the sight of adult authority figures, and have learned instead to solve conflicts by appeal to authority My niece who dealt with the kid hitting her on the playground every day by throwing a cinderblock at his face respectfully disagrees. I'm not sure this author has seen a modern public school.

chrisco255 3y ago
Playground fights are almost as old as playgrounds themselves.
itishappy 3y ago
How'd that go for her? I've heard stories like this typically end with both children receiving a stern reprimand from authority figures, which may end up reinforcing the behaviors from the article. I'd hope that's not the case, but it's been a while since I've seen a modern public school.

toolz 3y ago

> Private enterprise was caught as unprepared as everyone else, and has subsequently struggled to produce a tenth of the innovative counter-virus workarounds their Chinese counterparts managed to dream up (and that under much greater time pressure). It's absolutely mind-boggling that the first 3 countries hit hard by covid were China, Korea and Italy. China and Korea appeared to keep it contained and given everything we know about trusting these two countries, we chose to trust the Chinese model? In Feb of 2020 the U.S. committee of foreign affairs was posting documents detailing some of the lies China has told[0], but we chose to trust their data in one of the biggest crisis of our lifetime? Meanwhile, Korea was being pretty open with their approach and while I don't think it would've been effective in the U.S. it was certainly the more palatable approach and less damaging to the poor and most vulnerable population. We also saw Italy using the Chinese model for containment and it failed miserably, yet the U.S. stood firm in following their failures. Insisting that we protect the middle and upper class while demanding the lower class keep the "important" jobs running and giving the poverty class nowhere to turn. [0] https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Lies-Spread-by-the-Chinese-Communist-Party-CCP-V2-2.pdf https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/...

chongli 3y ago
This piece hasn’t aged well. What worked for China in the beginning of the pandemic had the opposite effect later on. While the West was opening back up and getting on with life, China was in the throes of a second wave while at the same time battling serious internal resistance to “Covid Zero” policies. In the end, the government relented to the pressure.
- toolz 3y ago
  Indeed, and that was always the logical conclusion. We've never made perfectly effective vaccines that fast and we knew the virus was global. It was always going to find its way into China and run rampant to everyone without immunity whenever society opened back up and all of that is assuming their isolation actually works to begin with. There was no other option and I struggle to understand how that wasn't plain to see even in early 2020 when we had confirmed cases all around the world. Were we really banking on making a perfect vaccine before the world couldn't sustain lock-downs? If not, what was the "real" plan? I believe it was probably all just political game-theory, but it's hard not to wonder if there were people at the top hoping poor people could take the brunt of the contagion and die off before the rich people started going back into public.

lsy 3y ago

While I agree that much of what is wrong with society boils down to a lack of civic participation and familiarity with institution-building, what I think this article perhaps misses is that social and technological changes militate against the effectiveness of a robust civil society. As conglomerates and governments can expand their reach through communications and management technologies, it becomes more feasible for institutions to manage large jurisdictions at a distance without intermediaries. And that same ability to grow to a large size also prevents smaller organizations from arising and seeing any effectiveness in their efforts. I also disagree that Silicon Valley represents any kind of solution to this issue. The centralization of power in the Valley is almost more extreme than in the "old world", as multinational companies dominate the industry and destroy competition. Most people will do better for themselves financially by joining the elect of the fiefdoms of FAANG than by fruitlessly attempting to build a smaller company or product, and the big companies keep it that way through massive networks of financialization and regulatory capture. In order for civic and social institutions, or small self-built institutions, to be attractive to Americans, people who join them have to have some experience of succeeding in their aims, and I think this is less and less the case, as the institutions that already exist suck the oxygen out of the space of potential action.

creer 3y ago
Silicon Valley is (still) an example of vitality. You don't have to join small companies as a founder or for more than a reasonably well paying job. You don't have to be part of the few who will rack their brains trying to find ways to sneak in between the FAANGs. Civic participation, by constrast, is difficult because it runs into the giant morass of public institutions laws and rules. Well serving the political forces in places but again not much to do with the FAANGs. (For example, while the city of Mountain View professes its pride in Google, it fights everything that Google wants to do inch by inch. Google doesn't exactly find much "proud cooperation" with its city.)
- throwaway626 3y ago
  [dead]
3y ago

_xnmw 3y ago

Best part was in the footnotes. > There was a time when average Americans could get together and, in one afternoon, build an entire barn. > Yes! A barn! Can you imagine average Americans doing that today? Not a chance! > They’d spend weeks debating the membership and organizational structure of the Barn Architect Selection Committee, whose members would then get into a lengthy squabble over the design of the logo to appear on their letterhead. Ultimately this issue would become a bitter and drawn-out dispute, be taken to court, and the people involved would start complaining of depression and anxiety, and psychologists would announce that these people were victims of a new disease called Barn Committee Logo Dispute Distress Syndrome, or BCLDDS, which would become the subject of one-hour shows by Phil Donahue and Sally Jessy Raphael, after which millions of Americans would realize that they, too, were suffering from BCLDDS, and they’d form support groups with Hot Line numbers and twelve-step programs. That’s what we modern Americans do.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jrumbut 3y ago
The Logo Subcommittee of the Barn Architect Selection Committee actually sounds like something Americans would form back in the halcyon days when we did build things. Some mediocre little guy got to call himself "subcommittee chairman" and be king for a day while he made pronouncements on barn logos (and got a little experience in leadership for future occasions). Everyone who cared about the barn logo had their say, got to give input and be heard, and so they felt they owned the end result. The committee was inefficient as hell, but the end result was that people were bought in because they got a little slice of the power and prestige. They didn't just get paid, they got a little standing in the community. They made their mark of the whole project and that feeling is one of the greatest motivators to work in the world. So when it came time to raise the barn they were dynamos because they wanted to see their logo on high. Compare that to today when I give my TaskRabbit barn raiser $200 to raise my barn. They aren't invested in the success of the barn, they just want to do the least barn raising for the most money while I want them to raise the most barn for the least dollars. Our relationship is adversarial. I'm under no obligation to listen to anything the barn raiser has to say and the only way they can express dissatisfaction is by quitting.

creer 3y ago

Cultural sclerosis may "simply" be a mix of unintended consequence and deliberately intended consequence (sabotage). The impetus for much of our legal system might be fine but not paying attention to unintended consequences then results in sclerosis. This is easy to achieve in an accreting system of rules and laws: "Let's just add one more rule - that will sort it out right up". There are fields of (american) activity that clearly understand the strength in building things fast - and that are designed for that. The startup world is still one of these - both for starting a new venture and for deploying fast and sorting out the details later. This is about the "rules of the game" and the infrastructure (funding, legal entity formation, getting people to join, hosting, software tools...) All around, the infrastructure and culture support the principle. Other institutions seem built as-if for endlessly delaying projects. In most cases this was not the goal. And in some cases, that IS the goal: it works so well that some don't let it go to waste. Still other institutions DO exist so as to allow moving legislation at a decent pace but have fallen out of favor - with the executive prefering endless ad-hoc informal processes in the vague hope of achieving unity, consensus, peace well in advance of actual change. With not much change possible as a result. That is not to say that "emergency committees" don't make plenty of harm. Brings to mind the ruling against fat and in favor of carbs: [Senator: I do not have the luxury. My constituents are dying. I can't wait for your scientific data.] But this should be a deliberate area of effort: improving institutions for time effectiveness and correctness. Even from a basic economics point of view, there is quite a bit of economic growth potential that comes merely from responsiveness. Same from a quality of life point of view. When need is recognized, pouring money in study (scientific, engineering, legal...) including study of unintended effects, then moving on with a ruling. Which does not mean in the sense of "environmental impact study" which seems to have become a weapon: a financial barrier against doing anything. In other cases, strength should be in recognizing that headline cause X is not actually an emergency and tabling it until it naturally accretes more data or is simply forgotten.

innagadadavida 3y ago

We don’t appreciate the maintainers much. Look at Linux, Git or any other open source project. The initial inspiration was absolutely needed but continued maintenance culture is what made them successful and have lasted decades.

creer 3y ago
It's maintenance but this one is "responsive" maintenance. It's not aiming at the status quo. The current Linux is serving the current mix of Linux applications - much broader and different from the "old" one. It's not just keeping it going until better replaces it. It is ITSELF the better thing that constantly replaces it. Which is all the more admirable. And results is well deserved increased market share. It is "building".
kragen 3y ago
free software licenses means that any person or company can maintain their own fork of linux or git, and if the software is useful to them and nobody else maintains it to their satisfaction, probably will. git means they can easily incorporate the work of other people who are doing the same thing instead of duplicating it the maintainers are doing excellent and praiseworthy work, but this is not just a result of 'culture' but also incentives: if they aren't sufficiently responsive to user needs, they'll quickly find themselves maintaining software with a user base of only themselves the problem with this theory is that it can't explain the absence of successful forks of python 2, wikipedia, and firefox

jonstewart 3y ago

The old Sam Huntington cultural determinism nonsense…

Animats 3y ago

"While this was happening, the civic and religious institutions that Americans traditionally relied on to manage their own affairs were quietly disappearing. Some organizations, like religious boards, unions, and bowling clubs, declined in number; others, like charities and NGOs, switched from a model of mass participation to a model of mass donations. Add it all together and you find that the percentage of Americans expected to be familiar with Robert’s Rules of Order shrunk precipitously." This is a good point. Do you belong to any non-governmental organization where the members can vote to fire top management, and this happens once in a while? A golf club? A maker space? A gym? A homeowners association? A mutual insurance company? A savings and loan? A school? Anything? Such institutions used to be common for non-profits. Now they are rare. Robert’s Rules of Order is for meetings where the members hold the power. Motions are voted upon and then are binding on the organization. Unless the members have power, it's just a talk shop. When someone set up a local maker space, they set it up as a nonprofit with a self-perpetuating board. That is, the management chooses its own successors. I declined to contribute.

kiba 3y ago
My makerspace is member elected.
svnt 3y ago
The management isn’t the board, that’s the point. The management is overseen by the board and the board entrusts the function of the organization to management while they help set direction. Separately, I can’t find the example but Robert’s Rules for Order can be trivially DDoSed and have been in order to bring down or paralyze organizations. I think there was a conversation here about it some time back. Nonprofits are legally required to have boards, AFAIK. What would you have preferred the nonprofit do?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

dang 3y ago

Discussed at the time: On Cultures That Build - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23569638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23569638 - June 2020 (189 comments)

3seashells 3y ago

Taxation by a extractive hacking mindset disconnected from societal feedback by still working abstractions like money?

bluGill 3y ago

Robert Moses and a few others like him are why we don't build fast. We can - we have just learned the hard way that some things are not worth building and so we threw roadblocks in the way to prevent those abuses. (safety standards are another thing we threw in that makes building take longer for what I think we would all agree is good reason) Sometimes I think we went too far the other way, but lets not swing too far back.

javajosh 3y ago

Productivity takes two forms: building new things and optimizing old ones. The former is not sustainable, but the latter is. Nature will not permit unbounded growth, but she will permit the pursuit of arbitrarily tight tolerances. To me, this is the key cultural shift that America requires: not to build to expand, but build to improve. There is a feeling of compression, intricacy, delicacy here. That is, we can stay legitimately busy increasing the fractal complexity (and beauty) of society and infrastructure without expanding. If we nostalgically fetishize growth, we may feel better in the short term but we become a destructive virus in the long term.

m0llusk 3y ago

This could just be a bunch of errors. The subway issue is a good example of this. The initial NYC subway was put in place with cut and cover construction. Because it was so long ago there were minimal obstacles. The Second Avenue subway was proposed early on, but even back in the day it was rejected as being far too expensive because of the complications caused by the soils, existing subway routes, and other infrastructure. Over the years the possibility of a Second Avenue subway was repeatedly raised and rejected as being far too expensive because of unavoidable complications. Then in the 1990s NYC politicians decided that miraculous new tunnel boring technology would make the Second Avenue subway easy and cheap. Modern technology solves all problems. It was a "no brainer". They decided to it was time to be a culture that builds. And the result was a terrible mess. The tunnel boring technology eventually worked, but only after much complication and multiple explosions of costs. So what is being advocated here appears to be the opposite of the truth. In the past things were relatively quick because we knew our limits and when to stop. We used to be a culture that could refuse to build. In contrast, this modern idea of being the culture that decides now is the time to build leads us astray so vast fortunes end up being spent on misguided adventures. Want to be a culture that is good at building quickly? Start by saying no to most things. And try to understand history as it is and not through meaningless comparisons of cut and cover subway construction to the modern wonders of tunnel boring machines.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I'm a big believer in infrastructure. Slow building in layers, with each layer providing a context and a foundation for the next. That takes time, and can be V E R Y, V E R Y, B O R I N G. In order to do infrastructure successfully, we need to commit to a long, protracted development process, with a shitton of testing at every stage, and refusing to go on to the next stage, until we have the one we're working on, now, complete. And we may not even see the final results. We may simply be the first-stage booster of the project, and our name may be buried in the dust, raised by the folks that stand on our shoulders, and get the credit. It's not easy. I've done it, multiple times. American culture, as it stands now, is no so good at this kind of mindset.

throwaway2037 3y ago

This article reads like typical doomerism. Can we replace the United States with any other highly developed (G7-level) nation and get the same result? Yeah, pretty much. For example: Swap in Germany or France. What big stuff have they built that amazes the world in the last 30 years? Not much. "Oh no, Germany/France is doomed." No, they are doing fine. These article presuppose that China will grow fast and endlessly and "take over the World" (economically, then perhaps militarily). Haven't we seen this before? Oh yeah, Japan in the 1980s. Now for my ad hominem attack: The about page on this blog is hysterical. Choice quote: taught Homer to the children of Beijing billionaires