Headlines like this are more pleasant than headlines about how the $100M project to implement SAP is five years behind schedule, how Deloitte has consumed tens of millions of dollars that could have gone to patient care, or that the new ERP system has lead to a total lack of accountability for patient outcomes.
Humans are actually intuitively log scale thinkers. That is, humans without the kind of early arithmetic training that Westerners get will think more in terms of ratios than differences. There are theories it is more evolutionarily adaptive.
Many years ago I had a job interview that included a personality test. I didn’t take the job, for other reasons. But I always wondered what had gone wrong in the past such that a personality test for engineers was in order. I’m now glad to know. I also wonder how many problematic malcontents I would have found had I gone to work there.
Premature denomalization is expensive complexity. Denormalization is a great tool, maybe an under-used tool. But you should wait until there are hot paths before using it.
I think of it as a bunch of bad early implementations that are being used for dubious financial purposes and outright fraud, fueling a bubble. The same could be said for joint stock corporations in the 1600s. Something can be inevitable (maybe it is maybe it isn’t) and the current situation can still be bad.
Someone in the 1600s saying that joint stock companies are terrible, solve a problem that doesn’t really need solving, and are being used to rip off investors and fund unethical colonialism would have been right. It took a while before people used them in good ways. And even today they are questionable.
I canceled recently and had to escalate to “I have told you to cancel three times and if you cannot cancel now I will have to dispute the charges with my credit card company.”
Can confirm, my kids get letters at camp from their grandmother written in cursive and they basically cannot read them. They can puzzle out cursive when it is very neatly written, but casual cursive handwriting is frequently impenetrable.
I remember the days of going down to my friends store because he had a modem and knew which BBSes would have software downloads. I had to bring my own floppy disk because those things cost money.
I dunno, I watched two professional architects not be able to estimate a beam size for a 16’ span without mocking it up in autocad. This delayed us like a week in design iterations, and cost me probably $2000 in architect hours. I own a book inherited from my grandfather that just told me the answer. A 72-year-old architect who helped with a later revision of the project also knew the answer off the top of his head.
That’s not to say I would build the house without doing a proper structural engineering analysis and simulation. But not being able to estimate feasibility without doing the full simulation is a real problem.