The article is written from the perspective of a business / management consultant, rather than a public policy shop perspective. In general, I think social problems move slowly, and solving them in a three year business plan isn't realistic. You'll see many agencies use a version of Mayne's Framework or Contribution Analysis to report on progress for big social problems.
It's not that they perpetuate their own raison d'être, it's that they are addressing path dependent social problems, and changing a system with embedded systemic memory within a vast number of crevices (public, private, and cultural) to hide those memories is orders of magnitude more effort than creating the system at the start.
Immediate quality of life improvement: Euro-Office disabled Only-Office's paid license gate on mobile web browser editing. I can finally send collaboration links to family and friends without them needing to download the only-office phone app to edit the document.
There needs to be incentives for people other than the distributed system users to participate as hosts. Risks also need a way to be offloaded cheaply by the hosts.
Risks: Co-mingling your home's ISP with the basement rack seems like a surefire way to get your personal devices blocked if external basement rack users are running a VPN through it and doing heinous stuff. Annoying, maybe solvable with an ISP device reboot. But that particular risk is worse depending on whether the host's jurisdiction allows the assumption of identity based on IP. Risks around general liability. Risks around tax implications when internal revenue folks see the opportunity to collect capital gains tax on your income generating property. So many risks!
The only encounters I've had with companies trying to incentivize this type of setup are Storj and Sia - both pay their host operators in cryptocurrency, which is just another risk IMO. Despite my own involvement with Storj, generating enough income to offset my energy bill by about 25% monthly, the implementation that wins out and gains wide traction has a lot of groundwork to lay for those utility contracts, risks, and incentives.
I agree that this is likely to flatten out the depth of comments I come here for. It's also hard to get a brief that is tailored to the subset of posts you might actually be interested in.
The approach I tried was to rely mainly on what comments I've upvoted, have the AI look at those comments and gather context from the article/link and the parent comment chain, then give me a "here's what you learned yesterday" brief.
I had plans to add some memory to mention related things from recent weeks. Relying mainly on being able to visually code all this with n8n, and never quite got it working.
Lovely to hear about it going right. There's still many contrasting accounts of underperforming regulation for environmental cleanup in Canada's West.
And just today, another story on the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise position being unfilled since May 2025. With piling up reports of human rights violations and negative environmental impacts on Canadian companies operating abroad.
With Canada testing the waters with Chinese EVs, I'm expecting a related question to be thrown around a lot - How will consumers access warranty service and repair for imported EVs?
Regulation maybe? Regulate the honest and straightforward disclosure of risk at a minimum.
Opening up the market so that we're not forced to choose between a select few car brands lets consumers weigh the risks themselves, based on their own appetites and tolerance levels. Give them the information.
In the longer term, the introduction of risk opens up new markets where companies like comma.ai (open pilot) could flourish and fill gaps for EV companies that go under or fail to deliver on the service side.
I think there's a narrow unregulated space where this could be true. I'm exercising my creativity trying to imagine it - where automations are built with the outcome of obscured responsibility in mind. And I could understand profit as a possible driving factor for that outcome.
As an extreme end of a spectrum example, there's been worry and debate for decades over automating military capabilities to the point where it becomes "push button to win war". There used to be, and hopefully still is, lots of restraint towards heading in that direction - in recognition of the need for ethics validation in automated judgements. The topic comes up now and then around Tesla's, and impossible decisions that FSD will have to make.
So at a certain point, and it may be right around the point of serious physical harm, the design decision to have or not have human-in-the-middle accountability seems to run into ethical constraints. In reality it's the ruthless bottom line focused corps - that don't seem to be the norm, but may have an outsized impact - that actually push up against ethical constraints. But even then, I would be wary as an executive documenting a decision to disregard potential harms at one of them shops. That line is being tested, but it's still there.
In my actual experience with automations, they've always been derived from laziness / reducing effort for everyone, or "because we can", and sometimes a need to reduce human error.
This is also a problem that exists within countries. My RSS feed is littered with Canadian independent (national) news agencies not defining what municipality article headlines relate to. E.g. "Mayor pushes back against province on xyz issue". Okay, that might be huge news for Timmins Ontario , but maybe BAU for Toronto. Even skimming the lead paragraph doesn't define the city often.
*Editting with a point: Perhaps everyone assumes a local audience.
The author suggested that if senior leadership had a development background then tech debt would be easier to get support and resources to deal with. Between the lines I'm reading that the risks are just inherently understood by someone with a tech background.
Then the author suggests that senior leadership without a tech background will usually need to be persuaded by a value proposition - the numbers.
I'm seeing these as the same thing - the risks of specific tech debt just needs to be understood before it gets addressed. Senior leaders with a development background might be better predictors of the relationship between tech debt and its impact on company finances. Non technical leaders just require an extra translation step to understand the relationship.
Then considering that some level of risk is tolerated, and some risk is consciously taken on to achieve things, both might ultimately choose to ignore some tech debt while addressing other bits.
> If no one asked and no one is on the hook to change anything: Stop talking.
It seems like a matter of knowing who to talk to about what. I don't think the solution is to stop talking to everyone.
Presenting a rationale for something worthy of addressing (need/problem/opportunity) needs to be communicated somehow, and convincingly. In person, in writing, or a simple business case.
From my non-tech background, priorities are fluid, and things that are rationalized as urgent and important are given resources and attention.
If there is someone like the author spinning wheels in frustration, then maybe there's a problem with the organization aligning everyone on goals/objectives/outcomes -> leading to misaligned solutions being raised, and deaf ears. Or, maybe there's no opportunity to raise solutions with the right people.
It's not that they perpetuate their own raison d'être, it's that they are addressing path dependent social problems, and changing a system with embedded systemic memory within a vast number of crevices (public, private, and cultural) to hide those memories is orders of magnitude more effort than creating the system at the start.