Paul M. Jones

Common technical conversation: "Well, why don't we just make a generic system, and then we'll tweak it to work with every specific implementation as we roll it out?"

There follows a long conversation from any good project manager that runs roughly like this:

a) In order to avoid having to completely rework much of the innards of a "generic" system, you need to know all the ways in which the specific systems could be exceptional.

b) In almost every case, if you knew the data in (a), there would be no reason to build a "generic" system, because you could simply start building the specific systems.

c) No, customer, your case is not an exception to (b).

d) OK, happy to do it your way. Please sign this spec, and pay attention to the bit that states that change requests void deadline commitments and will be charged extra at a higher than standard rate.

Most "simple projects," at least in the tech world, tend to be complex projects that have not been subject to sufficient scrutiny to have their complexities identified.

Emphasis mine. Via Will Obamacare's Exchanges Be Ready on Time? - The Daily Beast.

Just go look at them. They're not afraid of handling weapons; why are you? Girls of the Israeli Defense Forces (37 Photos).

Recently, my parents found an old dog that had been abandoned.  He stunk.  We needed to bathe him, and he wasn't keen on the idea.  It might seem mean to hold him down and spray him with a hose and soap with all his whining and complaining and whelping.  It would seem to the dog like he was being abused, and would sound like he was being abused.  But if we don't clean the dog, no one is going to take him in.  It is a loving action to wash the dog.  Whereas if we let him go on stinking, it will be much happier, and will surely die of starvation in a matter of weeks.  That isn't loving.

This is also a concept largely missing in modern morality.  Evil can wear kindness, and good can wear cruelty -- God was once praised as "terrifying".  Don't be fooled by appearances, but intention.  Love looks to better the other, while true hatred looks to please the other so as to use them for one's own wishes.

Go read the review to see why I picked that particular excerpt. Via the Wood between Worlds: Let Me In: the anti-Twilight.

To build a financial system meant building institutions (foremost, the Bank), and that in turn meant constitutional construction. Everyone on all sides eagerly mobilized the “original public meaning” of the Constitution, only to discover that it would carry only so far. Those arguments, moreover, were part of a vituperative, sharply polarized and, over long stretches, closely divided debate. (McCraw records the often razor-thin margins on votes on the Bank, the debt, and internal improvements.) The stuff that we now take for granted and cite, reverently and/or precedentially, as constitutional wisdom easily could have come out the other way. In our current confused debate, it’s good to hold on to all of that at the same time: the Constitution as a lode star; the limits of mere interpretation and the impossibility of a Constitution beyond all politics; and the recognition that the Constitution can survive and, in a real sense, rests on political strife.

via The Founders’ Finance, and Ours | Online Library of Law and Liberty.

Ask Not What's Possible: the question is not what you can do, the question is how much the client is willing to pay for it and how long they will wait.

Time Substitutes for Money on a Logarithmic Scale: e.g cutting the time by 20% will require doubling the budget. Cutting the budget by 30% will quadruple the amount of time.

All Estimates are Optimistic: new application development will take three times as long as you expect, and cost twice as much. Or vice-versa.

(Emphasis in original.) Via Database Soup: 20 Rules of Software Consulting.

Germany, the ECB and rest of the EuroThieves did something innovative.

They simply ignored Parliament and came up with a scheme that didn't require a vote.

We'll see how this works out for them.

This, incidentally, is exactly what happened here with GM.  It was blatantly unlawful to protect the UAW's pension fund, which had no senior standing while trashing senior bondholders.  The government did not care and did it anyway -- and the courts permitted it.

This has been the repeated means by which you are stolen from.  When you enter into an investment, whether you make a deposit in a bank or buy a bond or something else, you are buying into a capital structure in a given place with a given and declared level of both risk and potential reward.  You price that risk and your willingness to enter into the transaction with the full understanding of where you are in that capital structure.

When that is unilaterally changed retroactively you are being stolen from.  

via Quick Update On Cyprus in [Market-Ticker].

the most important lesson of economics is that no one has ever washed a rental car.  An excellent point, but the problem is worse than that: Without an incentive to preserve, many of us will gleefully destroy.  

via On Human Evil: Concrete Down the Drain Edition, Garett Jones | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

the EU has reached a deal to bail out Cyprus, but unlike the prior proposal, there will be no tax levied on anyone.

Insured deposits under 100,000 Euros will be safe and transferred to a new “good” bank, but the losses will be concentrated on the larger depositors who will be stuck at the “bad” bank.  And in a move eerily reminiscent of the maneuvering to get Obamacare passed, the deal is structured to avoid calling it a tax (which would require parliamentary approval).

via » EU and Cyprus agree to take big depositors’ money without calling it a “tax” - Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

The hallmark of the inferior being is not hypocrisy, or the mere appearance of hypocrisy.  Everyone with ideals fails to live up to them at some point or another.  One's failure to live up to a standard is not at all the same thing as denying the standard applies to oneself.  The hallmark of the inferior, the sure sign of the self-admitted inferior, is the individual who demands others live up to standards that he refuses to accept for himself.

If you do not hold yourself accountable to the same standards you apply to others, you are not only an anti-equalitarian, you are a self-declared and admitted inferior to those to whom you hold to those higher standards.

via Alpha Game: The hallmark of the inferior.