Direct democracy is easier to buy than representative democracies for two reasons: first, voters have other things to do with their time than become experts on every bit of law that comes before them. And second, they don’t have the ongoing interest in rule-making, implementation & enforcement an interested legislator does.
Reading the book Street Level Bureaucrats was eye-opening for me on why seemingly “common-sense” solutions like Direct Democracy end up either just not working or having the opposite of the intended effect. Laws are less like writing software for a computer and more like designing processes for a team writing software.
It is so interesting to me the way “nerd” and “geek” function as quasi-diagnostic categories for Boomers: not specifically medicalized, yet used to describe developmental differences.
It demonstrates both the power and limits of the social model of disability, in a way no amount of pure theory would.
(We can contrast this with the current Gen Z movement towards neurodiversity, which is emerging from solidarity across dramatically different subjective experiences, some regarded by the medical profession and others not.)
Here I was talking specifically about code reviews, so the context is pretty different than an incident retro. A code review where there is nothing nice to say is probably not going to merge into the code base: it is going to get updated to address the issues, and then there will be something nice to say as I give it a plus one.
But when I run retrospectives, even in the most horrific cases we have a section on "what went right". Sometimes the answer is "nothing", but usually there is something that was helpful: a log message that helped us find the root cause, documentation that meant we didn't have to call someone, alerting that found the problem, a feature flag we could toggle off until it got fixed.
In a corporation, we are playing a repeated game. It isn't about just this one incident: it is about what all the people watching the retrospective are going to built tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. I want people to hear what went right with this incident so they put the log statements & feature flags into their own stuff. Those are the kinds of things that may only be relevant when something goes really wrong, and it's easier to leave them off, so every bit of positive reinforcement we can manage makes our lives easier when we do get paged.
We had an incident that was worse than it could have been due to long neglect of infrastructure (dare I say that sloth and cluelessness figure heavily?). That's a different kind of complaint. Sometimes work is hard, sometimes things shouldn't be as they are.
even in the most horrific cases we have a section on "what went right"
Yes, in the distant past someone knew what they were doing and bought a bag of cat litter that our current crew of clueless hoarder freaks thankfully kept. It doesn't make them less clueless, though.
In a corporation, we are playing a repeated game.
We as well. We want to ingrain proper habits to get in front of the crazy train. That doesn't mean that we say to every passing serviceman "Thank you for your service and good job you are wearing proper headgear".
I'm tired of the sugar-sweetness. I want quiet and good practice, and the continuous din of "positive reinforcement" is the opposite.
I would recommend reading the blog post; I think there is context you have missed.
I'm describing interactions here I am having with my peers, not people I'm in a service relationships with. We are practicing a highly-skilled trade, and acknowledging the times our skill pays off isn't a "continuous din", or even "positive reinforcement". It is just refusing to be dour sourpusses who have to pretend our work isn't super cool.
Code reviews are most closely akin to a Writing Workshop. When someone in a writing workshop says, "that description evoked Oregon in spring" or whatever, it isn't banal positivity: it is specific feedback on how the craft is functioning.
For one, culture norms can change in less than a decade, much less 1964. In 1964 there was still legal segregation in the US. And whatever you think "natural" today might not be considered so in 2030 or 2040, much less 2019 + (2019-1964).
Second, it's not like the terms men and boys don't carry different attributes still today, or just because the anglosaxon culture is going through an Emo hyper-sensitive phase that everybody of the 8 billions in the world will have qualms to use the terms "men" and "boys" in such a matter (more capable, more mature, etc).
We're riding an exponent in everything around us, culture included - not just in amount of transistors per silicon wafer. 2019 is much more different from 2009 than 1974 was from 1964.
> We're riding an exponent in everything around us, culture included
Popular culture perhaps - but in my experience there's a massive yawning chasm between 'woke' culture and the culture of the majority of the population, which has remained remarkably sceptical. The whole pronouns thing for example would still get very strange looks down the pub.
And I call your recency bias and raise a "things have always been the same" bias.
Whether exponential or not, we've had more culture-defininging technological, lifestyle, and moral changes in the past 200 years than in the previous 3000.
I'm not sure that I agree, given that those 3,000 years encompass the beginnings of (amongst other things) Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, as well as the development of printing, explosives, and algebra.
Christianity unfolded over 2000 years. It took around 500-600 years to dominate Europe, it wasn't some huge sudden shift.
Algebra didn't matter much (as far as life changing applications) for most of the time after its invention until around the industrial age. Then we had a huge math explosion, and a huge science explosion, physics, chemistry, etc plus practical applications as advanced as sending people to the moon.
Explosives and printing are part of the exponential curve we talk about. We went from knives, swords, arrows (used for millennia) to crude explosives to nuclear weapons and rockets between 500 years or so.
Same for printing. We went from stone carving, papyri, hand copying and limited literacy for millennia, to the printing press, mandatory mass education, and onwards to computers, and the internet, and now whole world knowledge reachable in one's pocket wherever they are in the span of 400 years or so.
Every day life in most of the world wasn't much different between 500 B.C and 1800 B.C. Ancient Rome, or Medieval Paris, could as well be Ancient Babylon. In villages life was almost entirely the same. The slow cultural changes (the introduction of Christianity, the change in rulers, etc) didn't change or affect much of everyday life.
People can't only be judged on where they are right now, you have to include cultural and sociological aspects as well.
I would consider myself open minded and liberal and for lack of a better term, "woke". But I was born in the 80s to parents who were born in the 60s and their parents in turn were born in the 30s and so on. So my parents were raised with some racism and a bunch of sexism. That meant I grew up with a bit less racism and declining sexism, but those things were still there.
In my teens I used "gay" as a slur.
Am I awful? Can you take one look at a forum post I made in the late 90s and judge me entirely? I'm doing my best now to fix these things so hopefully my son will grow up with none of this cultural and sociological baggage, but I'm not a bad person for acting in accordance with the times 20 years ago. Nor were my parents in the 80s. Nor was Knuth in the 60s.
Is it okay what he did? No, of course not. But let's not hang the man for something that wouldn't have raised an eyebrow at the time.
>Am I awful? Can you take one look at a forum post I made in the late 90s and judge me entirely?
The opposite. I'd judge anybody judging a person from a 90s forum post as awful scum themselves.
>Is it okay what he did? No, of course not.
Yes it is. It's not even that controversial. Men and boys, whether one is woke or not, have some different characteristics, age, maturity, strength, etc, being some of them. That was the purpose of the analogy, which was, and remains, a common idiom across the globe.
Is it okay for 2019 people of a particular (woke) subset of a particular (Anglo-Saxon) culture to impose whatever latest retrospective moral panics they have on everybody? No. For one, that's cultural imperialism...
The article doesn't explains what makes LTSE different than NYSE? How will it actually encourage looking beyond the next quarter? Where can one learn about that?
The only concrete(ish) thing I could find was this quote:
> ...and reward long-term shareholders by giving them more voting power the longer they hold the stock.
I'm not sure how that would affect the behavior of traders in any particular stock. Seems like it would allow a "committed minority" of shareholders the ability to control the company, without having different classes of stock determined upfront?
If this exchange is mostly for value investing, as it sounds like, what barriers will LTSE set to prevent high frequency trading and other byproducts of access focused trading?
It's designed for long term investing. Not a place for day traders, high frequency trading and all sorts of sharks and piranhas that like to eat up pensions and 401k funds...
How exactly do you believe high-frequency traders "eat up" pension funds?
The only time any limit order gets executed is when it is the best price available. From the other perspective, the price a market order is matched at is the price of the best limit order available.
In the absence of high-frequency traders, the best price available will be worse, not better.
Example of how HFTs would "eat up" money, at least in the past: many instruments trade on multiple exchanges. So when a trader wants to execute what is conceptually a single large order, in practice this order may need to be split and routed to multiple exchanges.
HFTs will see the first order executing on one exchange, and will then jump in front of the rest on the other exchanges. For the trader it looks like large orders don't work; he can't buy every offer that's on his screen. Only part of his order works, and a price rise prevents the rest from executing.
Nowadays this may be less of a problem, because large traders now probably all use software that tunes injected latency to make all related orders arrive simultaneously at their different destinations. But I would still be careful about assuming that HFTs can't do any damage anymore.
The HFT can't just know that you're going to place a market order, and then jump in front of all of the other limit orders that you're going to match with, without offering a better price than the other limit orders.
The only way that could work is if the lowest price you can buy on exchange A is $100, and the HFT knows that you're about to submit a market order, so he buys up the $100 orders until the best price is $101, and then he lists what he bought for sale at $100.99, which your market order matches against. OK, in theory this works.
To avoid this, you can just submit a limit order at $100 instead of a market order. You should always use limit orders for exactly this reason, anyway: even in the absence of foul play, the order you're trying to match against might get matched by someone else in the mean time and you could get a worse price than you expect.
Pensions and 401k funds are not required to do any sort of short-run trading, and the asymptotic value of a security on each exchange will be the same. It won't meaningfully impact any sort of long run value of a pension fund or 401k (that is passively managed)
HFT get special trading codes they use to their advantage. They can see when a large order is being placed by an institutional investor and use it to their advantage to skim off a little bit.
Even if true, that's not an inherent property of HFT, that's just standard corruption: some traders get unfair access to private information about other traders' future plans.
Getting rid of HFT wouldn't get rid of that kind of corruption, and getting rid of that corruption wouldn't get rid of HFT.
Indeed there is very little. Just some mumble mouthing about "intentions."
""But unlike those exchanges, ultimately our intention is that when companies list shares on LTSE for sale to the public, they will adopt a set of governing practices that are designed to help them build lasting businesses and empower long term-focused shareholders.""
Utterly indistinguishable from the Wooden Language heard from every such grandee.
I am not one to indulge the sort of naivety that might allow me to pretend that powerful investors are going to tolerate any more impediments to their desires than legally required, or at least enforceable, so unless there are concrete differences imposed by SEC et al. I expect this is -- or eventually will be -- simply Wall Street West.
In the data set I used for reference, Series C+ companies still mostly failed to exit. Even at the furthest extreme the data tracked, of the 35 Silicon Valley companies that raised a fifth round 18 failed to exit or raise more money.
On the other hand, there are some advantages that may make later companies less risky: the timeline to exit may be shorter (though that is less true in the case of an early M&A, which ~23% of the cohort found). The nature of the risks may change in ways that make it easier to evaluate. And cash salaries usually rise in the later stages, reducing the marginal cost to employees.
There was no stage at which venture-backed companies stopped being a risk, but that's also true of public companies that grant options: it is always possible that the share price goes down and the options are worth nothing. I think the takeaway is that in this 2006-2008 cohort, earlier startups were less at risk of running out of money that most people would assume.
Building this I used information from CB Insights, which looks at companies that receive VC funding by cohort.
Their most recent report covers companies that raised seed rounds in 2008-2010: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/venture-capital-funnel-2...
Reading the book Street Level Bureaucrats was eye-opening for me on why seemingly “common-sense” solutions like Direct Democracy end up either just not working or having the opposite of the intended effect. Laws are less like writing software for a computer and more like designing processes for a team writing software.