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cloaca maxima

When to Build Millennia Sewers

In the mid-1800s, [7]every building in central Chicago was raised 10ft (30m).
Yes, they literally used [8]jackscrews to lift entire city blocks up
one-by-one.

Chicago had to [9]hotfix production because they built the city on the
shoreline of Lake Michigan, where filth accumulated without natural drainage.
They lifted the entire city after it was built so they could add sewers and
prevent flooding.

For comparison, Rome’s [10]Cloaca Maxima (“Greatest Sewer”) is still in-use
after 2,400 years.

So why didn’t Chicago just build it right the first time?

  • [11]Irreversible Decisions
  • [12]Unintended vs. Unforeseen
  • [13]Always Scale Down
  • [14]Labor & Materials
  • [15]Awful Architecture

Irreversible Decisions

    Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible –
    one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully,
    slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and
    don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you
    were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t
    like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If
    you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the
    consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through.
    Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment
    individuals or small groups.

    As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the
    heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including
    many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful
    risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently
    diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.

    – [16]Jeff Bezos

The Cloaca Maxima didn’t magically start out as the Greatest Sewer. It began as
an open-air canal, then was modified and renovated and connected to the
aqueducts.

The Romans probably made mistakes, but they didn’t make any wrong irreversible
decisions. To build something that lasts, make sure the architecture is correct
where it counts.

The Chicago sewage disaster was technically reversible, but extremely expensive
and painful.

Put “wiggle-room” in your architecture. Plan for repairs. Add backdoors,
engine-hoods, seams, and spaces. Emergency plans are generally cheap to include
in early phases of design.

Unintented vs. Unforeseen

[17]Exxon executives knew that CO₂ emissions would harm Earth.

Exxon willfully ignored its own research. Climate change was unintended but not
unforeseen.

Prophets are silenced when apocalypses seem bad for business.

But remember – all apocalypses are opportunities for entrepeneurship. Exxon
could’ve made billions by diversifying themselves with renewable energy. They
acted against their own self-interest by ignoring their facts.

To prevent long-term disaster, solve the hard problem of aligning incentives.
Build systems so that all constituents predict and prevent impending doom.

Transparency thwarts [18]own goals. It’s difficult to do stupid things when you
do stupid things publicly.

Always Scale Down

    There’s really two ways to design things. You can either sort of start with
    small things and scale them up or you could start with big things and scale
    them down…

    So suppose you want to build a system for like 10,000 people to use
    simultaneously. One way of doing it would be to start with the system,
    design it for 10 people and test it like that and scale it up 10,000. The
    other way would be to design it for like 100,000,000 people – I mean do the
    design for that – and then scale it down to tens of thousands. You might
    not get the same architecture. You might get a completely different
    architecture. In fact, you would get a different architecture.

    And I think it’s a really bad idea to start at a design for 10 or 100
    things and scale it up. It’s better to start with an architecture that you
    know will work for a few trillion things and scale it down. It will
    actually be less efficient when you’ve got your 10,000 things than when you
    scaled up, but you’ll know that you’ll be able to scale it up later. So
    it’s good.

    So rather than ask, “how do we get to five nines?”, let’s make it more
    interesting! Let’s start at 9,999 nines reliability and scale it down.

    – Joe Armstrong from [19]Systems that run forever and self-heal and scale

If you can afford it, throw a few extra zeroes on your designs.

Labor & Materials

Carefully compare lifetime, labor, and materials.

          lifetime   repair   labor materials
asphalt  20 years   moderate  $     $
concrete 30 years   difficult $     $$
stone    100+ years easy      $$$$  $$$

Pay particular attention to labor – 9 women can’t make a baby in 1 month.

Exercise for the reader: Which is cheaper, a Nespresso machine or a [20]
percolator?

Awful Architecture

Sometimes there are no tradeoffs.

Some decisions are awful in every dimension.

[21]Dvorak keyboards reduce finger fatigue using the same materials as QWERTY
keyboards.

[22]Juicero famously launched a high-tech product that was inferior to
traditional juicers [23]in every comparable way:

    After taking apart the device, venture capitalist Ben Einstein considered
    the press to be “an incredibly complicated piece of engineering”, but that
    the complexity was unnecessary and likely arose from a lack of cost
    constraints during the design process. A simpler and cheaper
    implementation, suggested Einstein, would likely have produced much the
    same quality of juice at a price several hundred dollars cheaper.

If you want to create lasting sewers, study sewer architecture and its impacts.
What do good sewers have in common? What do bad sewers look like? What
tradeoffs exist with sewage systems? Are there any promising-yet-untested sewer
designs? Why do sewers go into disrepair? What societal factors prevent sewers
from being made in the first place? Who truly controls the sewers?

Great architects think ahead, but don’t let ambitions run amok. They anticipate
irreversible changes and second-order effects. They consider all the costs –
labor and materials and maintenance and environmental impact. They always stay
ahead-of-schedule and within their budget. And despite the overwhelming
constraints, great architects build millennia sewers whenever and wherever they
can.


References:

[1] https://taylor.town/
[2] https://taylor.town/about
[3] https://taylor.town/now
[4] https://newsletter.taylor.town/
[5] https://taylor.town/feed.xml
[6] https://taylor.town/hire-me
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_%28device%29#House_jack
[9] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/blhec6/fixing_bugs_in_production/
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca_Maxima
[11] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#irreversible
[12] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#unintended
[13] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#scale-down
[14] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#labor-materials
[15] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#awful
[16] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312516530910/d168744dex991.htm
[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_denial
[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Own_goal
[19] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/cNICGEwmXLU?start=433
[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_percolator
[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout
[22] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero
[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero#Criticism
