183 lines
7.7 KiB
Plaintext
183 lines
7.7 KiB
Plaintext
[1]taylor.town
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[2]about [3]now [4]spam [5]rss [6]hire
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cloaca maxima
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When to Build Millennia Sewers
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In the mid-1800s, [7]every building in central Chicago was raised 10ft (30m).
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Yes, they literally used [8]jackscrews to lift entire city blocks up
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one-by-one.
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Chicago had to [9]hotfix production because they built the city on the
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shoreline of Lake Michigan, where filth accumulated without natural drainage.
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They lifted the entire city after it was built so they could add sewers and
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prevent flooding.
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For comparison, Rome’s [10]Cloaca Maxima (“Greatest Sewer”) is still in-use
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after 2,400 years.
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So why didn’t Chicago just build it right the first time?
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• [11]Irreversible Decisions
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• [12]Unintended vs. Unforeseen
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• [13]Always Scale Down
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• [14]Labor & Materials
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• [15]Awful Architecture
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Irreversible Decisions
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Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible –
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one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully,
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slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and
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don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you
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were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t
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like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If
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you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the
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consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through.
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Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment
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individuals or small groups.
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As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the
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heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including
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many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful
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risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently
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diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.
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– [16]Jeff Bezos
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The Cloaca Maxima didn’t magically start out as the Greatest Sewer. It began as
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an open-air canal, then was modified and renovated and connected to the
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aqueducts.
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The Romans probably made mistakes, but they didn’t make any wrong irreversible
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decisions. To build something that lasts, make sure the architecture is correct
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where it counts.
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The Chicago sewage disaster was technically reversible, but extremely expensive
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and painful.
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Put “wiggle-room” in your architecture. Plan for repairs. Add backdoors,
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engine-hoods, seams, and spaces. Emergency plans are generally cheap to include
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in early phases of design.
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Unintented vs. Unforeseen
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[17]Exxon executives knew that CO₂ emissions would harm Earth.
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Exxon willfully ignored its own research. Climate change was unintended but not
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unforeseen.
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Prophets are silenced when apocalypses seem bad for business.
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But remember – all apocalypses are opportunities for entrepeneurship. Exxon
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could’ve made billions by diversifying themselves with renewable energy. They
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acted against their own self-interest by ignoring their facts.
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To prevent long-term disaster, solve the hard problem of aligning incentives.
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Build systems so that all constituents predict and prevent impending doom.
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Transparency thwarts [18]own goals. It’s difficult to do stupid things when you
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do stupid things publicly.
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Always Scale Down
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There’s really two ways to design things. You can either sort of start with
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small things and scale them up or you could start with big things and scale
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them down…
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So suppose you want to build a system for like 10,000 people to use
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simultaneously. One way of doing it would be to start with the system,
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design it for 10 people and test it like that and scale it up 10,000. The
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other way would be to design it for like 100,000,000 people – I mean do the
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design for that – and then scale it down to tens of thousands. You might
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not get the same architecture. You might get a completely different
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architecture. In fact, you would get a different architecture.
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And I think it’s a really bad idea to start at a design for 10 or 100
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things and scale it up. It’s better to start with an architecture that you
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know will work for a few trillion things and scale it down. It will
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actually be less efficient when you’ve got your 10,000 things than when you
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scaled up, but you’ll know that you’ll be able to scale it up later. So
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it’s good.
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So rather than ask, “how do we get to five nines?”, let’s make it more
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interesting! Let’s start at 9,999 nines reliability and scale it down.
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– Joe Armstrong from [19]Systems that run forever and self-heal and scale
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If you can afford it, throw a few extra zeroes on your designs.
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Labor & Materials
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Carefully compare lifetime, labor, and materials.
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lifetime repair labor materials
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asphalt 20 years moderate $ $
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concrete 30 years difficult $ $$
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stone 100+ years easy $$$$ $$$
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Pay particular attention to labor – 9 women can’t make a baby in 1 month.
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Exercise for the reader: Which is cheaper, a Nespresso machine or a [20]
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percolator?
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Awful Architecture
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Sometimes there are no tradeoffs.
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Some decisions are awful in every dimension.
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[21]Dvorak keyboards reduce finger fatigue using the same materials as QWERTY
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keyboards.
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[22]Juicero famously launched a high-tech product that was inferior to
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traditional juicers [23]in every comparable way:
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After taking apart the device, venture capitalist Ben Einstein considered
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the press to be “an incredibly complicated piece of engineering”, but that
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the complexity was unnecessary and likely arose from a lack of cost
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constraints during the design process. A simpler and cheaper
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implementation, suggested Einstein, would likely have produced much the
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same quality of juice at a price several hundred dollars cheaper.
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If you want to create lasting sewers, study sewer architecture and its impacts.
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What do good sewers have in common? What do bad sewers look like? What
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tradeoffs exist with sewage systems? Are there any promising-yet-untested sewer
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designs? Why do sewers go into disrepair? What societal factors prevent sewers
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from being made in the first place? Who truly controls the sewers?
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Great architects think ahead, but don’t let ambitions run amok. They anticipate
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irreversible changes and second-order effects. They consider all the costs –
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labor and materials and maintenance and environmental impact. They always stay
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ahead-of-schedule and within their budget. And despite the overwhelming
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constraints, great architects build millennia sewers whenever and wherever they
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can.
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References:
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[1] https://taylor.town/
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[2] https://taylor.town/about
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[3] https://taylor.town/now
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[4] https://newsletter.taylor.town/
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[5] https://taylor.town/feed.xml
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[6] https://taylor.town/hire-me
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[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
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[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_%28device%29#House_jack
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[9] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/blhec6/fixing_bugs_in_production/
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[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca_Maxima
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[11] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#irreversible
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[12] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#unintended
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[13] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#scale-down
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[14] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#labor-materials
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[15] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#awful
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[16] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312516530910/d168744dex991.htm
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[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_denial
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[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Own_goal
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[19] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/cNICGEwmXLU?start=433
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[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_percolator
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[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout
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[22] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero
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[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero#Criticism
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