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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_(device)#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