> Just a series of unconnected errors at big companies
Except that "at big companies" is basically selection bias, problems at little companies don't get noticed because they're, well, small companies.
And the underlying issue of the "unconnected errors" is that software is rather like the airline industry: things don't really get fixed until there's a sufficiently ugly crash.
According to Wikipedia [0], the number of MV-related deaths has been right about 10 or 11 per 100,000 per year for the last ten years. Which makes the opening claim "Americans are condemned to lose friends and relatives to traffic violence" seem particularly overwrought.
And while the legal system may have been of some help, I rather suspect the main reason cars took over is because they give the user a tremendous amount of freedom and agency.
If you live in a small town of 100,000 people, that means 11 of your neighbors will be killed by drivers crashing their cars every year.
And that doesn’t account for the deaths and health costs caused by road pollution, by inactive lifestyles forced on communities due to car-centered infrastructure, etc...
Given the car-oriented status quo, perhaps it’s true that cars give owners tremendous freedom and agency (at the costs outlined above, plus tremendous financial cost). But it’s also true that many of the most desirable and productive parts of our cities are that way despite cars and not because of them.
> If you live in a small town of 100,000 people, that means 11 of your neighbors will be killed by drivers crashing their cars every year.
True. But for comparison, if we live in this small town of 100k people, then 192 people will die from Heart Disease, 178 people will die of Cancer, 47 people will die of Respiratory diseases, 43 people will die of Stroke, and 16 will die from the flu (influenza or pneumonia) every single year, according to the CDC. "Motor vehicle accidents" are not even in the top 10 causes of death (they're 13th, using 2016's data).
> the most desirable and productive parts of our cities are that way despite cars and not because of them.
Which is a strong argument for cars. Cars make things drastically more affordable for people. If you remove them, you increase the costs for everything (food, transportation, housing, healthcare, education, etc), to heights no regular person could ever afford. That also carries tremendous costs and even carries it's own death toll.
Paradoxically, making things "more desirable and productive" makes them worst for real people (because that value will be captured in a pricetag, and real people will never be able to afford it). Paradoxically, too much safety can actually be less safe overall (that safety will be captured in a pricetag, and real people will never be able to afford it, and will be forced into less safe alternatives) - https://local.theonion.com/neighborhood-starting-to-get-too-...
More people died from suicide (45k in 2016) in the US, than died from all automobile accidents nationwide (37k in 2016). The tradeoff here is not as simple as people often imagine it to be.
> Cars make things drastically more affordable for people.
In "Energy and Civilization A History" by Vaclav Smil he points out that, once you factor in the time spent earning money to pay for the costs of car transport, you are doing no better than if you walked.
The time that the car seems to save is spent working to pay for the car.
Thing about car crashes is...they are the #1 most common cause of death for young people from age 5-25.
If you look at the population-wide stats, things are dominated by diseases of aging because more old folks are dying overall.
Every death at age 25 has robbed us of more than double the number of years of life than a death at 50.
As for the rumination about productivity, desirability and cost - I really don’t understand your argument.
How do cars make life more affordable in communities that are well-equipped to live a car-free life? (Well-equipped meaning with density of services, walkability and transit.)
The paradox you describe is just a function of how rare these dense, people-friendly communities are in our landscape of endless exurban development crisscrossed by 6-lane expressways where you have to wait 5 minutes to cross the street while walking your dog. If we built more of these high-demand, people-centered communities, the price differential would not be so great.
>Which is a strong argument for cars. Cars make things drastically more affordable for people. If you remove them, you increase the costs for everything (food, transportation, housing, healthcare, education, etc), to heights no regular person could ever afford.
So why is it that the US has the most expensive healthcare costs in the world, and also extremely high food and housing costs?
I also live in a city of about 400,000 - and I have thousands of neighbors. Of course I don't know them all personally - I am familiar with different groups, communities, leaders, families. I know about what's important to them, what their goals are, what they are up to in our shared community. I care about them. Do you care about the health and wellbeing of people who are not your 10 immediate neighbors?
Here's another way to look at it. This link (https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/) says "traffic crashes [...] account for 2.2% of all deaths globally." Which means that out of your 50 closest acquaintances, one of them is likely to die in a car accident.
Motor vehicle-related injuries are the leading cause of death for people ages 5 through 34 in the United States. Also, the injuries are substantial. In the US, 2.7 million emergency department visits from motor vehicle accidents each year. I am not suggesting we eliminate cars, but the US has gone way, way overboard and thus actually "reduced" our freedoms. Congestion, car dependency, and lack of alternatives is not freedom.
I thought one of the basic lessons we learned from the last 70 years of programming language design is that it's a bad idea to make semantics depend on lexical structure.
I'm really surprised people like Rob Pike and Ken Thompson would design a language where the visibility of an identifier depends on the case of its identifier.
If you work for a while at a larger company that enforces a style guide, it starts to make total sense. If your company's style guide already insists that identifiers should be named with some convention that matches their visibility, then by making that part of the language, you are simplifying the system.
I would not be surprised if specifically the Google C++ style guide influenced this decision.
It becomes very annoying and tedious to refactor when you need to change visibility. Suddenly, a single line change (e.g. changing private to public) needs an IDE to refactor it and make sure it gets all instances (which is quite ironic given that golang proponents generally shun IDEs). Now depending on how many instances changed, you would need to split up your diff for readability, or clutter your diff with needless changes.
The linked article discusses this in the first point:
* Changing the visibility of a variable requires changing its name, everywhere it's used.
* It also cuts contrary to some very long-standing traditions, like using all caps for global constant names, using title case for class names, and starting with lower case for most everything else.
Or you could alter the recipe. I've made baking powder biscuits any number of times (flour, salt, baking powder, milk, and butter) with very serviceable results.
I've always had good results just using the recipe from the back of the Clabber Girl bakung powder tin. I've found making fluffy biscuits has more to do with how you cut in the butter and work the dough than much else.
For me, the problem with the Fermi paradox is that we only have one poorly understood and incompletely documented example of a planet with intelligent life from which to draw conclusions. Beyond that:
* How many habitable planets are out there? We're just now starting to get data on this, there might be a lot
* Of those, how many develop life?
* Of those that develop life, how many develop intelligent life?
* Of those that develop intelligent life, how many advance to the point where they're capable of interstellar travel? How many are interested in interstellar travel?
* What if FTL travel is simply not possible? STL interstellar travel could basically be a one-way trip. Maybe most (or all) alien civilizations are unwilling to explore beyond a few light years.
* What is the lifetime of a space faring civilization? maybe all the alien civilizations just died out before they explored very far.
What if another species has figured out a way around death? What if the idea of a single "life" isn't really a thing, and alien lifeforms instead live as a single "consciousness" among them all forever alive. Then the idea of spending millions or billions of years traveling around the universe isn't necessarily a "one way trip".
I feel like the actual moral of the story should be "don't underestimate how trying to scrimp on a vital resource can result in horrible logistical complexities and a nightmare UX".
All true, but I would add that "in order to get back to the previous system that actually worked, you may have to provide a fig leaf for management, so that they can pretend no such thing is happening." We are back to one toilet per car, but we have to use cars of twice the size (with superfluous coupling in the middle that is never uncoupled) in order to pretend that we did not go back to the original system.
Except that "at big companies" is basically selection bias, problems at little companies don't get noticed because they're, well, small companies.
And the underlying issue of the "unconnected errors" is that software is rather like the airline industry: things don't really get fixed until there's a sufficiently ugly crash.