I have worked in places where they didn't have a real ERP, and things were a mess. Hard to get anything done, hard to understand, a decent amount of time wasted.
Then I worked places with SAP. And if they were lucky and just "did things the SAP way", the result was easy to understand, actually worked, and saved time.
Can you do that without SAP? Of course. Can a SAP system also suck? Of course. I have no argument to make here, other than it's sometimes good and sometimes not. If I had to compare it to anything it'd be IBM.
I think it's less a "Spidey sense" and more an ego self defense mechanism. You hate or fear something and go into anger mode because you want to change it. But there isn't actually any external threat - the threat is internal. You're fighting a feeling or thought you want to suppress, and it's being directed outward because you don't want to acknowledge it. (IANAT)
Timber isn't the answer. The system is complex, and we need holistic solutions, not single-factor ones.
I think the answer is to stop building so dense, reduce our population, and reintroduce more nature to our deforested, inefficiently farmed, overly-paved modern world.
The more we have 12-story buildings, the harder they are to build and maintain. 3 and 4-story buildings are much easier, can be made with timber easily, etc. But we need to spread them out more. This would be good, as we could create more small businesses to service the people, less dense areas would require less intense civil management, communities would be smaller and more familiar.
The more people we have, the worse things get. You need more homes, cities get more dense, you require more resources / food / consumer goods / land, create more CO2. Quite simply, we have a shitload of people, and that causes us all kinds of headaches. If we just had fewer people, we'd have fewer headaches. We don't need to live like bunnies/rats/cockroaches constantly multiplying. And quite frankly, the planet would do much better with fewer of us.
We would also thrive more in a world closer to nature. You notice how there's fewer insects, fish are mostly disappeared, invasive species are rampant, and cities are increasingly hot and polluted? Most of that changes if we undo most of our "developing" and let nature come back. Replace concrete sidewalks with forest trails, grass lawns with trees and weeds and bushes. Remove [at least] half the roads and replace them with canopy and gardens. Grow only sustainable multicultures of foods on a quarter of the existing farmland (and stop growing so much fucking corn!) and pay a decent wage to work the land. Bring rivers and streams back. You will notice cities get cooler, biodiversity increase, CO2 emissions decrease, and our health will improve. Not to mention fewer car accidents, less noise pollution.
And those people want tear down the old house and build a bigger, fancier house where the smaller, less environmentally impactful houses stood.
In my old upper middle class neighborhood, our entire block of houses on our small cul-de-sac were all California ramblers. Small (under 3K sq ft), but on larger lots (some were 1/4 or 1/2 acre lots) near several natural ponds and wetland areas. Over the course of the last 15 years, out of the two dozen or so houses, only four or five are left as original. Thee rest were all bought, torn down and had huge, multi-million dollar houses which took up almost the entire lot built instead.
You're right, personal preference is a big one, and there are other obvious mechanisms at work here such as the city letting this happen because they benefit from the increased taxes they collect, but its not helping the environment at all.
many new houses are much more energy efficient, though. Modern building code basically guarantees that this is true. from an energy consumption POV, a bigger new, efficient house may be better. (within reason).
OTOH, modern tax laws and lot coverage calculations actively discourage energy efficient design. In many jurisdictions, you are taxed on the size of the house measured from the eaves, not the walls, and this encourages builders to maximize the house relative to the roof overhang. this reduces the ability to implement passive energy efficiency strategies like large eaves to increase shade on walls / windows.
A house that's 2x the size would have to be more than 2x efficient for it to be better. I doubt that new houses would be that much more efficient than an older house with some insulation and efficiency updates.
this article suggests that newer homes are more than twice as good, but that the size cancels some of this out, so that the new homes are only a bit better than old ones.
This isn't comparing new homes to old homes, but the overall homes over time. Obviously heat pumps, furnaces, etc are more efficient today than in 1970. If you updated an older home with efficient windows, doors, heat pump, and attic insulation, then I doubt there would be much difference.
Frame is just a small part of the cost and complexity of building a house. Considering you still need the CNC, and expensive materials, and a contractor, this doesn't seem like a win.
On the contrary, I'd rather see more open designs for modern post-frame homes. They're lighter, cheaper, simpler, faster, and provide some design benefits. The only real downside is zoning needs to catch up.
I am an engineer, and I rely heavily on metrics, because my job requires quantifying that a system is working correctly. It is impossible to do that correctly without metrics.
Similarly, managing a product team is also managing a running system; that system is just made up of meat sacks whacking plastic buttons with their bony protrusions, rather than computers humming away in data centers. A product manager still needs to quantify that the system making that product is working correctly, and metrics are essential. Otherwise you will only be guessing as to how the system is working, and those guesses will be much more haphazard as the system grows.
Velocity is a useful engineering management metric, but solely for the Product Owner's discretion in informing the Business when some particular functionality or set of value can be delivered, based on an ordered, story-pointed backlog.
It's essentially a long term weather forecast. Don't plan your beach vacation for November; don't plan to launch Product Feature X before we could have it done. "Velocity" makes it sound like it's measuring your productivity now, but it's more of a general forecast of the future. And absolutely nobody should be looking at it but the PO.
Most of them are total morons. Imagine the average genius that sticks up a liquor store, but have them go on random chat rooms asking how they can learn to sim swap.
Then I worked places with SAP. And if they were lucky and just "did things the SAP way", the result was easy to understand, actually worked, and saved time.
Can you do that without SAP? Of course. Can a SAP system also suck? Of course. I have no argument to make here, other than it's sometimes good and sometimes not. If I had to compare it to anything it'd be IBM.