+ is not a unique convention. I have dynamic rewrite sets so that all mails with specific prefixe s go to my mailbox:
<my initials>-site-<companyname>@<my domain> go to my personal mailbox
<my partner's initials>-app-<appname>@<her domain> go to my partner's mailbox
<daughter initials>-account-<entity name>@<my domain> go to my daughter's account
Sure you could in theory set up the server side verification mecanism for these pattern too. I am just stating that the +suffix stuff is not the only way used.
Accepting a little exaggeration (“works” vs “works well”), for a segment, almost certainly.
Particularly when they know that people like the commenter above are making sure it ultimately “works” by covering the incompetence of their colleagues.
The comment you are replying to is in my view a superb observation of the challenge of maintaining quality against systemic pressures to appear to be performing.
Most senior leaders in organisations cannot (or care not to) measure quality. Few (outside big tech I assume but wouldn’t be surprised to also see overlook this?) are even usefully measuring benefits realisation tied back to activity (such as software releases).
What they can measure and are systemically incentivised for is “what does it take to get the approval of the next leader above me”, and most of the time a plausible report that the software has been delivered to/ahead of schedule is the real objective to achieve this goal.
That doesn’t mean morally motivated managers aren’t out there driving quality. But it is at odds with these org systems, at the detriment (or risk of detriment) of their own careers compared to peers who optimise more for what the system rewards, and at the expense of greater energy as they effectively have to hide their pursuit of better outcomes for the organisation under a veneer of performing as the organisation expects (that is, serve two goals simultaneously, one covert and one performative).
> The price of something and the value of something were never expected to be the same
While I agree with you (quite firmly: it’s a great starting point to put on the table to challenge orthodoxy in this space), and think you’re agreeing with the parent comment, it is a fundamental tenet of mainstream economics and the political arguments of neoliberal (aka current mainstream) policy that [price == (market averaged) value], or at the very least [price ~= value].
Another interesting line of argument is to explore things that are valuable that don’t typically get a price: for example household labour, or love and friendship (at least directly: I’m sure a Friedman acolyte would reduce all relationships to exchange and reframe gifts and acts of love as investments).
As an aside for the parent comment: thanks for sharing this, it’s one of the top category of comments/quotes I’ve seen on HN in being useful, insightful, and challenging of conventional understanding in a way that improves understanding and future prediction.
Mainstream economists believe that value >= price. This is where economic surplus comes from. This is why trade is not zero sum, and it's why trade causes societies to get wealthier. Friendship and love fit into this framework just fine, as the price is $0, but the value is greater than $0.
How often is "You should pay me much more, it will make both of us wealthier" a winning argument when asking for a raise?
Trade very much is zero sum, at least some of the time. Prices are set by power disparities, not by abstract concepts of relative value.
One of the many problems with mainstream econ is that gloms together a whole set of unrelated interactions in a single crude concept of "price."
In reality share dealing, corporate wage bargaining, negotiations between farmers and supermarket chains, lemonade stands, and tourists haggling with craft vendors on vacation are all completely different kinds of interactions.
They end up with a price because they're mediated in currency, but their differences are far more interesting and economically revealing than their very superficial similarities.
Prices are set by supply and demand, which you may choose to label as "power" as a matter of a priori definition, and to some extent that will be a suitable label, but you would be throwing a way a whole deal of explanatory power by insisting on such a rhetorically loaded framing.
> How often is "You should pay me much more, it will make both of us wealthier" a winning argument when asking for a raise?
A great deal. If you don't pay me, I will quit, and you will be worse off, so it's a win-win proposition for you to give me a raise. That's what labor market competition is about.
> They end up with a price because they're mediated in currency, but their differences are far more interesting and economically revealing than their very superficial similarities.
Hence microeconomics, labor economics, financial economics, and the various other mainstream economics disciplines that do try to split those hairs.
Other theories of price setting (non-classical and non-marginalist) exist, for example the sample chapter of this book, which describes how the existence and prevalence of markup pricing was discovered independently several times over the past century.
I think we’re using different terms for value but I agree with your argument about comparative advantage and non zero sum trade, while also noting the other comments here that price is intended to correlate with marginal value in a suitably free market, to the degree that individual measures of value can be mediated through a price mechanism.
This is perhaps the broader point, which is that to the degree economics acknowledges non-priced value it’s a hand wave to “there’s some economic surplus here otherwise these people wouldn’t reach agreement to exchange”.
But to the degree that senses of value are the motivating factor behind economic exchange it’s oddly absent from the discussion. I get the reasons: philosophical inquiries about value and aesthetics are a lot more challenging to work through than concepts of utility reflected by measurable actions, but this goes to the overall point about the limitation and overreduction of current mainstream economics, and the criticism of people like Graeber of its politicised and somewhat arbitrary intellectual grounds.
To the degree mainstream economic reduction is useful to support understanding that’s fine - it absolutely allows reasoning and insight in many scenarios, especially microeconomics - but to the degree that decision-makers double down on it (especially macro) despite it being incomplete or absolutely wrong in certain environments and contexts because it promotes certain power structures and power plays that is highly problematic, especially when people jump to its defence out of misplaced loyalty to a school of expertise.
Note that in orthodox microeconomic theory, price is equal to the marginal value of the last exchanged unit. To use the above example of food:
> What's the value of food? If you have none you die, so the value is quit of high, but the price is much lower than that because there are many competing suppliers.
The first calories of the day, the ones that prevent you from dying, have a very high subjective value - but you pay them at the value of the 3000th calorie of the day, the extra drop of ketchup on your fries, which has a very little value.
And thus of course average value x volume is very different from (marginal value of last unit) x volume.
> While I agree with you (quite firmly: it’s a great starting point to put on the table to challenge orthodoxy in this space), and think you’re agreeing with the parent comment, it is a fundamental tenet of mainstream economics and the political arguments of neoliberal (aka current mainstream) policy that [price == (market averaged) value], or at the very least [price ~= value].
For mainstream economics, this is true in a very specific technical sense; all averages lose information, and the "market average" is a very particular form of average that doesn't behave the way most people think of an average behaving—particularly, it is not like a mean, the normal "average" that people think of, that is sensitive to changes in any individual values, it is somewhat like a median in that it is insensitive to changes in existing values that do not cross the "average"; e.g., if you take an existing market for a commodity with a given clearing price, and reduce, by any amount, the value of the commodity to any proper subset of sellers who would sell at the current market clearing price, the market clearing price does not change. The assessment of value across the market has decreased, but the output of the particular averaging function performed by the market has not.
Reminds me of a problem I ran into once where someone had wanted unique but short codes as identifiers for relatively small counts, and picked a substring of a UUID:
> However, the overall takeaway was: Don’t use the MongoDB Increment value as a Unique Identifier.
However, the overall takeaway should be, as always: don't use MongoDB. Period. Every time I learn something new about it I'm baffled about why people continue to use it.
What would the world be like if an identity-associated (and seemingly ego-threatening to others) label was not a requirement to get access to a consumable good that made a material impact not only on an individual’s wellbeing, and life-time outcomes, but even for those who value this more, value to the economic and capital and social system.
Like imagine saying you need to spend thousands in proving to people that coffee is something that would help you get a pep in your step at 3pm on Wednesday to be able to get your morning latte.
Or to reframe this, why does everyone care so much, especially in an era when we’ve given up so many other values and multi-generational investments at times in a baby and bathwater sense.
If I were to say to you for the sake of argument that contextual clinical interpretation was no longer required, let’s say that we had a perfect test some other way, does part of you feel threatened or attached or defensive or argumentative?
The reason I ask is that your response leans very heavily into the importance of expertise and a specific form of knowledge, without showing the kind of subjective empathy for the experience of the people dealing with these challenges that I’m confident you have in spades given your profession.
And given your personal draw to scientific expertise (given your profession), and investment in building that expertise in yourself, and continued personal material and ego investment in that expertise being valued (and the school of thought that legitimises and makes that expertise worthy), as well as your clear intelligence and exploration and insights in this space, it seems an interesting question to ask whether in your deepest reflection there is any sense of conflict or tendency to bias, and how you consider if that shapes your views.
In my highest ego moments I've probably regarded my strength in the space you articulately describe - that sort of balanced points, connector, abstractor, quick learner, cross-domain renaissance dabbler.
It also seems to be something that LLMs are remarkably strong at, of course threatening my value to society.
They're not quite as good at hunches, intuition, instinct, and the meta-version of doing this kind of problem solving just yet, but despite being on the whole a doubter about how far this current AI wave will get us and how much it is oversold, I'm not so confident that it won't get very good at this kind of reasoning that I've held so dearly as my UVP.
Yeah I can picture it. The non-rhotic R on its own doesn’t narrow it further, but there would be distinction within Australia based on the sounds of the “ea” part.
Off the cuff I can picture some Australians taking it more nasally at the top of the palate sort of yee-ah (think Steve Irwin), a more neutral yeehr with a hint of final r (but more clipped and mono syllable than an American accent), or even a yair that might push as far as yuhhh (heading towards a sort of hybrid of Californian Valley Girl and the posh British accent used in American media).
As a rough generality, being good at something, like proper good at it, is incompatible with the basic forces of how modern organisations work. By this I mean the systems of reward, power, decision-making.
That doesn’t mean all organisations work this way (mythically, startups of old didn’t), nor that some leaders can’t manage this tension, but tension it is which means while these leaders will often achieve “better” outcomes (that is, “more good” outcomes with relevance to the area of expertise or craft they’re good at, often but not always with more empathy and better working conditions for those delivering), they’ll also encounter more barriers to progressing to and maintaining positions of power, face greater scrutiny, probably be confused why the organisation around them isn’t understanding or valuing their capability (and spend a lot of time translating to frames they do understand and value), and ultimately greater burnout.
I think the challenge is largely a matter of scale. Once you have thousands or tens of thousands of people, communication becomes by far the dominant factor in outcomes. You can set up different structures and cultural norms to try to nudge things in the right direction, but there is no org structure that can solve this because local details always matter. The trick is understanding which details matter and why.
Ultimately I think this depends on management competence and judgement. I also think IC leadership is a critical counterweight to the distortions of empire building that incentivize creating messes. And finally as a competent individual you need the maturity to recognize the difference between unavoidable but tolerable organizational dysfunction, and broken leadership where its impossible to do good work, and hence time to cut bait and leave.
