I thought ORMs are trying to solve the problem of type mapping between SQL and your backend language.
Admittedly, this doesn't end up being great, but it seems hard to solve this well in other ways, as much as I wish I could write SQL and get types for free.
I've long been suspicious of the conflicts of interest induced by exit-orientated investment models.
I'm curious if you think cooperative businesses leveraging non-voting preferred shares, community shares and other coop investment instruments are more resilient against this type of corruption.
I'm wonder how you see the tradeoffs these models have against traditional LLC/VC models and how you would mitigate them.
I hate the word "exit" altogether. It's only the investors who are leaving Middle Earth; the rest of us are still try to make this thing work.
I address your question in much more detail in the book, using examples as varied as Mondragon in Spain, John Lewis Partnership in the UK, and Vanguard and credit unions here in the US.
We actually have pretty good evidence that these other structures are more resilient and more stable than the classic "best practices" we have all been indoctrinated into.
Unfortunately, most of us have been told that these approaches are incompatible. You either go "big" and try to make a lot of money, have investors, have a grand vision, etc. Or you go "small" and do something "ethical" and non-extractive. So many of us have been taught that it is the fate of the small to be destroyed by the big, since they are more ruthless and more powerful.
But the evidence doesn't really support this just-so story. My goal with the book is to help those who want to build mission-driven companies to realize that this is a source of strength, not weakness, and act accordingly.
> So many of us have been taught that it is the fate of the small to be destroyed by the big, since they are more ruthless and more powerful. But the evidence doesn't really support this just-so story.
This is the comment I came here to read. Thank you, I already have a copy of the book and intend to dig in more on these themes specifically.
Their secret? A very rigorous contribution policy. Essentially, issues and PRs are autoclosed, and reviewed daily by the team. If its not slop, they whitelist either the issue/PR or the contributor (so their stuff isn't autoclosed next time).
That's what I did on my last vacation, and it was lovely.
Except that I was in a cabin, on an island, in a foreign country. And the reason I was absolutely undistracted from my book, is that I'd turned my phone off before crossing the border. And I left it off, all week.
The isolation and quiet surroundings made the "week off" truly off. Nobody could reach me if they tried. Whatever calamity befell my boss, he'd just have to wait.
That's so much better than I'd normally do at home on a week off, and it was 100% worth the travel to achieve it.
My favorite vacations have been the ones where we've planned or been forced into a day of downtime amidst multiple days of go-go see the sights. I hope to never again be a seven countries in six days type of traveler.
We just spent 14 days in Mexico City. We'd been before, so got to visit some 2nd and 3rd tier sights and also just spent a few days vibing in the neighborhood. Meals for two were anywhere from $5 to $600 and almost all of them were excellent.
I would quite like for more of the cafes and restaurants near my home to be other peoples' Disneyland, to some extent, since this would provide a lot of jobs in the area and help the owners.
It can be a double edged sword. A restaurant near me got written up in the NYTimes and a few other "foodie" publications. What used to be a plan a head a few weeks reservation turned into the place selling out the month in less than 10 minutes.
The owner, recognizing that eventually the hype would die down and locals are his lifeblood, had to come up with all kinds of creative ways to make sure at least half his seats went to locals.
It's been about five years now and it's still not an easy reservation but I no longer have to logon at 12:01am on the 3rd of the month to score a seat two months from now or go attend a street concert on a random Tuesday afternoon in order to get early access to the reservations list.
Yeah, I guess there's a big difference between generational tourism of the "our family always used to go there" variety, and the social media hype cycle.
Organizations and communities that embrace both AI users and AI abstainers will be the true winners.
A bimodal strategy gets you the best of both worlds: the ability to rapidly explore and develop ideas, and the ability to critically and cautiously assess them.
On the corporate scale, see the whole carbon / ESG / impact measure ent industry. Lifecycle Analysis, supply chain extrapolation, Bill of Materials analysis.
You only get some relatively crude estimate and a lot of missing data points, whereas economic growth can conveniently assign a dollar value on everything.
But we have a lot of sources of information already available that do not seem to be incorporated into any kind of top-level number that we grade ourselves on.
- when we have an estimate of how many hundreds of billions it costs to rebuild after a hurricane that would not have happened but for climate change, existing economic processes generate that number
- when insurers raise rates throughout a region, this reflects an expectation on the cost of damage, and the change over time reflects the increase in risk we've created
- when a heatwave kills a bunch of people, we already have a range of ways of estimating a monetary value for those lives from insurance, healthcare and liability litigation.
Further ... suppose your elderly relative left you a bunch of jewelry. You don't know how much it's worth and getting it appraised can actually be a bit complicated and doesn't give you complete certainty over value. But it would be _bonkers_ to continually take unappraised jewelry out into the marketplace, liquidate it, and pretend that the whole sales price was _earnings_. After the transaction, you don't have a thing you had before. You didn't know what it was worth initially but that doesn't mean that it was worthless, and you probably got scammed. Yes, measuring the full environmental impact of all our industries is hard, but pretending it's 0 is silly.
Admittedly, this doesn't end up being great, but it seems hard to solve this well in other ways, as much as I wish I could write SQL and get types for free.
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