The DJ's took pills to stay awake / And play for seven days

Andreesen's 'Software Eats The World,' Mosaic & associated perspectives emerged from the fresh green fields of internet-enabled personal computing in the 90s and 2000s. Everything was young and novel. The software itself. The business models. The cultural impact. The companies and personas. Everything was a disruption.

There was a time when the record industry was fresh & jukeboxes were a disruptive new "channel." With it came new business models, genres of music. Music became imbued with new cultural & artistic significance.

There was a time when gentleman scientists were inventing the institution of science at home. A time before "publish-or-perish," tenure-tracks and grant applications.

Everything was young once. Mechanised farming. Production line manufacturing. The Americas. Nothing stays young, however.

Pondering why & how institutions go from new to old is something we've been doing forever. Ibn Khaldun, father of social science, had his barbarians-vs-civilisations theories in the 1300s.

These theories tend to get ideological. Marxism was a (Khaldun-ish) theory that "late-stage capitalism" was upon us(them). Ayn Rand thought everything had gotten infested with parasitic "looters." Both fantasised about revolutionary moments, where the old world dies and is reborn new & fresh. Today, we like terms like regulatory capture/burden, incumbent effects, path dependencies, low hanging fruit depletion or somesuch. All characterisations of "corruption" infesting mature institutions.

There are lots of examples. NASA's achievements in early decades vs the 90s. How a 3 person startup with 1 month of code can add featureX to their product orders of magnitude more easily than an established company with a mature code base. Twitter once served their product to the whole world with 50 people. It was a similar twitter, but doing it with just 1,000 people today would be a massive challenge.

Everything starts young. Everything gets old.

Is that true though? We know that instagram had less than 100 people running it before Facebook bought it for $19B.

There's a tendency for successful companies to add headcounts and grow - and it's very hard to convince yourself not to - maybe just maybe they would be able to serve the whole world with about 50 people, on a smaller revenue but huge revenue/headcount.

Secondly, headcount is a darling of many HR systems. You might cite exceptions with Google or Stripe but your typical corporate environment will not put much effort into fairly evaluating career advancement (e.g., measuring impacts, outcomes, risk) for anyone.

If you are sales or profit focused, lucky you. But outside of that, most HR systems will use simple metrics like "how many people report to you" or "how much budget do you control" to evaluate your promotions and pay. Some will even have literal formulas (e.g., you need 6 reports to go to Director; you need 6 Director reports to go to Executive Director; etc.)

It is done because it is easy and convenient for HR. Unfortunately, obviously, people then try to game the system and over-hire.

You might have to produce an "impacts report" at EOY but that is often HR-theater. Get down to "why" and you will find it came down to how many direct reports you had. Or how much budget you burned.

If your incentive system rewards hiring over results, expect headcount to grow I urge those in governance positions to ensure their organizations have a real impacts assessment system to evaluate employee progress. There is no better way to kill motivation among workers than tell them that impact has no effect.

The Instagram and WhatsApp example keeps coming up like clockwork in various contexts. A recent discussion that I recall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22471355

> If your incentive system rewards hiring over results, expect headcount to grow...

Goodhart's Law in action? "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320640

But the question is, can they do it without the bloat? My understanding is yes - and I can probably even tell you how.

I dont mean to be snarky, but isn't the "how" sort of obvious (though hard to achieve)? You'd have to align reward with value generated per unit of risk and nothing else. The more value you generate (on a risk adjusted basis), the greater your reward and promotion. When companies grow larger, it becomes difficult for them to measure value generated, or too tedious, or politics overpowers governance.

I'd be curious to hear your proposal on a fix.

I have no idea how to change the politics of hiring more, I can only hope if I was to ever start a company that I can try to make my own firm so.

This doesnt mean big company Directors and Executive Directors are not deserving of their promotions, it just means that they usually have an added hoop to jump thru -- increasing headcount.

I've been in senior ranks of big companies, and spoke to plenty of counterparts at other companies, and it is almost always the story.

You're thinking of WhatsApp.

For every well meaning well behaving individual there is another that will park his car in your freaking back yard if you don't fence your property.

Would you raise a building while taking into account the surrounding people and context? Well, perhaps. But many others will absolutely destroy the location in all concerns and just maximise square footage.

This problem has no solution! Whatever set of rules you agree upon, somebody will find a creative way to mess with them and a new rule or clarification will need to be added. Then people will complain why so many rules.

Rules can be rewritten in a cohesive way or rules can be written as just an endless series of if statements which may contradict with other if statements.

It would be useful for laws to have an automated test suite so that known good uses cases wouldn't be broken down the road.

But we've been having bugs and exploits in software since the beginning. And law has to cover an even wider field of situations.

Actually good rule systems are ambiguous or weak enough that when someone tries to abuse edge cases, people can turn round and say "no" and the rules don't get in the way.

The question is some people find the cost too much.

Maybe it is better to have a law that is explicitly dumb, in exchange for fast, cheap and predictable (kinda like computers, if you think about it)

An automated test suite for laws is NP-hard.

Laws in the US happen like this: someone has trouble parking one day and decides that the solution is to make more parking a legal requirement, giving little or no thought to the second or third order effects of those laws.

I'm not a big fan of philosopher Michael Huemer, but he makes an interesting metaphor regarding laws. He compares society with the human body and laws with medicine. For a long time medicine wasn't based on empirical evidence, but on logic and "common sense." Most medical advice from before the scientific method was more harmful than helpful. The human body is such a complex and delicate system that almost all interventions are more harmful than helpful. Even in the presence of a medical issue, unless there is evidence that a given medical intervention is more helpful than harmful, no medical intervention is probably better than an unproven one.

Just because a societal ill exists, doesn't mean that the first legal remedy that pops into someone's head is a good idea. Even if that idea solves the problem (a big if), will its second and third order effects cause more damage than the original problem?

American political discourse is dominated by a desire to "take action." But unless lawmakers are willing to start consulting economists and domain experts, no action at all is probably better.

You seem to think that endless sets rules is a necessary evil, but my intuition is the opposite: for every US law that makes for a better society, there are ten which are holding us back.

If you actually go to city council meetings they will explain why all of these rules and regulations exist. Just because random Joe on the internet can't see the problem doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I’m arguing that lawmakers don’t give enough consideration to the second and third order effects of laws. Minimum parking requirements solve one problem, but they create many others. I have attended many city council meetings and my impression of city councilors by and large is that they don’t rely enough on the work of economists, urban planners, and other domain experts.

Or, "someone owns a small house and one or two cars and finds they can't park because the neighbors have six roommates with one car each", or "developer builds 50 units without parking expecting the neighborhood to absorb the cars".

What are the second and third order effects and how do those effects compare with doing nothing? Will these laws be revisited as modes of transportation and the urban environment changes? (Spoiler alert, no). Without these laws would everyone just be permanently unable to park? Or would tenants, knowing how hard it is to park in public spots, pay a premium for private parking? Wouldn't those premiums incentivize developers to add private parking? But unlike the legal remedy, when those incentives go away, we don’t have to keep building parking spots.

   "developer builds 50 units without parking expecting the neighborhood to absorb the cars"

Ultimately I started questioning a lot of these rules and discovered in time what I said in the original post: a lot of people need to be forced with (new) rules because they will not think of anybody else or even actively try to workaround the rules.

And I'm not forgiving of rule makers: I think they are really bad at what they do, both in how they reach consensus and how they codify it in law, but I understand the general need they fill, so to say.

Some are.

But many rules are there because someone with power benefits from them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

"Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood."

What you've written is an all-too typical complaint of people who don't bother to understand the history of our existing legal, political and social structures. It's easy to hand wave and vent about "regulatory capture" (I do it all the time).

But go and dig down and find out why that 2+ parking space rule exists. You will find a massively more complex, and much more pro-public, pro-people, pro-progress agenda in play than anything you just wrote suggests.

I remember an example of this sort of thing that I came across in eastern WA about 20+ years ago. A small town there was facing protests because it was about to put down ("execute") several wild horses that were hanging about the town. The law was very clear about what had to be done, but the public, both in town and elsewhere in the state were aghast. The horses were healthy, beautiful and there seemed to be no good justification for killing the as the law required. People complained about the law being an ass (no pun intended) and said that this was the perfect example of government inflexibility and law making by people with selfish interests.

But all it took was a little history detour to go back and find out why the law(s) in question had come into being. It had indeed been the case that in the not too distant past (by global standards, not necessarily those of the western US), wild horses had indeed been a problem in town, and that the towns people had tried several approaches to dealing with and/or fixing the problems. None of them had been very successful, and some 80 years earlier, the town had reluctantly adopted a law where an unowned horse, if not claimed by anyone within a reasonable period of notice, must be put down.

This wasn't government inflexibility, or stupid law, or selfish interests: it was a community improvising to deal with a tricky situation, and doing so imperfectly. Improving this particular law, and others like it (such as your 2+ parking space case) isn't going to happen by assuming that the existing legal framework exists because of malintent. It's going to happen by carefully understanding the context and motivations and knowledge that led to the current laws, and only then setting out change them, hopefully for the better.

It's easy to find what arguments people gave for instituting a rule.

That is often different from the real reason it was enacted or is kept around.

There is always a nice sounding argument for even the most blatantly unfair rule. Normally, due to Motivated Reasoning, the people benefitting from them even honestly believes the arguments!

As I noted in another reply below, I think it's fine to make the argument that the 2+ parking place rule comes from zoning policies that are ultimately racist, and that if you can show that this is really the sole origin of the rule, you've cleared "the fence" and can start to meangingully propose alternatives.

But such a historically-aware analysis is a far cry from "too much government regulation ... regulatory capture ... wah!"

There is a bias that the present and recent history is how things are and should be and that any changes require superior proof than the initial experiment in passing the legislation.

I think the USA could benefit from "more government", but even saying that is woefully ambiguous. What does "less government" or "more government" even mean? Less laws? More government workers? Too much spending?

Regulatory capture is indeed a problem, but it's not unique to the USA and there's no point pretending that it's unsolvable.

Reality is far, far more complex and interesting than that!

and you're just declaring those based on feelings? or something you saw on fox news?

Improvising law and doing so imperfectly seems like a textbook recipe for "stupid law". That particular stupid law was worth complaining about "the law being an ass" (because it obviously was) and "the perfect example of government inflexibility" (local gov goes forward with putting down blameless horses based on an obscure law enacted 80 years ago in response to a situation that is nowhere near prevalent nor relevant today)

Maybe I'm missing something obvious but in light of this I'm curious how that specific example helps your argument?

The right thing to do do in the horse case would have been to repeal the law, since for sure, it no longer really applied. By contrast, the call from the public was "this is just another example of excessive government regulation", which is an entirely different claim.

But do you really want to argue for "oh, no problem, the police/courts can just ignore that statute because its clear to everyone that the original conditions that led to it no longer apply?" Really?

  we allow people to park on the street overnight. It's very simple to just not allow that

But notice how utterly different your argument is to the OP, who talked about excessive government regulation, regulatory capture and so on.

(and yes, one can make a case that codification of racism in law statutes is a kind of regulatory capture, but it's really not what most people mean when they use that term)

If you go case by case through all the nonsensical things in the american legal system, you'll find most of the time that the reason they were put in place originally was racism. Zoning is a prime example.

However, racism doesn't require 2+ parking spaces, just single family dwellings that cost more than poor people can afford.

https://qz.com/1008371/an-arab-thinker-invented-economic-the...

https://evonomics.com/amazing-north-african-scholar-beat-ada...

Ronald Reagan quoting Ibn Khaldun on his views on tax rates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KETIOgYu5uc

I dunno, maybe? In some ways yes, in many ways no.

> this covers the most basic things: would you like to build a townhouse...apartment building in San Francisco...

That seems awfully specific.

I think it's clear to any outside observer that Bay Area residential real estate policy is literally insane. That doesn't really have all that much to do with this essay or the Andreesen one that precedes it though.

No.

This is an outcome of having democracy operable at a local level; the entire outcome of localism is "your local special interests control the system". What that means, in practice, is the people who have time to burn control the system. That is either (1) retired people (2) semi-employed activists or (3) paid lawyers/lobbyists. 3 is often paid by the local big fish.

Add/subtract as your locality changes, but the principle is the same. Kill the hyperdecentralization, and you kill the balkanization.

If you want real change in the US, you have to gut the localism principle comprehensively.

edit: get involved in local politics, even on the margins, and you start seeing that change is very possible, and there are a lot of people passionately invested in not changing. This has nothing - ZERO - to do with US political alignment, BTW.

Good regulation, like good code, would express ideals and objectives in the simplest way possible that can still implement the solution. But if we follow this analogy, our country's body of law and regulation is like a centuries-old codebase that has never been revised or refactored for the sake of consolidation and simplification. It only gets added to, and obviously can't be rebuilt from scratch. This means we have a monotonically-growing level of complexity for entities that want to adhere to the law, which is a recipe for grinding to a halt.

I feel like the common argument by conservatives against regulation because it stifles innovation has some truth, but it doesn't have to.

What would it look like, I wonder, to implement reforms that are purely concerned with simplifying the existing rules and stripping out cruft? Has anybody ever considered the problem from this angle?

  would you like to build a townhouse for your family with just one parking space? Illegal in the vast majority of the United States, where 2+ parking spaces per home are required by law.

First of all, most of the U.S. doesn't even have zoning limitations regarding parking specific to townhomes. Nowhere outside cities (private developments can have CC&Rs to this effect, but that's not "zoning"), to my knowledge.

Where I live in SV, our entire development is townhomes with single parking spaces (plus a small pool of guest spots on the outer fringes of the complex).

Next to us is a large apartment complex with one space per unit. Next to that is a duplex development with one-car garages and just street parking otherwise. Can't even park in the driveways.

My last condo in Mountain View had exactly one parking space per unit (even the three bedroom units) plus a small pool of guest spaces outside the "secure" garage level. (Feel free to look it up: 1033 Crestview Drive, 90 condos in the complex, all with just 1 space).

YIMBYs love to claim "but zoning" yet almost never quote any specific codes from any specific cities, let alone anything at a county or statewide level.

So, by all means, please educate us all and give your references identifying this "vast majority".

I worked within OEM electronics industry since my first job 13 years. During those years I was fortunate to have experience living many different countries, with very different "systems."

I spent my childhood in early nineties Russia, where my parents had a business. My late teens were spent in Singapore, as an exchange student, and an interpreter in a trade company. Later I spent 6 years studying, working, and living in Vancouver, Canada, and Seattle, US. My career however only took off when I was forced to leave Canada by a paperwork mishap on behalf of my employer, and go to China for no better option.

SanderJD below has a very good point I wanted to talk about:

> I'm amused by these morality screeds from rich tech thought leaders. "Why don't the talented sacrifice easy money in software by getting into [insert super regulated, low-margin business]?" says profit-maximizing tech capitalists who ignored said businesses for a decade.

My own reason deciding not to return to the West was that I feel I simply can't do my job there, and an honest business as a way of making money doesn't work here.

I wrote many times here before how helpless I felt when I simply tried to "make money the normal way," and the normal way doesn't work. I feel the whole business culture in the West goes against the notion that a "normal, honest work" is the way to do things.

I saw many of those SV "mentors," "VC" guys, buffoon fund managers, and trendy hipstrepreneurs. All and every one of them is obsessed with NOT doing things the proper way. They all hellbent on the notion that the business IS to be done by some "special sauce," "a cheat," or "a secret trick" that is nearly equates to money out of thin air for them.

These people are wrong. They are so wrong. This is why you can not run manufacturing in America.

Maybe these guys can "make money out of thin air" by tricking banks, pension funds, clients, or the legal system, but there is no "trick" they think of to making physical things.

I'm an American living in Russia. While there are many problems (politics and others), it actually "feels" freer than the West in a sense and the cities offer a higher quality of life than the USA. They are actually walkable with many affordable transit options). In my city, there is new construction of condo towers everywhere.

Taxes are lower, costs are lower and people can afford their own apartments, there's a ton of untapped human potential (highly educated intelligent people). My Russian is elementary, but from the business owners I talk to, while they complain about regulations and taxes, it seems they have fewer than the USA. Or do you think it's a lost cause?

I was robbed three times in my life, two times in 2007 just months before my departure, and the third time in 2016, just a week after my first visit there after 9 years abroad.

You can understand, I can't bare carrying that passport now.

What does that mean? Do people need to build homes with at least 2 parking spaces per home, inside the area of their property? Does it generalize to apartments?

And so it's just required now.

It has a lot more to do with historical post WW2 urban planning models which were designed to make room for increasing household car ownership, which did happen over the decades as public transportation systems were either dismantled or never built in the first place.

Consumers of the time readily bought into that model. We are only reevaluating it today in light of its failure modes.

That rule was dumb and unnecessary, but was also not a "pointless regulation", it was not "regulatory capture" by the Big Driveway Cartel, and it definitely wasn't a response to a legitimate need for more parking (again, super wide streets that sat empty). It was just a reflection of the deeply held convictions of an extraordinarily parochial population.

Problem is, that person doesn't exist in most places where required.