103 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. Tech debt is frequently experienced by developers notonly as a difficult source of friction in their day-to-day technical decision-making, but also as a source of ambiguityabout what types of engineering work their organizations value (Besker et al., 2020; Lee et al., 2023).

      Interesting that this is considered a source of ambiguity. In my experience tech debt feels more like an expression of the type of work organizations value, reducing ambiguity by making concrete how little this kind of work is valued.

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  2. Dec 2023
    1. When the Keynesian settlement was nally put into eect, afterWorld War II, it was oered only to a relatively small slice of theworld’s population. As time went on, more and more people wantedin on the deal. Almost all of the popular movements of the periodfrom 1945 to 1975, even perhaps revolutionary movements, couldbe seen as demands for inclusion: demands for political equality thatassumed equality was meaningless without some level of economicsecurity. This was true not only of movements by minority groups inNorth Atlantic countries who had rst been left out of the deal—such as those for whom Dr. King spoke—but what were then called“national liberation” movements from Algeria to Chile, whichrepresented certain class fragments in what we now call the GlobalSouth, or, nally, and perhaps most dramatically, in the late 1960sand 1970s, feminism. At some point in the ’70s, things reached abreaking point. It would appear that capitalism, as a system, simplycannot extend such a deal to everyone

      How might this equate to the time at which Rome extended its citizen franchise to larger swaths of people and the attendant results which came about? particularly the shift towards an empire versus a republic?

      These seem to have been happening in the case of America with Donald Trump attempting to become a modern day Julius Caesar. To whom is Trump indebted?

    1. The crisis was triggered by King Louis XVI’s attempts to avoid bankruptcy.

      Cause of instability

    1. why do we need 00:24:19 to have economic expansion because there's 300 trillion dollar of debt based on future expansion so if we don't have future expansion that's $300 trillion 00:24:33 worth of debt which isn't going to be repaid entirely which means total financial crisis and so on and so right I say it is baked into the system
      • for: adjacency - debt - growth

      • adjacency between

        • debt
        • growth
      • adjacency statement
        • in the current different of endless growth, debt requires growth to pay off the debt
        • we borrow money to open a new business and have to GROW our market shares to service the debt
        • multiplier millions and billions of times the world over, we have too brief our markets and sell more stuff too post back our loans
  3. Nov 2023
    1. we’re putting the strength of the state’s balance sheet to work for Ohioans

      Ohio's balance sheet is $32.79 billion in the red ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/305339/ohio-state-debt/ ). That's a lot of debt to be setting up "savings accounts" with artificially inflated terms that can only worsen the problem it is supposedly intended to solve.

  4. Oct 2023
    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmita

      During shmita, the land is left to lie fallow and all agricultural activity, including plowing, planting, pruning and harvesting, is forbidden by halakha (Jewish law).

      The sabbath year (shmita; Hebrew: שמיטה, literally "release"), also called the sabbatical year or shǝvi'it (שביעית‎, literally "seventh"), or "Sabbath of The Land", is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah in the Land of Israel and is observed in Judaism.

  5. Jul 2023
  6. Jun 2023
    1. Bei der Frühjahrstagung der Weltbank und des internationalen Währungsfonds ist die Klimakrise ein zentrales Thema. Die Reformvorschläge vor allem für die Weltbank gehen voraussichtlich nicht weit genug, um ärmeren Ländern einen wirksamen Kampf gegen die globale Erhitzung zu erlauben. https://taz.de/IWF-und-Weltbank-auf-Fruehjahrstagung/!5924846/

  7. May 2023
  8. Feb 2023
    1. Collecting does not transform us and always postpones learning and transformation to the future. Collecting creates debt that we promise to pay back in some future that never arrives.

      There's some truth and falsity here...

  9. Jan 2023
    1. you you have to back politicians who are   00:52:41 willing to change this and unfortunately there's  no party that's uh in favor of canceling student   debt or any kind of debt in the united states  because the political parties are subsidized   by the banking in the financial sector so  uh i don't see uh i don't see a way out

      !- Michael Hudson : The realities of debt writedown of any kind - Not pragmatic because no political party will support it because all political parties are subsidized by banking and financial sector

    2. you  see a lot of third world debts that uh if the   third world better countries have to pay uh their  foreign debts under as the world economy slows   down they're going to be subject to austerity to  the world banks and the imf's austerity programs   00:35:01 and they're going to be kept in poverty uh is it  really right that they should be kept in poverty   just to enrich the bondholders of the one percent  the one percent will say yes that's why we're   the one percent so that we can impoverish  other people that's our liberty our liberty   is the right to impoverish other people and reduce  them to dependency uh that will happen if you do   not write down the debts uh it's already happening  in the united states to the student debt uh crisis   00:35:30 where students uh have to pay so much money uh as  they fall behind on their student debts that they   can't afford to take out mortgages to buy homes  uh and you're having the home ownership rates   plunge in the united states that's the result of  leaving the debts in place uh the mortgage steps   uh uh are causing shrinkage so there is no way  to get out of this economic polarization without   00:35:54 a debt write down and that's something that  is too radical and uh uh when we talked about   when i was referring to what china's doing i'm  referring to what it's doing today and tomorrow   about uh the uh real estate company evergreen  uh uh china has a choice is it going to leave   evergreen's real estate debts in place and every  grand uh as a real estate company is two to three   00:36:21 percent of the entire chinese economy if it  pays the foreign creditors and the domestic   one percent of china it's going to impoverish the  uh the employees of evergrand it's going to make   housing prices more and more expensive in china  china has had a debt finance housing boom uh   if you leave the debts in place then uh you're  you're going to impoverish china and obviously   00:36:47 china is going to say i'm we're not going to put  the creditors first we're not going to do what   the west does and say the sanctity of debt service  debts are uh that you owe or sacred uh it's worth   sacrificing the economy it's worth plunging the  economy into poverty just to preserve the wealth   of the one percent i think china's uh is going to  make the opposite decision and say we're not going   00:37:12 to commit political suicide we're going to operate  for it's a socialist economy and when it comes to   debt and credit thank god we have our banking in  the public domain and since the public domain the   people's bank of china is the creditor they can  afford to write down the debt without having any   political backlash because it's cancelling that  so do itself uh which is a great advantage uh and   00:37:38 it's also uh as for the private bond holders uh  it's going to say well sorry bondholders you made   loans to a company that was way over leveraged  uh already uh the american bond rating companies   have reduced their bond rating to chunk so you  knew what you were buying if you continued to hold   bonds that uh fitch and other bond raiders moody's  all say or junk and you lose your money well   00:38:03 you took the risk you got a high rate of  interest now you're you're paying the price   that's how markets work uh and uh that really  uh is the argument and i think uh you have to   uh obviously what i'm suggesting is a radical  step just as you're suggesting of taxing wealth   would require the radical step of closing down  offshore banking centers of simply negating uh if   00:38:28 banks would simply erase all of the deposits  they have from the offshore banking centers from   the cayman islands from from panama from uh from  liberia to all the places that began by to be set   up by the mining companies the oil companies  and then were set up beginning in the 1960s   essentially by the cia to finance  the vietnam war by making america   like england the home for criminal capital  for flight capital all this uh all this flight   00:38:57 capital and the kleptocracy that you mentioned  in russia all this really should be wiped out   and if you leave this capital if you leave this  one percent in place the economy is going to be   sacrificed and shrinking is it worth shrinking  the economy just to leave the one percent in place   and if you challenge them that's pretty radical  that's really what i think marx would say today

      !- Micheal Hudson : debt writedown - At a certain point, Governments of 3rd world countries who are so debt trapped may simply decide to write down the debts and start over - They may reach a point where instead of servicing the debt of the 1%, they decide its not worth it and save their own economies, freeing themselves from World Bank and IMF debt conditions - It's just as radical a move as your suggestion to stop tax evasion by closing down all offshore banks

    3. as long as the system of  of political finance and you know parties and   campaigns and media and think tank you know  are largely controlled by by large wealth   00:29:11 holders you know our collective ability to  change the distribution of wealth and the   you know through through taxation or that  consolation and or what you know whatever   the method is going to be limited so it will take  major political fights and in some cases you know   changing the political rules of the game and the  political institution to to to changes and and   you know the good news is that this has  always been like this or this has always   00:29:39 and and still sometimes you know it has worked  in the in the past but it has worked you know   i mentioned the french revolution you know of  course that's a huge popular mobilization uh also   in the 20th century i mentioned after world war  ii after world war one well let's be clear it's   only because there was a very powerful uh you know  labor movement a socialist movement and communist   counter model in the east which in the end put  pressure uh on the on the uh and you know and on   00:30:09 the in effect and the elite governing elite in in  in the west so that they they they had to accept   a number of decisions you know which which were  limited in their scope but still which transform   the economic and social system in in a very  substantial way as compared to the pre-world   war one and 19th century economic system but it's  only through this enormous political mobilization   00:30:34 and collective organization and you know it will  be the same in in the past

      !- Thomas Piketty : limited ability for real change as long as elites can lobby governments - but in the past, there has been success, as the two cases previously mentioned - so it is possible, but will take just as enormous a political mobilization of the people

    4. as long as you leave banking and credit in   private hands you're going to have banks trading  their product debt and the more debt they create   the more debt service that the borrowers the 99  have to pay the banks in order to obtain a house   00:22:54 or an education or medical care or just to break  even and the more money they pay to the financial   sector the less they have to pay for goods and  services so as the economy polarizes between the 1   and the 99 the economy as a whole shrinks because  more and more of its income is spent not on   production uh and consumption it's spent just on  bit service

      !- Michael Hudson : private banks maximizing debt is the goal - creating lots of loans to create lots of debt is the best way for the private banks to make money - it means the 99% spend all their efforts servicing the debt

    5. to get rid   of monopoly rent you have to return basic key  uh infrastructure to the public domain where   it was before 1980 so that uh basic needs can be  supplied at low prices not uh creating monopoly   for uh the one percent uh and i guess i'm saying  you have to realize that finance has used as well   00:25:12 to take over the economy and this has to  be reversed uh because uh once you have   uh wealth taking the form of uh claims uh  loans and claims on other people's debt   we'll count you up compound interest any rate of  interest is a doubling time and compound interest   is always going to grow faster than the economy's  real growth and the only way to prevent this isn't   00:25:37 simply to lower the interest rate which you've  done today 0.1 uh the only solution is to wipe out   the overall debts that are stopping economic  growth and these debts are the savings of the   one percent the good thing about cancelling debts  is you cancel the savings of the one percent   and as long as you leave these savings in  place there's not going to be a solution

      !- Michael Hudson : reverse privatization and wipe out debt - returning the public infrastructure sold off to companies after 1980 back to the public to get rid of monopolies who gouge the public - cancel all debt so that the savings of the 1% cannot continue compound growth trajectory

    6. there   00:08:24 are two modern episodes which i find particularly  striking in terms of getting that back to zero   or at least you know concerning a big part of  that the french revolution of course is a very   important example so you know this was a time  when the basically the political system did not   manage to make pay those who should have paid  for the public spending which was the nobility   00:08:47 so there was a fight flight toward that because  people who should have paid the tax managed on   how to escape and the solution was the french  revolutions and the fiscal privileges of the   aristocracy the conservation of that through  partisan inflation partly through taxation   and that's sort of one modern episode the other  modern episode which i want to to refer to is of   00:09:12 course uh after world war ii uh you know after  you know in 1945 1950 most rich economies had   public debt which were enormous you know even even  bigger than than today and they made the choices   you know the political choice through you know  very conflictual social movement political fights   00:09:37 in the end the choice was made collectively not  to replace his debt so this happens in various   ways you know inflation in some cases but  but some countries like germany in particular   which is viewed today as as very conservative in  terms of economic doctrine and ideology and which   in many ways is very conservative we'll  see after the election in a few days but   you know it's still going to be quite conservative  probably in any case but in fact after world war   00:10:05 ii developed applied the solution to to  get rid of the debt of the past through   a monetary reform and through progressive taxation  of very high wealth holders in order to in effect   compensate the lower wealth holders for the uh for  the monetary reform and the the loss of links that   was implied by military reform so that in the  end i mean this is not job this was certainly   00:10:33 not a perfect system but as compared to all other  ways of getting rid of past that you know this was   certainly one of the one of the most equitable  or at least or the least unequitable way to   to address the problem and you know i think we  will have we will have other episodes like this

      !- Thomas Piketty : two ways we got rid of debt in the recent past - french revolution - execute the nobility who escaped paying their fair share of debt - post WWII restructuring

  10. Nov 2022
    1. The paradox of information systems[edit] Drummond suggests in her paper in 2008 that computer-based information systems can undermine or even destroy the organisation that they were meant to support, and it is precisely what makes them useful that makes them destructive – a phenomenon encapsulated by the Icarus Paradox.[9] For examples, a defence communication system is designed to improve efficiency by eliminating the need for meetings between military commanders who can now simply use the system to brief one another or answer to a higher authority. However, this new system becomes destructive precisely because the commanders no longer need to meet face-to-face, which consequently weakened mutual trust, thus undermining the organisation.[10] Ultimately, computer-based systems are reliable and efficient only to a point. For more complex tasks, it is recommended for organisations to focus on developing their workforce. A reason for the paradox is that rationality assumes that more is better, but intensification may be counter-productive.[11]

      From Wikipedia page on Icarus Paradox. Example of architectural design/technical debt leading to an "interest rate" that eventually collapsed the organization. How can one "pay down the principle" and not just the "compound interest"? What does that look like for this scenario? More invest in workforce retraining?

      Humans are complex, adaptive systems. Machines have a long history of being complicated, efficient (but not robust) systems. Is there a way to bridge this gap? What does an antifragile system of machines look like? Supervised learning? How do we ensure we don't fall prey to the oracle problem?

      Baskerville, R.L.; Land, F. (2004). "Socially Self-destructing Systems". The Social Study of Information and Communication Technology: Innovation, actors, contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 263–285

  11. Aug 2022
    1. or raising fresh equity

      Why Corporations Supply Preference Shares Companies that offer preferred shares instead of issuing bonds can accomplish a lower debt-to-equity ratio. That allows them to gain significantly more future financing from new investors. A company's debt-to-equity ratio is one of the most common metrics used to analyze the financial stability of a business. The lower this number is, the more attractive the company looks to investors. Additionally, bond issues can be a red flag for potential buyers. The strict schedule of repayments for debt obligations must be maintained, regardless of the company's financial circumstances. Preferred stocks do not follow the same guidelines of debt repayment because they are equity issues. Investopedia

      Preferrred shares can act as poison pills in the event of Hostile Take over

  12. www.janeausten.pludhlab.org www.janeausten.pludhlab.org
    1. interest

      I take this to mean that he wants to get paid too and he's probably being chased by Sir Walters creditors

  13. Jun 2022
    1. Between 1914 and 1980, inequalities in income and wealth decreasedmarkedly in the Western world as a whole (the United Kingdom,Germany, France, Sweden, and the United States), and in Japan,Russia, China, and India, although in different ways, which we willexplore in a later chapter. Here we will focus on the Western countriesand improve our understanding of how this “great redistribution”took place.

      Inequalities in income and wealth decreased markedly in the West from 1914 to 1980 due to a number of factors including:<br /> - Two World Wars and the Great Depression dramatically overturned the power relationships between labor and capital<br /> - A progressive tax on income and inheritance reduced the concentration of wealth and helped increase mobility<br /> - Liquidation of foreign and colonial assets as well as dissolution of public debt

  14. Jan 2022
    1. Mistiming risk is minimal or very short-lived in all debt funds (other than gilt funds) and in hybrid categories other than aggressive hybrid.

      SIP Mistiming risk - debt funds & Hybrid aggressive funds

  15. Oct 2021
    1. These corporate “solutions” end up driving more poverty. Whereas farmers previously relied on their own locally-adapted seeds and natural fertilizers, they are forced to continuously purchase inputs from agribusiness corporations. The expensive chemicals needed to grow these “improved” seeds deplete the soil. As a result, they have to purchase more and more chemicals over time to compensate for the degradation. This is not development — it’s a vicious cycle that grows corporate profits by trapping farmers in debt.

      Cultivating dependency, not just food crops!

  16. Sep 2021
    1. We don't need the threat of repo men to keep you paying your car note – miss a Tesla payment and your car will phone home and lock its doors. When the tow arrives, it will flash its lights, honk its horn and back out of its parking space for repossession.

      The technology in advanced cars like the Tesla can be used for repossessing them. Is this an intended or unintended consequence?

    2. Hudson, meanwhile, is the debt-historian and economist whose haunting phrase "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid," is a perfect and irrefutable summation of the inevitable downfall of any system that relies on household debt to drive consumption.

      With this description, I want to read Michael Hudson's work.

  17. May 2021
    1. “Finance is, like, done. Everybody’s bought everybody else with low-cost debt. Everybody’s maximised their margin. They’ve bought all their shares back . . . There’s nothing there. Every industry has about three players. Elizabeth Warren is right,” Ubben told the Financial Times.

      Pretty amazing statement! Elizabeth Warren is right!

  18. Mar 2021
  19. Nov 2020
    1. this is treated as debt work for of us and that's usually tackled during the first week in the milestone (roughly the first week in the month)
  20. Oct 2020
    1. And if they are a technical debt - how do measure up how much you can borrow so you can afford the repayments?
    2. debt ... which is not a straight bad thing but something that could provide some "short term financing" get us to survive the project (how many of us could afford to buy a house without taking out the mortgage?).
    3. But recently I started to think about default values as some sort of a technical debt ... which is not a straight bad thing but something that could provide some "short term financing" get us to survive the project
  21. Sep 2020
    1. Customers care more about the value our application adds to their lives than the programming language or framework the application is built with. Visible Technical Debt such as bugs and missing features and poor performance takes precedence over Hidden Technical Debt such as poor test code coverage, modularity or removing dead code
    2. In the real world — the time to pay off technical debt is scarce — in most of the time fueled by the fear of the unknown. The management loves to milk the cow but not to change the litter. The developers on another hand avoid modernizing legacy code — to avoid trouble in case anything breaks.
    3. You are in crossroad to make a big decision: keep increasing the tech debt or start the migration before it is too late.
  22. Aug 2020
  23. Jul 2020
  24. Jun 2020
  25. May 2020
    1. AppCache was standardized in the Offline Web applications section of the HTML specification. The standard is formally referred to as application caches. New Web applications should be built around Service Workers. Existing applications that use AppCache should migrate to Service Workers. AppCache access was removed from insecure origins in M70. This intent addresses AppCache usage in secure origins.

      First and foremost, AppCache is a deprecated standard with serious architectural concerns. Second, Chrome's AppCache implementation is a security and stability liability. AppCache is documented as deprecated and under removal in MDN and in the WHATWG standard, and marked as obsolete in W3C’s HTML 5.1. It is incompatible with CORS, making it unfriendly for usage with CDNs. Overall, AppCache was changed in over 400 Chromium CLs in 2018-2019. It has imposed a tax on all of Chrome’s significant architectural efforts: Mojofication, Onion Souping, and the Network Service. The security benefits of the removal are covered under Security Risks.

    1. after nearly 10 years of continuous improvement

      Not necessarily a good or favorable thing. It might actually be preferable to pick a younger software product that doesn't have the baggage of previous architectural decisions to slow them down. Newer projects can benefit from both (1) the mistakes of previously-originated projects and (2) the knowledge of what technologies/paradigms are popular today; they may therefore be more agile and better able to create something that fits with the current state of the art, as opposite to the state of the art from 10 years ago (which, as we all know, was much different: before the popularity of GraphQL, React, headless CMS, for example).

      Older projects may have more technical debt and have more legacy technologies/paradigms/integrations/decisions that they now have the burden of supporting.

  26. Apr 2020
    1. The result, all too often, is that we decide (often unconsciously) that the sweeping change just isn't worth it, and leave the undesirable pattern untouched for future versions of ourselves and others to grumble about, while the pattern grows more and more endemic to the code base.
  27. Mar 2020
    1. The whole point of not relying on debt excessively in normal times is precisely to be able to use debt massively and without hesitation in situations like this.
  28. Feb 2020
  29. Oct 2019
    1. As high-paying jobs and college degrees are becoming far out of reach, and student debt continues increasing drastically, barriers to success are growing so high for most Americans that they are now unsurpassable.
  30. Jun 2019
    1. This year, the Promise’s marketing has emphasized vocational college. Administrators hope marginal students will be less likely to drop out of such programs because they are shorter.

      Vocational programs are great for "Builders", who learn by doing stuff than merely reciting study material.

    2. “The challenges that people bring with them to education because of poverty don’t just go away because we say we’re going to pay for college education,”

      Reminds me of "The boy who couldn't read"

    1. Income share agreements could lower costs and improve outcomes by tying loan amounts to objective judgments of how much the student is likely to earn from her degree. Educational quality could also benefit: Investors would presumably advance students money only for schools that were doing a decent job of teaching them. The risks are that some borrowers could end up paying far more under such a scheme than the current plan and that investors might not lend to students they consider too risky.

      The author's counter arguments to Income Share Agreements are not convincing enough for me. They seem abstract and vague.

    2. His administration cut out the middlemen by killing off the Guaranteed Student Loan Program, the one created under Presidents Johnson and Nixon that relied on banks, in favor of a direct loan program, in which money came from the Treasury. But the government’s loose lending policy, with few questions asked, remained in place. The Obama administration also heavily promoted income-based repayment programs, which set borrowers’ monthly payments at 10% of their discretionary income and then forgave a portion of their debt after 20 to 25 years of payments. This severed the link between the value of students’ education and how much they could borrow, providing a huge incentive for schools to raise tuition, since taxpayers would pick up more of the tab. Enrollment in these programs is one big reason that the government’s costs for student loans are exploding.

      Obama revisions to the original student loan program of 1970s started under Johnson and Nixon.

    3. The voucher system, combined with a lack of government oversight, created perverse incentives: Colleges could raise money quickly by admitting academically suspect students while suffering little or no consequences if their students dropped out and defaulted on loans.
    4. In particular, the system gave colleges an incentive to maximize the tuition they extracted from students and the federal taxpayer by boosting fees and enrollment, which meant relaxing admissions standards.

      Reason for inflation in tuition fees -

      1. Higher Enrollment
      2. Relaxing Admission Standards
  31. Sep 2018
    1. The selloff partly reflects a broader malaise in emerging markets. U.S. interest rate increases and a stronger dollar have lured cash back to America, often at the expense of developing economies. Some countries have come under additional pressure because of U.S. tariffs or sanctions, while economic turmoil in Turkey and Argentina have further fueled investors’ concerns.
  32. May 2018
  33. Apr 2018
  34. Nov 2017
  35. Oct 2017
    1. that we owe what ecologists like David Tilman call an ‘extinction debt’ (Tilman et al., 1994, pp. 65–6)—and that this debt will be paid.

      For more on the concept of 'extinction debt'; read this article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v371/n6492/abs/371065a0.html

      Essentially my understanding of 'extinction debt' refers to species becoming extinct in the future because of things that have happened in the past. Tilman refers to the destruction of a species' habitat as the main cause of that species becoming extinct. Makes absolute when I think about it.

  36. Jul 2017
  37. May 2017
    1. 129 colleges reported average debt loads of more than $35,000 and 49 reported that more than 90 percent of their graduates left with debt.

      This is just ridicuolous.

    2. colleges might have lower average debt levels because they enroll fewer students with the financial need to take out loans.

      This is just wrong to students because in High School who has a job that pays you more than maybe 1,000 a year. I don't understand how colleges think people right out of high school can pay these costs. Parents should have to just lay down money on their kids college education. If college was free then everyone would have a better chance at reaching their dreams and living life without the worry that their tuition might not get paid.

    3. no relief if you hit a rough patch."

      I think this is sad becuase college students shouldn't have t worry about money they should be worried about their studies.

    4. best path to a job and decent pay,

      This is a point that colleges really need to take in consideration because in order for jobs to be filled in society people need to get a college education.

    5. debt
    6. thers topped $30,000.
    7. states had average debt amounts as low as $18,656,
    8. approaching $30,000,
    9. TICAS found nearly 7 in 10 graduating seniors in 2013 – 69 percent – left school with an average of $28,400 in student loan debt,

      I think that this is outrageous becuase students shouldn't have to live life by worrying about student loan debt they accumulated due to the extremely high costs of college.

    10. average amount of student loan debt again
  38. Mar 2017
  39. Feb 2017
    1. Outstanding student loan balances increased by $31 billion, and stood at $1.31 trillion as of December 31, 2016. 11.2% of aggregate student loan debt was 90+ days delinquent or in default in 2016Q42.
  40. Oct 2015
    1. Vast infrastructural projects, including dams and highways—again, all debt-financed—are transforming the landscape.

      "all debt-financed" .... have we thought about the long term effect of this system?

    2. American urban expansion partially steadied the global economy, as the us ran huge trade deficits with the rest of the world, borrowing around $2 billion a day to fuel its insatiable consumerism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

      America's debt is much higher than $2 billion today.. somewhere in the trillions.. is our hunger being fulfilled worth the debt its costing us?

  41. Jul 2015
    1. TECHNICAL DEBT: A lot of new code is written very very fast, because that’s what the intersection of the current wave of software development (and the angel investor / venture capital model of funding) in Silicon Valley compels people to do. Funders want companies to scale up, quickly, and become monopolies in their space, if they can, through network effects — a system in which the more people use a platform, the more valuable it is. Software engineers do what they can, as fast as they can. Essentially, there is a lot of equivalent of “duct-tape” in the code, holding things together. If done right, that code will eventually be fixed, commented (explanations written up so the next programmer knows what the heck is up) and ported to systems built for the right scale — before there is a crisis. How often does that get done? I wager that many wait to see if the system comes crashing down, necessitating the fix. By then, you are probably too big to go down for too long, so there’s the temptation for more duct tape. And so on.
    1. Consumer loans can be a fundamentally risky business even for a company with a reputation for deftly managing risk.

      Apparently it's considered deft to package up risky debt and then have the American and European taxpayers foot the bill when it goes south.

  42. Jun 2015
    1. Instead of thinking of technical debt as yesterday’s work that I failed to do, I think of it as tomorrow’s feature I can have today
    1. a principios de abril el Parlamento heleno lanzó este comité presidido por el politólogo belga Eric Toussaint, quien ya ha auditado otras deudas como la de Ecuador, que derivó en una reestructuración previa negociación con los acreedores. Profesor de la Universidad de Lieja y presidente del Comité para la Anulación de la Deuda en el Tercer Mundo, Toussaint, probablemente urgido por el Ejecutivo de Tsipras ante la agonía que le espera este 18 y 19 de junio en el Eurogrupo de Luxemburgo, presentó en Atenas un documento de 50 páginas del que el plato fuerte se conocerá el mismo día que se reúne el Eurogrupo. Lo que viene a continuación es un resumen de algunos de los puntos principales del texto, que atribuye a la troika (BCE, FMI, Comisión Europea) gravísimas imputaciones.