To create noblemen and kings While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. Henry David Thoreau, Walden societycivilization
Can maintenance save civilisation? An Article by Tim Harford timharford.com Maintenance is a low-status affair: you can confess to being unable to change a tyre in a way that you would never confess to being unable to name a play by Shakespeare. …We understand the expertise of janitors, plumbers and mechanics, and we suffer mightily in their absence, yet somehow we take them for granted. We take for granted, too, the most basic maintenance of all — preparing food, washing clothes, changing dirty nappies. Nobody would boast at a dinner party or on a first date about doing any of this, yet it is essential. …This is about more than breaking bridges and breaking bike chains. There is a missed opportunity here to find something rather wonderful in maintenance. repaircivilization
The Thing-deadline calculus Now, I understand deadlines. I understand that the plane will take off whether or not I’m on it, or the importance of beating the holiday retail rush, or that "the show must go on". It is perfectly clear to me how people use timekeeping technology to coordinate social activity. It’s actually quite remarkable when you step back and look at it. But, over the years, I have observed that there is a difference between those examples and the ones around the delivery of Things, which tend to be completely arbitrary. When you wrap an arbitrarily complex endeavor up in a neat launch date, the goal seems to be more about coercing the people beneath you to absorb the overhead of all the details you left out—that or sweating it yourself. As a tool for coordinating human activity, I have come to believe that the Thing-deadline calculus is, considering more sophisticated alternatives, unnecessarily crude. Dorian Taylor, On the "Building" of Software and Websites Deadlines are bullshitNever enough timeDriving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake planningproducts