Cool thing about pendulums: The time it takes for one to swing forward and backward—the period—won’t change, no matter how wide it swings. If it’s got a lot of energy, it’ll swing farther and faster, but the period will still be the same. This is what mechanical clocks take advantage of to keep time. That period ends up being driven by two things, and two things only: the length of the pendulum and gravity.
Legacy code is often defined as "code that makes more design decisions than the team working on it". Could we define a legacy process as "one that makes more decisions on how a team functions than the team itself"?
In 1966, the economist Raymond Vernon outlined the five stages of any important product’s life cycle: introduction, growth, maturity, saturation, and decline. During the first three stages, production is clustered near where the product was invented. By the time a product enters the latter two stages, it is almost always produced elsewhere or supplanted by technological change.
Lyndon Johnson (who had allied with white supremacists earlier in his career, before embracing civil rights) recalled this divide-and-conquer tactic: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Throughout history, we see again and again conservative elites who underestimate a populist strongman, thinking they can use him as a mere figurehead without ceding power. They are almost always proven wrong.
"This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others." What's the answer? "It's simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus."
