watters

The second footnote acknowledges that the post is largely tautological.

For plenty of already-in-shape people, the calories expended during the exercise are largely incidental, with the goal of exercise being to enhance or maintain some other property of their physical capacity.

See also:

* DevOps * Microservices * SOA * ACID * Observability

Semantic diffusion, dilution, and drift are endemic in tech because terms are so frequently co-opted by opportunists who want to find a way to sell the concept as a product.

What is interesting is that the first sentence is undermined by the second sentence, which is fairly reasonable compared to the first.

Which specific idea(s) presented do you believe has its merits undermined by this lack of impartiality?

> There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers.

First, yikes.

Also, I'm quite curious about how productivity was measured here.

For a (successful) software business, the work output of developers is highly productive because the marginal cost of selling another copy of the software is so low.

SaaS delivery models may result in somewhat higher marginal costs compared to non-SaaS distribution models, but I'd be surprised to learn that it makes developer work the least productive component of the SDLC.

> For reasons that should be obvious to anyone with a bank account, you really really want both updates to happen, or neither. This is what atomicity guarantees - that the entire transaction will either succeed or fail as a single unit.

So, I understand why this example feels particularly illustrative of the value of transactions, many-if-not-most financial "transactions" can't practically rely on this kind of atomicity for the kind of financial operation depicted.

While it may seem like a small thing, I think authors would do everyone a favor to stop using the "banking transactions, obvs" example.

Would be great to have a feed that was only dogs, tho.

We humans are a bizarre lot.

We build complex systems and environments that alienate and marginalize massive groups of people and then, rather than recognizing that as a failure of the system, we frame the problem as one of individual responsibility to adjust.

But, the system probably feels like it is still working working well enough for the folks running the WSJ to continue their support of it, so we get articles like this.

Very large household-name companies often own or otherwise control significant amounts of commercial real estate, which sit on the company's balance sheet.

If commercial real estate in general loses value, the value of these assets is also reduced, which will eventually be reflected on their balance sheets.

Even in cases where the real estate is leased rather than owned, the future rents owned are liabilities that are also a part of the companies' financial reports. If the demand for commercial real estate goes down, they won't be able to fully offset liabilities by subletting or selling their commercial real estate, which will show up as losses, write offs or write downs.

Hence my choice of phrasing: "benefits to results".

There are certainly perceived benefits to management and/or related to real estate interests, including but not limited to: easier observation and suppression of employee organizing, different legal exposure profile as fewer people are casually creating business communication that may later be sifted during legal discovery, propping up commercial real estate investments, etc.

If RTO drove actual, material benefits to results, companies would be explaining RTO policies by connecting those dots.

At this point, I haven't seen a single attempt from any company to offer such a rationale.

We can reasonably infer that such policies are not rooted in any evidence-oriented analysis.

It's almost as if the typical contemporary "knowledge work" shop has completely discarded ergonomics, industrial engineering, and library science as potential sources of wisdom about how to construct effective socio-technical systems because they don't have a clear, straight-line, first-order effect on profit.

> The levels “Very little of the time”, “Some of the time”, and “Most of the time” were collapsed into a single level—“Hybrid”. “Not at all” was recoded as “Do Not Work from Home” and “All of the time” was recoded as “Work from Home Only”.

Imagine you had a 5 increment rating system that was 1–5 stars. Then, to interpret the data, someone decided that 2-,3-, and 4-star ratings were all equivalent.