Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE CONVERSATIONS I’VE HAD A THOUSAND TIMES (funny) (software d

    ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE CONVERSATIONS I’VE HAD A THOUSAND TIMES

    (funny) (software development)

    Employee: Can we have coffee?

    Curt: Sure. I love coffee. 🙂

    … … …

    Employee: So, how come you keep adding features? We’ll never get done!

    Curt: You’re confused. It’s not that I add features. The feature list has been on the wall for a six months. It’s constant except for very minor changes.

    Employee: (curious expression)

    Curt: It’s just that I parcel them out one or two at a time. Lots of states of ‘done’ that way. And I can kill something early or try something else. It also stops ‘grand plans’ that take forever to implement.

    Employee: (awareness)

    Curt: The only feature I know that I added is the one you told me to. (teams) The only feature I postponed is the one you told me to (team estimating). In fact, I’m pretty sure you’ve added more features than I have. (various amazingly brilliant UI ideas.)

    (discussion)

    Curt: I have my own bias: Get to feature complete, then harden the app by refactoring it. But until you’re feature complete it’s all R&D, and the return isn’t there if you’re doing much more than getting to feature complete. Once you’re feature complete, it isn’t a matter of whether you’ll succeed or not. It’s just the cost of error reduction and user experience improvement until you decide to release.

    COMMENT

    Everyone has their own little bias. Mine is money. I want to know money is well spent at all times.

    If I produced this software in the states it would probably take a little longer. But it would cost me something under ten times as much. And that’s money that I don’t have to borrow, get from investors. But it’s also my money. And I’m very careful with my money. 🙂

    Get to feature complete. Prove the theory. If it works at feature complete, then the theory is pretty close. If it goes to market and sells, then the theory is confirmed. It can still be falsified. But at present, the theory tested true.

    But there isn’t a lot of POINT in investing in a theory, and that’s what an application *IS*, until you’ve tested that theory.

    Its just scientific after all..

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-25 10:11:00 UTC

  • There is construction going on across the street on a wonderful old brick buildi

    There is construction going on across the street on a wonderful old brick building that’s being brought up to date. When they aren’t using power tools it’s actually fun to listen to the banter.

    Today, some guy randomly is shouting, in very clear and passionate Russian “Mother F___r!”, on a semi random basis.

    We all laugh every time.

    🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-25 09:22:00 UTC

  • I just really like this meme. Our job as libertarians is not to be the majority

    I just really like this meme. Our job as libertarians is not to be the majority – we cant be. It’s to be intellectual arms dealers to anyone who opposes the totalitarian state. That is a really good meme. It’s a really good meme.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-25 06:40:00 UTC

  • DANIEL KEUHN : OBFUSCATORY LANGUAGE —“The greatest hesitation I have about the

    http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/10/donald-kuehn-none-of-them-along-the-line-know-what-any-of-its-worth-noted.htmlCONTRA DANIEL KEUHN : OBFUSCATORY LANGUAGE

    —“The greatest hesitation I have about the market economy is the wedge between demand and the willingness to pay that is the ability to pay.” —

    Curtd said…

    Hmm…

    (a) What is incorrectly allocated in the structure of production that allows people to desire to consume, but have nothing to exchange?

    (b) It is probably true that if we bypassed the financial system, and inflated the currency, by directly, say, crediting people’s debit cards – as long as it was done equally, that this would increase activity in the economy by redistributing savings and investment that are not moving, to consumers who desire to spend. We’ve been talking about this for a couple of decades now.

    (c) But why is there structural misallocation in the first place, and what misallocations are we creating this way?

    — We are creating poor single parent households. Would this activity increase the rate of creation of single parent households?

    — We are clearly failing at education of our work force compared to the Germans

    — We are clearly transforming old age savings into academic institution equity, and long term student debt, without performing any useful education other than sortition.

    — We are clearly immigrating vast numbers of low wage workers rather than employing our young and old at higher cost, and therefore creating two dependent classes.

    — We are clearly destroying the system of intergenerational cooperation of savings and borrowing, and the information system that goes with it.

    — We are clearly depending upon future anticipated growth, based upon a five hundred years of the spread of anglo absolute nuclear families, accounting, law, money and prices around the world by forcible conquest and unforced competition.

    (d) Instead: WHAT TROUBLES ME IS THE MISALLOCATION OF ACTION, CAPITAL, CREDIT, and POLICY THAT PREVENTS PEOPLE WHO DESIRE TO PAY FROM EARNING SOMETHING TO PAY FOR IT.

    One can use the artful word ‘wedge’ as a means of obfuscation: As OBSCURANT LANGUAGE, in order to obfuscate the underlying CAUSAL RELATIONS. This is what it means to speak as a leftist: using obscurant, and therefore, unscientific language. 🙂

    At least the right’s religious people speak in analogy not obfuscation. 🙂 The left’s religious people simply use obfuscatory language, and artificially select short time horizons so that they can ignore externalities. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-24 19:17:00 UTC

  • Curt Doolittle shared a photo

    Curt Doolittle shared a photo.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-24 13:34:00 UTC

  • NEW MACBOOK PRO : PORTABLE WHOO HOOOO!!! 15-inch: 2.3GHz with Retina display – 2

    NEW MACBOOK PRO : PORTABLE WHOO HOOOO!!!

    15-inch: 2.3GHz with Retina display

    – 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7

    – Turbo Boost up to 3.5GHz

    – 16GB RAM

    – 512GB PCIe-based flash storage

    – Intel Iris Pro Graphics

    – NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M with 2GB GDDR5 memory

    – Built-in battery (8 hours)

    $2,599.00

    NEW MAC PRO: OFFICE WHOO HOOOOOO!!!

    Mac Pro w/ E5 3.5GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5

    Dual AMD FirePro D500 graphics with 3GB each

    16GB 1866MHz DDR3 ECC RAM

    256GB PCIe-based flash storage

    Ports Six Thunderbolt 2, Four USB 3, HDMI 1.4, Two Gigabit Ethernet

    $3999

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-24 13:22:00 UTC

  • MAXIMUM TAXATION? Taxation is by definition immoral. Whereas fees are not. We is

    MAXIMUM TAXATION?

    Taxation is by definition immoral. Whereas fees are not. We issue taxes even in local villages, largely to prevent free riding. We issue taxes under statism for the purpose of empowering the state. And little else.

    The maximum taxation possible is that which maintains the ability of exit from the market and the total reliance on past earnings as a means of maintaining one’s standard of living. If this lottery is removed it will decrease participation in experimentation that is only evident over a decade or more.

    Subtract from this the willingness of people to subsidize that which they disagree with.

    Subtract from this the impact that taxation places on their status signaling ability.

    Subtract from this the trust that their sacrifice is well used by government.

    Subtract from this their current level of economic confidence in the long term.

    That’s pretty much it. Math is pretty easy really.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-24 10:40:00 UTC

  • WHO TOLD ME ABOUT _BOUNDARIES OF ORDER_ AT PFS? (question) Ok, so I have given i

    WHO TOLD ME ABOUT _BOUNDARIES OF ORDER_ AT PFS?

    (question)

    Ok, so I have given it a second pass, and you know it’s just written romantically and worldly, and the whole (damned) justificationism of bringing in correspondence with nature is a useless mess. But honestly, that said, he did, as you’ve told me, do a pretty good job with it.

    It’s still an appeal. I don’t want to make appeals. Appeals are a dead issue for libertarians. Moral diversity means we will forever fall on deaf ears.

    But NECESSITY (they hayekian program, and the Hoppeian program) is something else entirely. It isn’t that we PREFER one thing or another, it’s that prosperity REQUIRES certain things and requires we DON”T DO other things.

    Property is synonymous with morality. HOWEVER, the distribution of rights and rewards from property are determined by the structure of REPRODUCTION. As such, while economic and political thoguth iis NOT POLYLOGISTIC, it is POLYMORAL, because reproductive rights are DIVERSE AND IRRECONCILABLE except through PROPERTY RIGHTS.

    Propertarianism is an evolution over current libertarianism because it has BROADER EXPLANATORY POWER and is not based upon PREFERENCE for liberty, but NECESSITY in balancing scarcity, production, and reproduction by making cooperation between heterogeneous moral codes POSSIBLE.

    ***For all intents and purposes, different family structures render us into behaving as different tribes, if not different species.***

    We have no means of reconciling this difference. Because there are material differences between the gene pools.

    So we must construct political systems, like the market, to allow for heterogenous investment and production, while doing what the market cannot: inhibit our willingness to cooperate because of free riding, privatization, socialization and rent seeking.

    That is the one purpose we must put government to. Because privatizations of commons is indeed a problem that the market cannot on its own solve, at least, solve competitively.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-24 09:57:00 UTC

  • ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF THE ANGLO SAXON ABSOLUTE NUCLEAR FAMILY “The English are d

    ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF THE ANGLO SAXON ABSOLUTE NUCLEAR FAMILY

    “The English are descended from the Germanic conquerors who brought to England the ‘integrated nuclear family,’ in which nuclear families formed separate households, but stayed close to their relatives for mutual cooperation and defense. These people were illiterate, so we have no written records from those times, and we cannot know precisely how they organized their family life. But what we do know for sure is that over time the original Germanic family type developed into the ‘Absolute Nuclear Family,’ or ‘ANF,’ which we have today. It appears that the family type we have now has existed for about a thousand years.” — America 3.0. p51

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-24 05:05:00 UTC

  • PREVALECE OF CORRUPTION : ASIANS AND EDUCATION (low trust society) (corruption)

    http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/asian-immigrants-and-what-no-one-mentions-aloud/CULTURAL PREVALECE OF CORRUPTION : ASIANS AND EDUCATION

    (low trust society) (corruption) (education)

    The author doesn’t take the time to put in the references to the empirical work, but he does talk a bit about Asian performance.

    1) high test scores

    2) hard work for them

    3) pervasive cheating

    4) not matched by college performance.

    5) not matched by performance in real life.

    6) Colleges are discriminating against admission of asians.

    I don’t much care really. Because NORTH EAST asians assimilate and really, except for their slight weakness in verbal skills, they end up as pretty good citizens, behaviorally indistinguishable from us, with all the right status signals. And, if what I’ve read is correct, they lose the pervasive asian corruption fairly quickly. Within a generation or so.

    I wish we could get everyone else to work hard and conform. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-24 03:56:00 UTC