Cocaine is illegal because it is addictive.

This is so true. Software that should be simple can become so gnarly because of bad infra. For example, our CI/CD team couldn't get updated versions of Python on the CI machines, and so suddenly we need to start using Docker for what should be a very simple software. That's just an example, but you get the idea, and it causes problems to compound over the years.

You really want good people with sharp elbows laying the foundations. At one time I resented people like that, but now I have seen what happens when you don't have anyone like that making technical decisions.

This is not a new thing. TV monetizes human attention. Tiktok is just an evolution of TV. And Tiktok comes from China which has a very different society. If short-form algo slop video can thrive in both liberal democracies and a heavily censored society like China, than it's probably somewhat inevitable.

I'm not sure it's environmentalism. It's efficiency. From the article.

> In richer countries, where farming has become more efficient, deforestation has slowed or even reversed

You simply don't need as many people living in villages, farming marginal land. New England re-forested because the land was never that good for farming, and it made a lot more sense to work in factories.

I worked at a large insurance company and this was definitely the approach. There was a website, but you had to call to realistically get almost anything done.

One product manager's big innovation was to completely remove passwords. Every time you wanted to log in, you had reset the password and be sent a link via email. Of course the didn't announce this, so you would be probably spend 20 minutes frantically looking for your password that didn't exist.

Do you have a citation for this?