Being super careful about 'parallel' and 'concurrent' is super, super pedantic and pointless. They are synonyms. If two things are running concurrently, they are running in parallel. If two things are running in parallel, they are running concurrently. These are terrible words to overload with very careful definitions.

When people talk about 'concurrency' using the super careful pedantic definition, they just mean that it's possible to execute code while at the same time blocking on system calls. This isn't some kind of great feat and any language that can't do it is a toy. There is absolutely no reason to act like 'concurrency' using this definition is in any way special or worth even mentioning.

But that's not the point, is it? People get defensive about their favorite languages, so when faced with valid criticisms like "the GIL prevents you from running Python code in parallel" (which is a completely valid and actually pretty huge defect when modern computers have many cores on average) instead of just admitting the deficiency a person can be defensive and respond with stupid lectures about 'concurrency' and 'parallelism'.

If you ever ask Racket-lang folks about threads they will lecture you about concurrency vs parallelism endlessly, it's like a mantra they repeat to avoid realizing there is a problem.

The amount of friction you add to the development velocity has to be proportioned to the potential downsides. A system that shows doctors xray images in the ER cant go down or people might die. A site like twitter can go down and slightly improve the life of its users. It sounds like you are recommending big company super risk averse solutions at a startup, which is just silly. Besides, staging environments never work, for a long list of reasons. You should be recommending continuous integration and a focus on proper unit tests.

Have you ever seen $300MM worth of wood? I specifically said the owner had pumped a huge amount of money in the company.

What they don't realize is that if you put nontechnical people in charge of programmers, nothing will get done.

Evernote could have skipped those VC meetings, skipped renting the huge, insanely expensive office just off Rt. 1 by SF, skipped putting huge, expensive light up Evernote signs on that office, and skipped hiring hundreds of engineers in the most expensive place in the world to hire engineers. They could have rented a small office in a commercial park in San Jose and only hired 10 people and now they would be quite profitable. They could have done this by only taking a few million dollars in funding, and now they wouldn't need an insane valuation to exit.

Re-reading what you posted I have to agree with this.

>Unsurprisingly, this is not a big problem for economic systems that do not reward profit-making.

There are few examples of such systems and they are extremely unstable, there are certainly no examples surviving more than a hundred years or so.

> Witness e.g. the fact that capitalist systems always end up realizing and attempting to solve this problem with a patchwork of laws and regulations.

All systems end up solving all problems with a patchwork of laws and regulations, except the problems that go away by themselves, or the problems that are not addressed at all.

> But the problem of social benefit being misaligned specifically with profit-making is very much a quintessentially capitalist problem.

Again, this is just a tautology. Above you effectively define capitalism as the system that rewards profit-making. So any feature of any system that is specific to profit making can only exist in capitalism in the structure you set up, so it's not a meaningful claim at all.

> Also, consider that your comments about psychology are mostly comments about your own biases and value systems.

No, this is simply not the case. If you think that mammals don't inherently have a concept of personal property you should see how my dog reacts when the cat is sleeping in her bed. We have to spend countless hours teaching children to share, not because it is natural for them, but because what is natural for them is not adaptive to life in a society. Our social structures have evolved much faster than our biology.

You might say "what about slavery", and you would be correct, except that this makes my point perfectly. It was illegal to teach a slave to read, at a time when the only media was newspapers and the written word. Why did they have to prevent slaves from having access to media? Because the system was so unnatural to human psychology that it could only persist while there was no media whatsoever.

So talking about 'media' in an environment besides 'capitalism' doesn't even make sense.

So much this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

What is reported is decided based entirely on what will hold the most attention for the advertisements. If media outlet attempts to act according to any other rule they are displaced by one which will maximize eyes on advertisements. (This is much like politicians who base every decision on getting more votes against politicians doing anything else.) The exception to this rule is when the media is directly used to further other interests of the large corporations which own it.

God help us if this isn't satire.

I don't have a CS degree and I'm fairly well versed in philosophy. I suggest you take a closer look at your assumptions, it may be that you can't get to the truth entirely by quoting Gould.

Frankly it astonishes me that you don't accept that income is more correlated to intelligence today than it was when a large percentage of the population were slaves, or when people were legally bound to the land they lived on? Are you just disagreeing with everything I say out of reflex?