I think it's worth linking to the original Agile Manifesto[1], because that's pretty much all the consensus you're ever going to get on what's "agile" and "what's not".
Lewis is right that most of these principles were described before the manifesto, but I can vouch for the near-impossibility in many contexts of convincing anyone who wasn't a coder (and a lot of coders too) why these might be sensible defaults.
For every person burned by a subsequent maladaptive formalization of these principles, there was someone horribly scarred before the agile manifesto by being forced to go through a doomed waterfall process.
Ask anyone with 30 years in the industry whether "agile", for all its problems, was a force for good or bad, and the answer will be an emphatic Good!
If nothing else, it gave us ammunition to argue against the impossibility of delivering a fixed thing in a fixed amount of time - which was the universal view from senior stakeholders of what competent software delivery looked like.
No, you are not going to get that consensus, because middle management and hire ups don't want to know what agile actually means, but want to continue believing, that the processes they impose are agile, and they have probably never even seen that page. In a truly agile team, the team takes many if not all of their work and responsibilities, so that even the jobs of PMs and low middle management would be on the line. As we know it is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their income depends on not understanding it.
I worked at EFF during that time, and this is a weird story that I’ve not heard before. EFF doesn’t let interns write blog posts (at least not with a lot of supervision) and certainly wouldn’t sack someone for getting something wrong — partly because that’s a terrible lesson to teach someone just starting out in law or activism, but also and more pragmatically it risks being a PR nightmare.
I concede it might be a mangled version of some other incident — EFF’s network neutrality policy during that time was /extremely/ subtle and we often struggled to express it without annoying some colleague organization or another. Do you remember any other details, or link to coverage of it?
yes it was this, not the EFF but the Trump admin, it was a surprisingly normal and level headed policy take, and I was pleasantly surprised, but then it turned out it wasn't their official stance, it was removed and replaced with a statement and stance that was nearly the opposite. But for the life of me I can't find it again, but I swear I didn't imagine it.
So, I knew Aaron and I definitely would not presume to predict what he would have thought, but I’d point out there is a sizeable state space where he should never have been prosecuted, and scraping by others including large commercial companies should not prosecutable on the same grounds.
I repeat what Aaron’s friends and lawyers said at the time: we were going to fight that case, and we were going to win.
So, I was interested in this statement, and looked into it barely, and on one side, its conclusions were replicated in a number of other papers[1] (despite the headlines, three years after its publication, of a simple calculation error)[2]. I'll state that neither of these points are a slam-dunk if you're a member of one political side or another. If you're a believer in austerity, you'll look at the corroborating studies; if you think that was a bad policy choice, you can argue that they're all junk science, pushed out by supporters of the status quo.
I suspect what it narrowly shows though is that this isn't the same category of error as what's being discussed here.
I think one of the things that goes unmentioned in these discussions is that while the US gets a lot of attention for this kind of activity, it has also (historically) been in the forefront of criminalization and prosecution. I may be wrong, but don't know of any other jurisdiction that prosecuted insider trading before the Eighties, and the US has had a pattern of investigating and regulating this since the 30s.
I don't think that this is a particular form of exceptionalism, beyond the US having a longer tradition of widespread, retail-owned shares, and law-making around that fact.
But sometimes I wonder when people are criticising the US as a culture, they're often choosing as the baseline that should be respected standards that were also defined in a US cultural context. What this sometimes means is that in internal US culture these points are seen as something that is heavily discussed, because there was a point where it was democratically decided and therefore could be undecided in the same way, like corporate personhood, or money-as-speech. In the case of the criminalization "insider trading", there is lively debate about whether this is actually a "good thing". That can sound horrific externally, because of course insider trading is a bad thing. But someone decided to make that a bad thing, and -- for historical accident reasons -- the edges of that debate was largely defined within the US.
(This is mostly just barely-informed speculation: sometimes issues like this emerge in international fora, or start in another culture and quickly spread. But the cultural and financial dominance of the US in the last century or so really makes these things often a point of debate in American terms, and a fixed point elsewhere. I speak here as an immigrant to the US and also someone who is dipped in global policy work, rather than someone who is stating this as a good or a bad thing.)
A lot of the United States historical influence and soft power comes from it being a nation of rules and laws. The credibility of the country provided a perception that it was a stable place to store value (investment in treasuries, greenbacks, etc). When the government is facilitating insider trading out in the open (repeatedly), we’re losing a lot more than money due to fraud.
What parts of it were confusing? I think science fiction can be confusing if you haven’t read a lot of it, because part of its art is to try and set the scene in as compact way as possible, with a combination of cues that you can work out from their context or by reference (like “laminate” and “squarely” — yes, I had to look it up), and some are the puzzles that the rest of the story will resolve (who/what is Julia? What do they want?)
It’s ok if it’s not your thing. It’s like an emotional crossword puzzle.
This is fascinating; thank you for building it. (I also enjoyed watching the flurry of visitors as soon as my Let's Encrypt certificate got assigned. It's a Dark Forest out there!)
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