FailForward @FailForward@qoto.org

# Pain Is Inevitable; Suffering Is Optional cont.

> When it comes to how we respond to physical and emotional pain, we have a choice
> -- [Psychology Today](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/some-assembly-required/201401/pain-is-inevitable-suffering-is-optional)

> Suffering in general, as well as specific to chronic pain, is a function of imbalances in physical, mental, emotional, and/or spiritual functioning.

> Suffering is both a cause and an effect of the catastrophic cognitions and distressing emotions

> For people with chronic pain, there is a direct correlation between negative thinking and the level of pain they experience.

> Pain leads to negative thoughts/self-talk/beliefs lead to feelings of frustration/anger/anxiety/fear/sadness/depression/hopelessness lead to suffering leads to muscle tension and stress lead to more pain leads to increased negative thoughts/self-talk/beliefs lead to increased frustration/anger/anxiety/fear/sadness/depression/hopelessness leads to greater suffering, and so on. The longer such a cycle continues, the more out of balance a person becomes.

> Suffering can be modified when people become consciously aware of this chain reaction and learn how to respond differently to their pain.

# Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional

> “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.”
> -- Haruki Murakami, [What I Talk About When I Talk About Running](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2475030)

# Wicked Game

* [Daisy Gray's cover](https://youtu.be/L4VU-AwxzSY)
* [London Grammar cover](https://youtu.be/Wo80bXyEbkE)
* [Chris Isaak's original](https://youtu.be/4vKsSGyQf-M)

# Make Boring Plans

https://skamille.medium.com/make-boring-plans-9438ce5cb053

A recent blog post continuing the trope of _boring is good_. This time it moves a bit away from technology into team management and tech team processes. I like this shift, it well complements the [choose boring technology piece](https://qoto.org/@FailForward/105618393533273455).

## Novel Technology Deserves Boring Plans

> When we don’t attend to the boring parts by making our plans predictable, the interesting parts turn into extra stress on top of the overwhelming anxiety of juggling these moves.

1. turn vision into boring plans
2. start small
3. execute a change; observe; make notes; learn
7. iterate

## A Strategic Plan Is Obvious and Simple, Even Boring

> Good strategy provides the clarity that enables boring plans.

> Your teams need more than a clear idea of the end state and the hope that smart engineers will inevitably get you there. Plans that are formed around hope are failing plans; hope is not a plan. Plans that change constantly are failing plans. When your plans are constantly changing, it is a sign that you either are making plans that express a certainty you don’t have, or you haven’t done your research to get the right certainty in place. Either of these is a waste of time and an unnecessary stress on the team.

Yes, of course.

Now there's something to add. Once upon a time when I was a junior high-flying and invincible programmer, I would spend nights coding and debugging some project shortly before the deadline, just to beat it into submission and drag it kicking and screaming to the delivery. Proud I was. And so were my managers. I do not know whether they considered it right, or not back then, we all felt somewhat powerless in the face of the unknowns we faced developing something nobody attempted before (because such is the nature of fun projects, right?) and at the same time proud of what we achieved.

Fast forward about one and a half decade later, as a lead of a severly understaffed and underfunded team delivering yet another _interesting_ project (read: with a lot of uncertainty in feasibility and execution). Before the dealdine where you just feel to be a step from everything falling in place and yet everything starts breaking down, my team worked hard a few evenings and nights to beat the project into submission. We of course made it. Then, a couple of days later I apologised to the whole team for all of that and promised to myself never to get into such a situation again (which is of course a fallacy, but one needs to have ambitions, right?).

Apology from a tech lead, or a manager is in order in such a situation, because such situation should never have happened. Because _boring is good_ dictates that to be on time, we shall have worked 9-to-5 and have all the integration and validation test done 2 weeks before the deadline. And we didn't. Because the planning failed. Because the project was not planned to be boring enough.

Keeping learning...

# Choose Boring Technology

A blog post from 2015 which made some rounds back then around HackerNews and keeps regularly resurfacing. I guess this is either obvious, or at leat familiar stuff to anybody long enough in the business to keep a couple of project corpses in the attic together with the corresponding deep scars on one's engineering soul.

https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
and
http://boringtechnology.club/

_"Boring is good. Pick where you chase shiny uplands carefully."_

I internalised this over the years deeply. And I think it paid off well so far. Engaging in a deep/hi-tech endeavour, one needs to focus their energy on that one difficult thing you want/need to do and keep the rest preferrably out of the way. _Boring is difficult enough_, no need to make one's life harder than it is.

And of course the uncertainty:

> The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood.

The metaphor of a very limited number of innovation tokens is very useful.

> 1. Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while.
> 2. Adding technology to your company comes with a cost.
> 3. Choose New Technology, Sometimes.

#engineering

> study indicates that corticosteroids are regarded as one of treatments in the general clinical practice of COVID-19. However, corticosteroid use may be accompanied by increased use of antibiotics, longer hospitalization, and prolonged viral shedding.

# AAAS Science: Three-quarters attack rate of SARS-CoV-2 in the Brazilian Amazon during a largely unmitigated epidemic

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6526/288

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) incidence peaked in Manaus, Brazil, in May 2020 with a devastating toll on the city's inhabitants, leaving its health services shattered and cemeteries overwhelmed. Buss et al. collected data from blood donors from Manaus and São Paulo, noted when transmission began to fall, and estimated the final attack rates in October 2020 (see the Perspective by Sridhar and Gurdasani). Heterogeneities in immune protection, population structure, poverty, modes of public transport, and uneven adoption of nonpharmaceutical interventions mean that despite a high attack rate, **herd immunity may not have been achieved.** This unfortunate city has become a sentinel for how natural population immunity could influence future transmission. **Events in Manaus reveal what tragedy and harm to society can unfold if this virus is left to run its course.**

# How much can a government borrow?

Few days ago, I read a write-up titled [No one knows how much the government can borrow](https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/no-one-knows-how-much-the-government)

The authors basically argues the following:
1. _How much can the government (US presumably) safely borrow?_ is an important question.
2. It seems that _no one knows the answer to this question_ as there seems to be an acute lack of research/literature on the topic. The author says there's quite some literature on historical cases of country defaults, as well as how countries ot out of hyperinflation, but little on what _actually triggers a default/hyperinflation_.
3. The author finds a paper which finally sheds some light on the topic and the main finding is that _hyperinflation episodes tend to be preceded by several years — maybe 2 to 12 years — in which inflation is high but not yet “hyper”._
4. One of the very interesting takeways was that Japan [In 2019, Japan's debt reached 223% of GDP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_Japan) and as of 2020 might as well be above [250% GDP](https://worlddebtclocks.com/japan), yet it somehow does not yield a state's default on its obligations.

Now I am not an economist (moreover, I am rather suspicious of that discipline in general), but this topic interests me. The other day, I had a conversation with a friend who is very worried about the public debt to GDP ration of Italy and how it can negatively affect EU, Eurozone and specifically northern-EU countries (because they will pay for the lazy Italian pensions, right?). So the question arises: **How much debt/GDP can Italy afford? Where is a breaking point? And what options different stakeholders in the game will have once a default of Italy is triggered?**

Since in the news everybody has an opinion on this, I asked around the Intertubes and among my smart friends, naively thinking that this must be a well researched topic in that high profile discipline. After all, maybe I am suspicious of economists, but I do treat most of their work with high respect. Well, my inquiries yielded nothing useful.

So here I am asking for pointers to useful literature on the topic. **_What do we know about how much a country like Italy can borrow before it ends up in trouble?_**

# Gordon Lightfoot/The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

> Does anyone know where the love of God goes
> When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
> -- [Gordon Lightfoot/The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vST6hVRj2A)/[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Edmund_Fitzgerald)

#music

# Roxette /7Twenty7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lxTKIWILOc

Somewhat underappreciated high energy oldie from 90's.Coding soundtrack.

#music

# Song for a Winter's Night

1. [Gordon LIghtfoot's great original](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRIlTvYp0ok)
2. [Sarah McLachlan's beautiful cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbgfXp5M02M)

Yes. Good for a winter's night.

# Versions of Jolene

1. [Dolly Parton's original](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0eeSoU35wM)
2. [Miley Cyrus - The Backyard Sessions cover ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOwblaKmyVw)
3. [The BossHoss ft. The Common Linnets - Jolene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdsHb7mnD-Q)

All good in its own right. I keep getting back to this song and its many covers over years.

#music

In contrast to
> May you live in interesting times
> -- [Chinese curse (allegedly)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times)

> Boring is good.
> -- me

[Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 6 years in the industry - Blogomatano](https://chriskiehl.com/article/thoughts-after-6-years)

Mostly obvious to anybody long enough in the business. Still refreshing that somebody took time to put it together for later reference when a junior team member comes up with their "next great idea they can't let go".

Twitter thread slowly documenting the many small Brexit damages as they accumulate:

https://twitter.com/rdanielkelemen/status/1348964732104007680

Some of those are teething problems, but many are structural. Solutions to many would need treaties re-negotiation, so they are probably about to stick for a longer while.

> The human heart is a mystery, capable of endless expansion.
> -- [Mariella Frostrup/The Guardian Lifestyle column](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jan/24/the-idea-of-having-a-baby-scares-me-what-if-my-child-is-horrible-mariella-frostrup)