Reading “What happened”

What Happened is a 2017 book by Hillary Rodham Clinton about her experiences as the Democratic Party’s nominee and general election candidate for President of the United States in the 2016 election. I can’t bear reading the whole book, but some passages are quite interesting.  For instance:

 “To make sure we built the most diverse team ever assembled by a presidential campaign, I brought in Bernard Coleman as the first-ever chief diversity officer, made sure women were half the staff, and hired hundreds of people of color, including for senior leadership roles”


That one made me cry and laugh at the very same time.  They are crying that she lost after choosing “the most diverse” instead of “the most effective” or even “somewhat effective” team members. “L” is for Logic.  But it’s a real trend in some societies.  I still vividly remember some companies that chose engineers according to their ability to be politically correct in their messages.
– Do you know how to build a bridge?
– No, but I understand the importance of equality for transgenders.
– You are hired!

It’s very funny to me that some people don’t see the relation between
- “We started the first presidential company in the world with positive discrimination for the team”
and
- “We lost badly.”

What do we need? It's obvious:  more positive discrimination. We just didn't have it enough.

Do you think it’s possible to have success if you form your team not by their qualification but by other factors?

The cost of your mistake

I got a new project recently that related to money transaction and conversions. And of course during the first week of working, I have already made a lot mistakes.  What is bad about those mistakes for me is that because we don’t have a “staging” environment, and I have to work with real “production” cases, every mistake I make is a financial loss to the company – how much will they cost the company?

It sounds like a very broken design, doesn’t it? I went to the boss to clarify that and got the answer that it’s better for the company to have some losses now in order to deliver new features faster.  This is a new mindset for me.  I am going this way now, but I can’t shake a feeling of remorse when I make a mistake.  After I made a new one last week that caused more loss than the salary they’re paying me, I felt uncomfortable again and still it seems that nobody cared.  I did a little bit research about “the price of mistakes”.

I understand that in surgery the cost of a mistake can be much different that in my humble vocation, so I limited my research to “program code mistakes”, and this is what I found:


1.     4 June 1996 $370 000 000 caused by an integer overflow error
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_(spacecraft)

2.    3 December 1999, Mars Polar Lander. $328 000 000 caused by an uninitialized variable

3.    There are a lot of such stories in the aerospace and flight industry (50+ cases), so I tried to find other areas, and it was easy.

4.    Pensions and welfare: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3235394.stm
5.    American electricity blackout in 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
6.    Medicine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

The last one is especially terrible in my opinion. Patients received more radiation then prescribed due to bad software.  I don’t know why, but this is more intimidating to me than the rocket crash.

The idea that something can slowly kill you because of an obtuse programmer is especially scary because everything nowadays is controlled by computer programs.

I wanted to comfort myself about my mistakes with this research, but it looks like I made things even worse. Now I am glad that I don’t write code for hospitals and that all my mistakes are only about money.  However, now I’ve trust in anyone’s else code.

Have you run into bugs that influenced your life?

Strange and posh type of coffee: kopi luwak

When I was in Vietnam once in a restaurant I saw ridiculously high price for  a cup of coffee. I was surprised, and asked a waiter why this is so. She answered me  it’s “Kopi Luwak”. At that moment this explanation didn’t help me much, but it did a few days after I had a chance to visit a local farm that produces this kind of coffee.
It was fun indeed.

So the reason is that they have a lot of  special animals, called

“palm civets” or something like that. They feed them coffee beans, and then after a cycle, they collect these partially digested beans for future coffee production. There is a special cult about this process. It costs almost as much as gold, but I was warned that there are a lot of counterfeit products.

Frankly, I was not too eager to taste it, but I managed. I also bought a big pack of this coffee for my friends (they asked me before my trip), but I still didn’t understand why they asked me for that. I was not impressed to put it mildly, but it made me think about the market of posh products in general.

It seems to me that people like to pay for special characteristics even if they result in worse products afterwards. I have visited many restaurants in my life and tasted many different things, but  I still think that the best products were just simple, fresh and ordinary dishes. Never in my life have I found something great in posh restaurants besides white cloth-tables and silverware.

As for me, the same thing happened with kopi luwak — over-complicated process, ridiculous price, and pretty average result at the end.

Would you like to try such coffee?
Do you agree with my conclusion?

Old New Year

On the night of Jan 14 we celebrate Old New Year in Russia.

How can the New Year be old? It's simple if you are in Russia.

The trick is that before 1918 in Russia we used the Gregorian calendar, which differs from the Julian calendar. It is shifted by two weeks.

Jan 1 of the Julian calendar is Jan 14 by  the Gregorian calendar.

I like standardization, and I am proud that we made the change, that we haven't chosen to create a mess with different standards like with miles, kilometers, liters and pints.

But some people didn’t like that shift at that time, and they continued to celebrate New Year by the Gregorian calendar.

It was called New Year by Old style or Old New Year for brevity.

Since we like any reason for celebration, people started to love the traditional New Year and it ha become our new tradition.

How do we celebrate it? Well, it's kind of the same New Year, but a lighter version.
When the holidays are almost over, and we are getting ready to get back our duties, celebrating the Old New Year is kind of the final point in that holiday's journey.

Despite all that, it is still an "unofficial" holiday, and I have no idea why.

If something is widely common and exists for 100 years, in my opinion it’s time to admit it officially, even if it’s strange.

Do you have something like that? Do you celebrate something twice?