jasoncwarner
commented
4 years ago I have two I think quite a bit about.
The first is that we as a society, though particularly the United States (my home country) is ok with poverty and literally no societal safety nets.
The second is 'regulation is bad' as a default statement.
The past few years have taught us a lot about a lot, but we don't seem to be learning, or perhaps we are learning too slowly. The tribal and feudal nature of humans comes out as we back in to our respective camps and throw stones at each other over facile caricatures of various arguments.
It's unthinkable to me, having lived in and experienced both Australian and Canadian systems, that the United States has not already adopted some form or universal healthcare more akin to those countries. Worse, the arguments against it feel so, well, basic and tribal.
I think/hope we'll have moved to some rational societal safety nets and universal healthcare in 50 years and our future selves will be utterly stunned it took us so long. We know this to be the case currently if we simply ask people their perceptions of the US who live in Australia, Canada or the UK.
The second is about regulation, particularly regulation when it comes to companies.
Regulation is 100% needed to keep a modern society running, safe, healthy, growing, and evolving. Any argument otherwise is, simply, intentionally misleading or uninformed. The argument shouldn't be about "less regulation", but a completely different mechanism or system. We need regulation. Absolutely 100% need it. What we also want is growth, innovation, and the ability to make money free of constraints.
I think we'll have to live with some constraints. Those constraints are what give us the safety. And I think we need to find a new path forward as a society that keeps our baseline and allows the upside. I don't know what this looks like but what we have today feels like a binary switch (more regulation/less regulation) and the arguments don't work.
We already know this in tech. We want both safety and speed in our development processes, but we don't want absolute safety (which would take all computers offline and we never deploy anything) and we don't want reckless speed (which would mean zero controls on our code, pipelines, deployments, no sign offs, no production monitoring etc etc etc). We understand the spectrum here and try to find the optimal balance for ourselves.
We need this "safety and speed" but for humans and society.
So it's not about "regulation bad" or "regulation good", it's about embracing regulation as necessary and finding the minimal implementation to support our society.
I think of this as process. You don't want capital 'P' Process to creep into your company so much that it becomes a bureaucracy, but you also don't want any process what so ever. You literally want to Goldilocks your process and get it just right. Same with regulation.
We need to find 'speed with safety' and 'safety at speed'. There's an optimal point for this as a society. We haven't even begun to explore it.
There are these things, which appear to us so obviously wrong from today's perspective, but they were still very much believed in at their time. Women's rights are one example. Not that long ago it was common thinking that women should not have the rights to do the same jobs as men or not have the right to vote. From today's perspective this appears to be very wrong.
What of what we find right today will we lough about with our grand-children as ridiculously wrong in 50 years (or any other time span you prefer)?