The need to service those debts has further knock-on effects, such as reducing food budgets, leading to decreased nutrition, higher levels of stress, etc, etc.
In short - it's nothing close to the whole story, but there are real effects here, with real consequences, that we've known about for a long time.
The "Vimes Boots" formulation of it may be a bit glib, but there are still plenty of people who have never thought about any of this that it could a useful starting point for. /4
To pick one extremely important example - financial services. For example: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-waste-stream-of-consumer-finance/ - the system is structured in such a way as to keep poor people in the poverty trap in a way that simply doesn't happen for middle class people.
They are simply more profitable when kept in the trap - and the banks and credit card companies don't give a damn how much human misery and damaged mental health is caused by that squeezing out of that last bit of profit from desperate people. 3/
@1c2c6506 Interesting. I don't suppose for a moment that they have a repro version of the app that they can open so we can have a proper dig about in it?
Tbh ~30-40 Pg calls / request sounds like it might be falling into the "Hibernate Cascade" antipattern.
There are always going to be workloads that are disturbed by the weaving that happens as a result of instrumentation. It's more a question of trying to identify how widespread (or pathological) they are.
@dcb51bf2 The specific point I'm making is that: "People who are in financial circumstances that would allow them to undertake an unpaid internship are already over-represented in the tech industry. The practice only serves to add selection bias in favour of those already benefiting from systemic bias".
No, unpaid internships are *not* fine, and if your defense of them is: "Well, I'm subsidizing my offspring to do one right now", then what you should be doing instead is stopping talking.
Oddbean new post about login | logout
Notes by Ben Evans | export