This is definitely an old school “one thing happens after another “ adventure. Barely any character, flat world, events piled on each other. The lean style of a good short story but… a lot
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30% complete! Matt K has read 6 of 20 books.
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Matt K quoted The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley
Content warning Plot reveal
From these conversations, Barrent learned that the grim-faced guards were human beings, just like the prisoners on Omega. Most of the guards didn't seem to like the work they were doing. Like Omegans, they longed for a return to Barth.
— The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley (Page 93)
Matt K commented on The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley
Matt K started reading How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra
Matt K started reading The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley
Matt K reviewed How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg
Why big things don't get done
4 stars
If the title is a question, Brent has collected data across thousands of large projects and found an answer that he reveals early. Big things get done over budget, late, and deliver less value than people expected. Or they don't get done. For the most part. Not by a little bit, either - big things fail by a lot. In a database of "16,000 projecgts from 20-plus different fields in 136 countries" he finds that "99.5 precent of projects go over budget, over schedule, under benefits, or some combination of these."
And it shouldn't be this way for big things. These are HUGE EXPENDITURES. Stuff like dams, nuclear power plants, healthcare.gov, and similar massive projects that people depend on succeeding. There should be lots of incentives to get it right.
Brent explores why this happens over and over again. He doesn't duck the question, he has real answers, like:
- Many …
If the title is a question, Brent has collected data across thousands of large projects and found an answer that he reveals early. Big things get done over budget, late, and deliver less value than people expected. Or they don't get done. For the most part. Not by a little bit, either - big things fail by a lot. In a database of "16,000 projecgts from 20-plus different fields in 136 countries" he finds that "99.5 precent of projects go over budget, over schedule, under benefits, or some combination of these."
And it shouldn't be this way for big things. These are HUGE EXPENDITURES. Stuff like dams, nuclear power plants, healthcare.gov, and similar massive projects that people depend on succeeding. There should be lots of incentives to get it right.
Brent explores why this happens over and over again. He doesn't duck the question, he has real answers, like:
- Many projects start without defining why they need to happen. Without a defined why, decisions aren't always steering to the north star and not everyone will have the same vision.
- People act too early and don't plan well before they get started. He goes into how to do that better - pointing out how Pixar did it really well with low stakes small versions.
- When people get started early, they get delayed on every new emergency, so it takes longer than expected - and every day late is a chance for a new unexpected incident or emergency. Fast is good once you have a tight plan.
- People estimate poorly because they think their project is special instead of finding a good match of things that have been done before.
- People lie about the costs so they can use sunk costs to demand more funding when they exceed the budget. (Robert Caro describes how Robert Moses did this repeatedly in The Power Broker). Some "estimates aren't intended to be accurate; they are intended to sell the project."
- The team doesn't have enough experience so they can't anticipate that similar problems will show up as happened on previous similar projects. If you've never built an underground train before, you won't know to keep replacement parts for the digging machine ordered in advance.
The stories are numerous and detailed in here. I was also pleased by how many echoes I found with my other reading. I'd read about the building of the Pentagon and the chaos of the the early building of it. So much was done so fast, but so much had to be redone. I'd listened to the 99pi/Cautionary Tales episode about the building of the Sydney Opera house and how it ruined the architect, who fled the country and never saw it completed. I'm reading Robert Caro's "The Power Broker" and it's a great peek behind the scenes to see how and why the author thought his 8 years of research/writing would only take a year.
This book was a big eye-opener for me, articulating things my experience had turned into instincts. I was able to use it before I even finished, referring engineers I work with to find "reference projects" to figure out timelines instead of doing the same things that didn't work for us and don't work for anyone else.
If you do things that take longer than a month, this is a pretty valuable book to read. If you do things that are new or haven't been done before, it's VERY interesting. I'm going to go on about this a lot to other folks about it.
Matt K quoted The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro
And they partied on a scale the New World had seldom seen, outdoing themselves with swimming pools bearing thousands of orchids, diamond tiaras for lady guests, cigarettes wrapped, and designed to be smoked, in hundred-dollar bills, until an awed America named the North Shore "The GoldCoast."
And if their displays of wealth were awesome, so were their displays of selfishness. The robber barons intended to keep their world for themselves.
— The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro (Page 11)
Just absolutely reviling these people, setting us up to side with Moses.
I have a feeling Caro comes back to this - I know he will show us that after beating the powerful Moses is not going to shy away from turning his power on the poor that he considers beneath the value of his aesthetic
Matt K quoted The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro
the men who, building their empires on the toil of millions of immigrant laborers, had kept wages low, hours long, and had crushed the unions. Their creed was summed up in two quotes: Commodore Vanderbilt's "Law? What do I care for law? Hain't I got the power?" and J. P. Morgan's "I owe the public nothing."
— The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro (11%)
I love what Caro is doing here. The antagonists to Moses are real SOBs.
We get to understand how they get the land that will be stolen back from them. The devil fighting the devil. And the outcomes are the beautiful parks I get to go to.
Matt K wants to read The Kingdom of Copper by S. A. Chakraborty
Matt K finished reading How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg
Wow - the simple concepts here are really powerful and obvious when laid out like this. Loved to see mentions of other things I've learned or am learning about, like the construction of the Pentagon building, Robert Caro's writing of The Power Broker, the Sydney Opera House construction, the Pixar process and then see it broken down into issues of poor estimation, lack of a reference class for estimation, starting too soon and lack of modular small pieces - spending too long in Long Arcs rather than little loops of iteration. This book rang like a bell for me.
Matt K replied to Sally Strange's status
@SallyStrange ugh! I heard about this from an episode of This American Life and it was mind-blowing
Matt K commented on How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg
Matt K reviewed The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik
A Golden Ending
4 stars
This is the conclusion of Naomi Novik's Scholomance series. In the first two, El gets to realize she's not alone, she's connected. She realizes she needs help and that when she works with others, she can do more than she can alone. Her school learns the same. Massive battles are fought, huge sacrifices are made. El has grown powerful and early on was offered a place in an Enclave - which used to be her childhood goal. In the world of the Scholomance wizards are delicious to monsters. That's why they don't just rule everything. There are two ways to get the power for a spell - a hard way and an easy way. The easy way is.. dark. And that darkness makes monsters. And those monsters love to eat wizards. Wizard children are especially delicious - that's what drives the creation of a school for wizard children where it's …
This is the conclusion of Naomi Novik's Scholomance series. In the first two, El gets to realize she's not alone, she's connected. She realizes she needs help and that when she works with others, she can do more than she can alone. Her school learns the same. Massive battles are fought, huge sacrifices are made. El has grown powerful and early on was offered a place in an Enclave - which used to be her childhood goal. In the world of the Scholomance wizards are delicious to monsters. That's why they don't just rule everything. There are two ways to get the power for a spell - a hard way and an easy way. The easy way is.. dark. And that darkness makes monsters. And those monsters love to eat wizards. Wizard children are especially delicious - that's what drives the creation of a school for wizard children where it's considered acceptable that merely most of each class dies. So, of course the dark way is considered awful and no one would do it. But it is easy. And just a little bit of it when you really need it can be excused.
In the same terrible logic that drove the bleak stories of The Tangled Lands, we find that there sure are a lot of monsters out there. And the worst monsters are the ones called "maw mouths". If you are eaten by one, you never fully die, you just merge and are digested forever and are used by the maw mouth. They are incredibly difficult to kill. El has learned how to kill them, but there is a horrible price, and not just that it's painful to kill them.
In this world, an Enclave is a place of refuge. It's a hideout where powerful wizards can take refuge and protect each other from the stream of hungry monsters that sniff out wizards. They cost a lot to make and maintain and less fortunate wizards strive and scrape and bow and serve to either gain admittance or get their children in to the relative safety. They councils of the Enclaves around the world are incredibly powerful and the economics are tragic. And that's not all. There's an even darker cost at the center of it all, a true Omelas that El is forced to make choices about.
Our hero does well. She has learned to work with others, to take care of them, and others have put their hearts in her as well - even if she is the crankiest person on Earth. Faced again with a terrible system and a brutal dilemma she does what she was born to do. She refuses to be shunted into a stupid trolly problem and figures out a pure cooperative play. The final end of this is a decent place to stop, and it all comes together so smoothly it seems like Naomi Novik had a plan all along - no idea if that's true!
The series is a fun read - I blasted through these like they were Halloween candy and I love it when my hero brings everyone together.
Matt K reviewed The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik
A Blast Graduate
4 stars
Ok - the previous book ends so well, and drops a huge cliffhanger in the final paragraph. I'm glad I was reading these after they were all done because I'd HATE to wait a year for the next book
This is the graduating year for El in the Scholomance, the murderous school for wizards with deadly monsters around every corner. It really starts to heighten the tension between the tenets of Realpolitik and Mutualism. The world of wizards is brutal realpolitik. Every thing is a dismal trade - no one will help anyone without a benefit because every resource is hoarded against the day of graduation, where every single advantage is needed to improve your odds of not dying or worse. Worse is definitely a real possibility. In comes El and she does not need to trade. She destroys the economics by being able to do more.
I really enjoyed …
Ok - the previous book ends so well, and drops a huge cliffhanger in the final paragraph. I'm glad I was reading these after they were all done because I'd HATE to wait a year for the next book
This is the graduating year for El in the Scholomance, the murderous school for wizards with deadly monsters around every corner. It really starts to heighten the tension between the tenets of Realpolitik and Mutualism. The world of wizards is brutal realpolitik. Every thing is a dismal trade - no one will help anyone without a benefit because every resource is hoarded against the day of graduation, where every single advantage is needed to improve your odds of not dying or worse. Worse is definitely a real possibility. In comes El and she does not need to trade. She destroys the economics by being able to do more.
I really enjoyed this - couldn't help but tear through it in a few days. I like seeing El slowly overcome the social obstacles, the economic obstacles and finally the school itself in a fantastic climax. One downer is that this really is only possible because El is a kind of chosen one. Absent El, no one else could have done this. No group of kids before her could have made her choices. But she does have a real set of choices and she DOES make good choices that are very hard.
And the ending isn't just good - it's a triumph. We are along for a hell of a ride.
And it's the second in the trilogy. So, you know, the very last paragraph comes hard again. Damnit.
Matt K finished reading The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik
The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik
The one thing you never talk about while you’re in the Scholomance is what you’ll do when you get out. …