[monknomo]

The thing is though, when you look at actual autocrats, they aren't really even fast. They are perhaps fast at protecting themselves by enriching their friends and impoverishing their threats (ie anyone that is not their friend), but you can't tell me Idi Amin or Ghadaffi built out the trains to run on time. Not even Mussolini really did that (in fact, they became worse, and also Italy ran out of bread)

[ben_w]

That's evidence of them being "not good" rather than "not fast"; the former isn't in dispute.

Consider a recent cliché: "Move fast and break things".

[godelski]

  > Consider a recent cliché: "Move fast and break things".

It's pretty hard to move fast when you're wading through a pile of garbage.

The "move fast and break things" strategy is a fantastic strategy when you are approaching a problem and trying to figure it out. But if you don't go back and clean things up when you do then you're left with a lot of junk and dead weight. A lot of technical debt builds up this way. It's slow and no singular instance is to blame. Just like how you don't get fat by eating a single cookie. Hell, you don't get fat by eating an entire fucking cake in one sitting. You get fat by doing so repeatedly and by not doing things to mitigate that buildup.

You can't run fast when you're fat. And you don't get fat overnight. It is slow. Maybe you gain a pound a week and lose a second on your mile time every day. You likely won't notice such effects. But by getting fat you have to work so much harder to move fast.

This is true for weight, software, countries, and all sorts of things. Professional athletes spend far more time on maintenance and implementing good habits to ensure nothing slows them down. But often we look at those things as if they provide no progress. Maybe they don't move us literally forward, but they are definitely key to doing so. Let's not make this mistake

[ben_w]

Again, you're arguing here on the basis of quality. The points you're making here are not in dispute.

> It's pretty hard to move fast when you're wading through a pile of garbage.

One of the key things about autocrats, their defining characteristics even, is they get to disregard any law they want to.

This is not fun for anyone relying on that law. It is not somewhere sensible people will choose to invest in.

But it is fast.

Technical debt is a fine example, but you know what? Easy debt fuels capitalism. I've seen one codebase that had an incompetent mutilate it for something like a decade, and another that was ISO 9001 rated. The train-wreck with all the debt was still easier to handle and faster to implement features and fix bugs within, and lasted in prod much longer than most software companies.

Lots of governments keep promising the equivalent of finally refactoring the old codebase, it's hard and slow but some even make progress. Autocrats? They can just order them all gone. And when it turns out that wasn't a good idea? It was a bad idea done fast.

[godelski]

  > Again, you're arguing here on the basis of quality. 

You have to have a minimum threshold of quality for speed to mean anything. If not well, I can outperform math calculations even if you have a calculator. My answers might be nowhere near correct and I might just yell "zero" in response to everything, but it will be very fast!

Or have a made some bad assumption that quality isn't relevant at all? That you're arguing fat void of all correctness? If so, I'm not sure there a meaningful conversation to have at all

But instead if there's any measure of quality that must be satisfied, even if the bar is on the floor, then reread my comment again. I'm afraid you're reading what you want to read rather than what I wrote. You're going to have to work with me here as I can't beam my thoughts directly into your head nor am I willing to write a novel in reply. I've already been quite verbose