So I'm sitting on the toilet today, and the damn thing plugs again. You see, any time you use more than 2 wads of paper, the thing plugs. Now for those of you who aren't American, you need to understand that most new houses here have these "eco friendly" toilets that are supposedly better on water usage than the old solid gallon flush ones. Naturally, since these tend to plug with little provocation, you often end up using two, maybe even three (as was the case since I was plunging today) to do the job that a single flush should do. So in the end, the government regulation in my life is generating the opposite of its stated intent.
This got the wheels spinning, and I realized that there are many places where government or community involvement is well meaning, but generates the opposite of its stated intent. Take for instance the current crisis in the middle east. The UN is scrambling to make yet another cease fire resolution. However looking at middle eastern history there have been tons of cease fires before. If cease fires led to lasting peace, the middle east would be a utopia of peacefullness. By the same token, raising minimum wage doesn't push poor people into the middle class, and the more you raise taxes, the lower government tax revenue seems to get (see how Bush's tax cuts actually increased government tax revenue, since more money was left in the market to grow and be taxed).
Now, being this is a coding blog, I wouldn't be posting these thoughts unless I could tie it back to development, and so I shall. In the web world, we have our own series of standards for html, xhtml, css etc etc etc. Have these standards actually made web development any easier? Not really. Why not? The whole purpose of these standards was to make the process of building web pages easy and allow users to use any browser they like. However all the various browser vendors continue to go their own way... they think that their way is superior and are betting that the standards will turn to comform to them instead of the intended effect which is the opposite. A libertarian mindset would be to leave things as is, encourage standards but not require their implementation. A big government perspective would be to mandate standards and legally enforce them. However, what would this do to competition and innovation? Something to think about...
You often see the same thing happen in the open source community. A project "forks" because developers can't agree on a standard way of doing things, and I've often felt that although this generates choice, it undermines the strength of the community since you have now cut your installed base with the fork. Where there were once many, there will now be fewer, the developers that leave take their expertise with them and this needs to be replaced or compensated for which can harm the progress of the original project.
It is the one big strength that Microsoft leverages in software though, all of their applications talk to eachother, and talk well. They have internal standards that for the most part they stick to, and you tend to know what you are going to get. In the end, I think this is the trump card that is going to keep the OSS community in the minority, they can't seem to agree to implement standards and interfaces for the sake of competition.
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posted @ Monday, August 07, 2006 12:18 AM