If Writing is Hard…

In Kislay Verma’s excellent post Why programmers don’t write documentation (April 29, 2021), he writes:

Software engineers, like everyone else, don’t write because writing clearly is very, VERY difficult.

I find this both amusing and scary. If writing documentation clearly is very VERY difficult then doesn’t this imply that writing code clearly is also very difficult?

And there we have it. If you can’t write documentation clearly, I suspect your code is equally unclear, which is exactly my experience.

Putting COVID Deaths Into Perspective – The Profit Motive

Tragically, as of 7/11/2021, over four million people have died COVID according to how COVID deaths are recorded over the last year and half of the pandemic.

Even more tragically, this is how many people die worldwide every year from:

Starvation: an estimated 9 million people.

Air pollution: an estimated 7 million people.

Smoking: more than 7 million deaths.

Car accidents: approximately 1.35 million.

Remember, those are per year, totaling over 24 million people a year.

To put that in a different way — in the 18 months that 4 million people have died of COVID, approximately 36 million or 9 times as many, have died from starvation, air pollution, smoking, and car accidents.

But we don’t consider these 24 million yearly deaths to be a pandemic. Why not? Because there is in no profit in addressing these issues particularly as it is strenuously argued by various industries and corporations that there would monetary loss. And who suffers? The people of this planet and the planet itself.

But there is profit in manufacturing drugs. Pfizer made $3.5 billion dollars in revenue just in the first quarter of 2021 from the vaccine alone, nearly 1/4 of its total revenue with profits predicted in the high 20% range. (source)

Moderna logged a profit of $1.2 billion dollars. (source)

The word “pandemic” comes from the Greek pandēmos (from pan ‘all’ + dēmos ‘people’.) It doesn’t refer to just viruses (“a pandemic disease”, first use recorded in 1853) but rather anything that affects all people. We have several global pandemics which are being ignored by governments and corporations for one simple reason: there is no profit in fixing them.