by on

I was very surprised to note that in paper based offices there was nothing like erase a mistake or throw out the original, it was always an append over the previous ones. Be it land records, mark sheets or accounts. The end state was always calculated and consolidated than written, erased and rewritten.

Why do you need an eraser when you can always create a new version?

This is very different in the software world, it is always wipe out old values and put the latest unless there are transactions which have to be recorded each time they happened. In real world everything happens by events yet in software we were always saving end states until recent times where having a common shared state became a huge problem when the systems started scaling and no one can have a claim to be the source of truth.

The problem with saving the projections is that we have to constantly erase and rewrite the projected truth, it was inconvenient in paper based ones so people stuck to append only. Since software makes erasing and writing easy, projections were always created during events instead of storing the events.

Why this becomes a problem? The problem is when there are lots of actors and they have to share the truth between them. Not everyone is interested in the entire projection and transporting that data also becomes painful. The solution is to keep events/transactions as it is and let each of the actors compute their projections when they want.

This is how we work in the real world, the events keep happening whether we observe or not, we try to make sense of it only when we are interested in it to do something with the events; else it just gets journaled somewhere unless someone wants to go through them. I am glad that more and more technology solutions are taking a cue from the biological and social world which had taken 100s and 1000s of years to evolve, instead of discarding them as old way of doing things.

by on

I often encounter people who deal only with false promises and a lot of people fall for it and yet take it easy as if it is normal.

Consider the following scenario.

There are two tailors who have setup shops side by side, during the festive season you go to store ‘A’ and request to tailor your suit in a week which is made of very expensive cloth. The tailor informs that due to the workload you will not be able to get the suit in a week but in about 10 days which is cutting too close to the day of the festival. In the past this tailor has delivered with good quality on promised dates but this is too close for you to take a call.

So you visit store ‘B’ where they also have a similar workload and backlog but promise to deliver to you within 5 days. They cost a little bit less and you are happy with the deal. 5 days later you turn up to collect your suit and you are in for a shock that the cloth has not yet been put in the queue for cutting and stitching. After losing your cool and talking to various people who play bad and good cop finally you are promised to get the delivery in another 5 days. 

5 days later, you have to be ready for the event in the evening so you drop by the tailor to collect your suit. You notice that the tailor is still stitching in a hurried manner and makes you wait for a few hours before giving it to you. On getting the suit you notice that it has a lot of glitches like double seams, improper creasing, misaligned pocket flaps etc. Only a few of them gets somehow masked and you end up late for the event in a spoiled suit. 

After the event you take it to Store ‘A’ and they tell you that they can fix it but it will take 10 more days and cost the same as a new suit as there are extensive repairs to save the expensive cloth. You reluctantly agree and at the end of 10 days you are surprised with on time delivery and the quality of the suit. You leave the place with a regret that you did not place the order with Store ‘A’. 

The scenario is similar at all levels even where the deals run into millions. The lure of a sweet price is so much that no one takes a look at the feasibility. Only in some cases the person making the deal is the same person getting the bad quality; but most of the cases the person making the deal gets good benefits for the sweet deals and the brunt is borne by someone else often many steps down the ladder. This leaves no room for direct observation and hence the feedback loop is never closed; the sweet deals and bitter quality output keeps going on rounds. 

One of my friends tweeted this recently

The bitterness of poor quality lingers much longer after the sweetness of a cheap deal has disappeared. 

Image courtesy: rawpixel on Unsplash

by on

Marketing is quite powerful and can impact us so much that we take many decisions based on the biased knowledge we have been imparted with. A recent experience with diet made me find a lot of loopholes exploited by the food industry and how it is the same product that had been there for many years with just some labels and some phrase changes. The biggest one is ‘No added sugar’. I have been believing this label until I found out the truth the hard way by cutting down on refined sugar in the diet. The number of sick days in a year went down considerably when the refined sugar in the diet came down to near zero.

spoon-2426623_640.jpgNo added sugar test

Take this following test – Try drinking fresh fruit juice without sugar, if you had been accustomed juice with sugar, this is unpalatable. But if you continue doing this for about a week your taste buds gets adjusted (caveat: Cut down sweets as well for that week to make it easily observable). The craving is hard to resist but promise yourselves a cheat treat if you pass one week.

By the end of a week or so the taste buds would have adjusted such that you begin to appreciate the subtle flavours and natural sweetness in the fruit juices. At this point of time, have two fruit juices of the same fruit side by side, one freshly prepared without sugar and another with a popular ‘No added sugar’ brand. Try the difference in the taste between them, see that the ‘No added sugar’ is significantly sweeter.

Why is that even with ‘No added sugar’ the branded drinks appear to be sweet? They have the following marketing tricks up their sleeve to substitute the word sugar. 

Dehydrated cane juice – Excuse me, isn’t that sugar. This was the most outrageous disguise I have found. Dehydrated cane juice is apparently not sugar for many people. This helps in adding the same amount of sugar as a sugared juice.

Some juice concentrate – This is pure genius, If you take apple juice, the label will often read ‘apple juice concentrate’ which helps to boost the per ml sugar content in the juice from the natural sugars in the fruit. We end up taking the same amount of sugar dose for a sugared juice which can be as high as two teaspoons for every 100 ml.

While a lot of people are trying to fight lifestyle and overconsumption related diseases there is a group of people who are working hard to trick people into making poor lifestyle choices. By doing so they are getting rewarded big at the expense of a unhealthy greater good. There is no big difference between an adulterer and these marketing gurus in the way they trick people to become wealthy.

There are a lot more, try to find what ‘No added preservatives‘ mean.