Links and Notes for January 28th, 2022
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.↩
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited.↩
Table of Contents
COVID-19
State of Affairs: Jan 24 by Katelyn Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist)
In the U.S.,
“Deaths have increased 41% in the past 2 weeks. For the first time since February 2021, we reported 3,896 COVID19 deaths in the United States. This made last Friday the 10th deadliest day of the whole pandemic and the deadliest since vaccines were widely available to Americans. We are losing more Americans each day to COVID19 than we did during 9/11. And the biggest tragedy is that COVID19 death is preventable—vaccines reduce the risk of dying by 68 times. Omicron may be milder compared to Delta, but it’s not mild.”
COVID-19: endemic doesn’t mean harmless by Aris Katzourakis (Nature)
“In other words, a disease can be endemic and both widespread and deadly. Malaria killed more than 600,000 people in 2020. Ten million fell ill with tuberculosis that same year and 1.5 million died. Endemic certainly does not mean that evolution has somehow tamed a pathogen so that life simply returns to ‘normal’.”
Amazing how we really just don’t care about those deaths when they happen in unimportant countries. That’s a lot of people. It’s more than COVID, but TB doesn’t happen in Europe or North America, so it’s not on the radar.
“Stating that an infection will become endemic says nothing about how long it might take to reach stasis, what the case rates, morbidity levels or death rates will be or, crucially, how much of a population — and which sectors — will be susceptible. Nor does it suggest guaranteed stability: there can still be disruptive waves from endemic infections, as seen with the US measles outbreak in 2019. Health policies and individual behaviour will determine what form — out of many possibilities — endemic COVID-19 takes.”
“Much can be done to shift the evolutionary arms race in humanity’s favour. First, we must set aside lazy optimism. Second, we must be realistic about the likely levels of death, disability and sickness. Targets set for reduction should consider that circulating virus risks giving rise to new variants. Third, we must use — globally — the formidable weapons available: effective vaccines, antiviral medications, diagnostic tests and a better understanding of how to stop an airborne virus through mask wearing, distancing, and air ventilation and filtration. Fourth, we must invest in vaccines that protect against a broader range of variants.”
It’s amazing that we have supercomputers in our pockets—and scalable hyper-software in the cloud—but the notion of doing a few things to minimize exposure is the part that eludes our grasp.
“Thinking that endemicity is both mild and inevitable is more than wrong, it is dangerous: it sets humanity up for many more years of disease, including unpredictable waves of outbreaks. It is more productive to consider how bad things could get if we keep giving the virus opportunities to outwit us. Then we might do more to ensure that this does not happen.”
I agree 100% while also being 100% sure that we will not do any of this. We will “get past” Omicron, breathe a sigh of relief as summer rolls in, then be absolutely gobsmacked by the next variant in autumn.
What “endemic” COVID-19 really means: Mass infection and death forever by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)
““The [SARS-CoV-2] virus is circulating far too intensely with far too many still vulnerable. For many countries, the next few weeks remain critical for health workers and health systems. …Now is not the time to give up and wave the white flag.… This pandemic is nowhere near over, and with the incredible growth of Omicron globally, new variants are likely to emerge.”
“— Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General,World Health Organization”
American capitalism demands the infection of China by Andre Damon (WSWS)
“The emergence of the Omicron variant is precisely what scientists—and the World Socialist Web Site —warned would happen as a result of the policy of mass infection. Emanuel and Osterholm are effectively telling China: “Due to our actions, which prioritized financial and economic interests over lives, the virus has not been eliminated. Your efforts to prevent mass infection will therefore fail, and you must learn to ‘live with it.’””
It truly is criminal considering that both Osterholm and Emmanuel (the authors of the op-ed giving China the “facts”) were on the COVID task forces for the U.S. at various times. That they didn’t even temper their editorial with an admission that, had the U.S. and the rest of the West not prioritized their economies, the virus wouldn’t pose such a great threat to the rest of the world now. Even the U.S. and Europe aren’t really safe yet.
They talk about endemicity as if it were a safe, stable state. That’s not true. It’s very possible that they’re right about China not being able to maintain zero-COVID. They’re probably very wrong about the necessity of doing so, though. They talk about China’s vaccines being “worse” without discussing the sheer criminality of not having made “better” vaccines more available to the world. They just discuss the reality of the potential impact on China’s system like generals laying out how the attack will go.
They’re like two kids who just smashed in all of the windows on an older neighbor’s home, then go over to tell the neighbor that they can’t stay there anymore because it’s going to rain in. Anyone can see that they’re going to get wet…why don’t they just admit it and get out of there? It’s really very like the mob of any stripe. At a certain level, this is kind of like biological warfare against the world. If the U.S. and Europe had deliberately unleashed a disease like this, the rest of the world would be just as threatened as if they’d stumbled their way into it with their own ineptitude. It is no comfort to anyone if a country blows itself up with nuclear weapons, but infects the rest of the world with nuclear fallout. This is no different, really.
What “endemic” COVID-19 really means: Mass infection and death forever by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)
“MacIntyre adds, “Many do not understand ‘public health’ and equate it with the provision of acute health care in public hospitals or confuse it with primary care. Public health is the organized response by society to protect and promote health and to prevent illness, injury, and disability. It is a core responsibility of government.””
“She notes that endemic and epidemic infections demonstrate different patterns of disease and “respiratory transmissible infections like influenza, measles or SARS-CoV-2 do not become endemic. They cause recurrent waves, and each wave is disruptive to society because it grows rapidly, within days or weeks. Even influenza, which is milder than SARS-CoV-2, requires surge planning for extra hospital beds for the seasonal epidemic every winter.””
“[…] endemic doesn’t mean ‘never think about COVID again.’ It’s exactly the opposite! Endemic means someone is always thinking about COVID. Endemic means public health is always monitoring disease and always intervening when cases cross the acceptable level.””
That doesn’t sound at all like what proponents of endemicity are doing. They are thinking that “endemic” means “mostly gone”.
Economy & Finance
You Get the Crypto Rules You Want by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)
“There is a certain drunk-under-the-lamppost element to current U.S. crypto regulation. If you incorporate a company in the U.S. and walk into the SEC’s office and ask “hey what are we allowed to do,” the answer is “almost nothing.” If you just launch the wildest thing in the world pseudonymously, call it “decentralized,” and advertise eye-popping investment returns to U.S. investors, then, I mean, I don’t want to give you legal advice, but look around.”
“One of the largest companies in the world devoted millions of dollars to figuring out how to launch a stablecoin and concluded that it was impossible. It is demonstrably not impossible! Tether did it! Tether has a hugely successful stablecoin! Tether does not care at all about working closely with all of the relevant regulators! That’s why!”
Watch Out for Shadow Trading by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)
“There is something a bit circular here. Medivation’s policy said that using its material nonpublic information to trade other companies’ stocks “is illegal,” and that appears to be true, but it’s true only because it said it. If Medivation’s policy had said “it’s perfectly legal to use our material nonpublic information to trade other companies’ stocks” then Panuwat would have a good argument that that was true. The law of shadow trading seems to be “it is illegal to trade stocks in violation of your company’s insider trading policy, whatever it is.””
“There is also an argument that your executives develop specialized industry knowledge over the course of a career in the widgets business, and they should be allowed to use that knowledge to make intelligent investments, allocate capital to the most promising widgets innovators, etc., and that you will attract more talented and motivated executives if you allow them to profit personally from their industry expertise. If individuals are going to trade stocks, why shouldn’t they trade stocks in businesses they know something about? Like the one they’re in?”
“I will say that, in the stablecoin world, the classic tech advice of “move fast and break things” and “better to ask forgiveness than permission” seems to be correct. Tether is a hugely popular stablecoin that obeys no capital regulation, lied about its backing for a long time, did shady related-party transactions, got in trouble with regulators and kept on being a hugely popular stablecoin. Meanwhile Libra/Diem asked for approval first, did everything right, and seems to have died a regulatory death:”
Also, Tether is showing all signs of unraveling and has been printing coins that it can’t possibly have backing assets for, but will have made a bunch of money for a handful of people before it implodes and wipes out a lot of others.
The Apes Have Fat Fingers by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)
“To fall victim to this trade you had to have been moving NFTs around between wallets to minimize gas fees. You thought you were being clever, but there are always people who are cleverer than you are, and crypto markets are very good at distinguishing the clever people from the cleverer ones and letting the cleverer ones take the clever ones’ money. Or apes.”
“There’s a reason that the New York Stock Exchange tries to prevent “clearly erroneous” trades, and reverses them if they accidentally happen, and the reason is not that the NYSE and its major stakeholders are gentle altruists. The reason is that people will trade a lot more stock if their trades on the NYSE work more or less the way they’re supposed to. If trading stocks meant constantly being ripped off by more sophisticated counterparties, nobody would do it, and the sophisticated counterparties would have nobody to trade with. It is better for the sophisticated counterparties to pass up some opportunities to rip off the rubes, to agree to some rules to level the playing field, to forgo some of the rewards to sophistication, in order to increase the size of the pie.”
Public Policy & Politics
Congress’s 1/6 Committee Claims Absolute Power as it Investigates Citizens With No Judicial Limits by Glenn Greenwald (Scheer Post)
“On November 22, the 1/6 Committee served a subpoena on Taylor Budowich — a former spokesman for the Trump campaign who never worked for the U.S. Government — that requested a wide range of documents as well as his deposition testimony. On December 14, Budowich voluntarily complied by handing over a large amount of his personal records, and then, on December 22, he flew to Washington at his own expense and submitted to questioning. There is no suggestion that Budowich was engaged in any violence or other illegal acts at the Capitol on January 6. Their only interest in this private citizen is his connection to the Trump campaign and his stated view that he believed the 2020 election was marred by fraud.”
“At the hearing, the committee’s lawyers essentially repeated the same argument they advanced in their legal brief: namely, that none of the legal safeguards imposed on the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to guard against abuse of power apply to this Congressional committee, which therefore enjoys virtually absolute power to do what it wants.”
“Instead, the committee’s response is they do not have to comply with this law. “The Act restricts only agencies and departments of the United States, and the Select Committee is neither,” the committee’s lawyer contended. In fact, they explicitly argued that these safeguards were meant to be imposed only on the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, but were intended to exempt Congress even when, as here, they are clearly engaged in investigating private citizens for potential crimes.”
Today’s militia movement / Amy Cooter (This is Hell!)
This was an excellent interview with Amy Cooter, a sociologist who teaches at Vanderbilt University and who has investigated and written about citizen militias in the U.S. Her article Citizen Militias in the U.S. Are Moving toward More Violent Extremism (Scientific American) is unfortunately nearly entirely behind a paywall (and the 12ft paywall-remover didn’t help).
She and host Chuck Mertz discuss their origins and their reality, as opposed to the myths and fictions promulgated by the mainstream media. Their story is a lot more complex and complicated than the simplistic propaganda.
Long story short: these people are just people who often have their hearts in the right place, but are also massively underinformed about how their world really works (e.g. about the ongoing effects of historical racism that continues to support the phenomenal wealth gap between whites and blacks in America).
Citizens of countries that rebate carbon taxes aren’t aware of the rebate by John Timmer (Ars Technica)
“Not surprisingly, less than 15 percent of people correctly guessed that the typical rebate was in the area of five to 10 Francs.”
That’s one cup of coffee per year? Shown as a line item in the itemized detail of a yearly health-care statement? You’ll pardon the Swiss for not having noticed. I had no idea this was a thin.
Vaccine Apartheid Has Reinforced US Empire by Kevin Klyman (Jacobin)
“Members of the foreign policy establishment have leapt to Biden’s defense, pointing out that China has also used its vaccines as a bargaining chip. They insist that Biden’s “vaccine diplomacy” has been a force for good. But it is Washington, its European allies, and US pharmaceutical companies — not China — that have blocked most of the world from obtaining vaccines.”
“And while Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson initially sold 90 percent of their vaccines to rich countries and subsequently lobbied for moneymaking booster shots, Moderna outdid them by charging poor countries twice what it charges rich countries for vaccines. Pfizer and Moderna raked in record profits, but only 1 percent of vaccine doses have been administered in poor countries, leaving little prospect of vaccinating the world before 2025.”
“The United States is well ahead of China in many subfields of biotech — unlike in other emerging areas like machine learning and green tech — making it all the more important to policymakers that the United States maintains its advantage. By keeping a viselike grip over the intellectual property rights to mRNA therapies, Big Pharma prevents other countries from replicating its breakthroughs and guarantees exclusive access for the US military.”
Let’s Not Have a War by Matt Taibbi (TK News)
“Both Biden’s comments and the “Obama doctrine” were fundamental betrayals, presidents saying out loud that there existed such a thing as “our” interests separate from Washington’s war pig clique. The latter group somehow believes itself impervious to error, and takes extraordinary offense to challenges to its judgment, amazing given the spectacular failures in every arena from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria.”
“Their wag-the-dog thinking always argues the right move is the one that allows them to empty their boxes of expensive toys, from weapons systems to Langley-generated schemes for overthrows, which a compliant press happily calls regime change.”
“Our plan with every foreign country that falls into our orbit is the same. We ride in as saviors, throwing loans in all directions to settle debts (often to us), then let it be known the country’s affairs will henceforth be run through our embassy. Since we’re ignorant of history and have long viewed diplomats too in sync with local customs as liabilities, we tend to fill our embassies with people who have limited sense of the individual character of host countries, their languages, or the attitudes of people outside the capital.”
“Instead of devising individual policies, we go through identical processes of receiving groups of local politicians seeking our backing. We throw our weight behind the courtiers we like best. The winning supplicants are usually Western educated, speak great English, know how to flatter drunk diplomats, and are fluent in neoliberal wonk-speak.”
“The ostentatious incompetence of the foreign policy establishment, which America got to examine in technicolor during the War on Terror, was one of the first triggers for the revolt against “experts” that led to the election of Donald Trump. Once, these were drawling Republican golfers who got hot reading Francis Fukuyama, thought they could turn Baghdad into Geneva, and instead squandered trillions and hundreds of thousands of lives pushing Iraq back to the eighth century.
“The more recent crew is made up of Extremely Online, Ivy-educated fantasists who rarely leave their embassies abroad and view life as an endless production of Sloane or The Good Fight, soap operas about exclusive clubs of fashionably brainy pragmatists with the guts to color outside the lines and “get things done.” Lines like “Yats is our guy” make them tingly. This is perhaps the only subset of people on earth arrogant and dumb enough to think there’s a workable plan for pulling off a shooting war with Russia.”
Will Putin Accept Half a Loaf? by Ray McGovern (Antiwar.com)
“Here is President Putin speaking to his top military officers:
““In particular, the growth of the US and NATO military forces in direct proximity to the Russian border and major military drills, including unscheduled ones, are a cause for concern.
““It is extremely alarming that … Mk 41 launchers, which are located in Romania and are to be deployed in Poland, are adapted for launching Tomahawk strike missiles. If this infrastructure continues to move forward, and if US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7–10 minutes, or even five minutes for hypersonic systems.
““This is a huge challenge for us, for our security. In this context, as you are aware, I invited the US President to start talks on the drafting of concrete agreements. … We need long-term legally binding guarantees. Well, we know very well that even legal guarantees cannot be completely fail-safe, because the United States easily pulls out of any international treaty that has ceased to be interesting to it for some reason, sometimes offering explanations and sometimes not, as was the case with the ABM and the Open Skies treaties – nothing at all.
““However, we need at least something, at least a legally binding agreement rather than just verbal assurances.””
“It strains credulity to imagine that Putin really thought he could get the US and NATO to sign a document limiting NATO membership. No less incredulous was/is the widespread impression spread wide, so to speak, in the Establishment media, that Putin planned to exploit an anticipated Western rejection to “justify” a military strike on Ukraine.”
Journalism & Media
The Folly of Pandemic Censorship by Matt Taibbi (TK News)
“Anyone paying attention to that story will now distrust the president, the CDC, and “reputable” mainstream fact-checkers like the Pew Center’s Politifact. These are the exact sort of authorities whose guidance sites like the Center for Countering Digital Hate will rely upon when trying to pressure companies like Substack to remove certain voices.
“This is the central problem of any “content moderation” scheme: somebody has to do the judging. The only thing worse than a landscape that contains misinformation is a landscape where misinformation is mandatory, and the only antidote for the latter is allowing all criticism, mistakes included. This is especially the case in a situation like the present, where the two-year clown show of lies and shifting positions by officials and media scolds has created a groundswell of mistrust that’s a far bigger threat to public health than a literal handful of Substack writers.”
“Censors have a fantasy that if they get rid of all the Berensons and Mercolas and Malones, and rein in people like Joe Rogan, that all the holdouts will suddenly rush to get vaccinated. The opposite is true. If you wipe out critics, people will immediately default to higher levels of suspicion. They will now be sure there’s something wrong with the vaccine. If you want to convince audiences, you have to allow everyone to talk, even the ones you disagree with. You have to make a better case. The Substack people, thank God, still get this, but the censor’s disease of thinking there are shortcuts to trust is spreading.”
The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship by Glenn Greenwald (SubStack)
“This [Washington] Post attack on Substack predictably provoked expressions of Serious Concern from good and responsible liberals. That included Chelsea Clinton, who lamented that Substack is profiting off a “grift.” Apparently, this political heiress — who is one of the world’s richest individuals by virtue of winning the birth lottery of being born to rich and powerful parents, who in turn enriched themselves by cashing in on their political influence in exchange for $750,000 paychecks from Goldman Sachs for 45-minute speeches, and who herself somehow was showered with a $600,000 annual contract from NBC News despite no qualifications — believes she is in a position to accuse others of “grifting.” She also appears to believe that — despite welcoming convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to her wedding to a hedge fund oligarch whose father was expelled from Congress after his conviction on thirty-one counts of felony fraud — she is entitled to decree who should and should not be allowed to have a writing platform”
“The emerging campaign to pressure Spotify to remove Joe Rogan from its platform is perhaps the most illustrative episode yet of both the dynamics at play and the desperation of liberals to ban anyone off-key. It was only a matter of time before this effort really galvanized in earnest. Rogan has simply become too influential, with too large of an audience of young people, for the liberal establishment to tolerate his continuing to act up.”
This sounds like the CCP’s state censor, no? I liked Edward Snowden’s tweet, which read “Nobody has stronger opinions about Joe Rogan than people who have never listened to Joe Rogan.” He also wrote “Please don’t take medical advice from Joe Rogan.” These are both excellent sentiments.
“Many bizarrely urged that everyone buy music from Apple instead; apparently, handing over your cash to one of history’s largest and richest corporations, repeatedly linked to the use of slave labor, is the liberal version of subversive social justice.”
I use Apple Music and I know all of the above. Since our world is organized in a way to put convenient access to our cultural output—like music, video, and books—into the handles of global mega-corporations—like Apple, Google, and Amazon, respectively—the only alternative is to severely restrict your access to that culture.
““The cancellation of the ex-Fox News host’s [Megyn Kelly] glossy morning show is a reminder that networks need to be more stringent when assessing the politics of their hirings,” proclaimed The Guardian.”
That is a quote from the “liberal” newspaper in England, sounding ever so much like a state censor.
Here for the Ratio by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)
“Now, of course it’s necessary that someone do what deBoer is doing: calling this futile insanity what it is. And at the same time, what he is doing is also an instance of the insanity: it is, yet again, a white guy online calling another white guy online white. And now I find myself trying to manoeuvre one level higher, and to critique the Discourse from a perch that even deBoer has not yet reached. But if I succeed, my critique will also be an instance of the thing of which it is a critique. There is no escape.”
“I’m only stabbing at an answer, and I think the next few years will make clear whether I’m right or not, but it seems to me that social media are in the process of swallowing literally everything: first newspapers and books, later education, and, ultimately, banking, policing, and government. If this is true, then even the FBI needs to secure its place there, if it is to have a future, and the logic that dictates how to do this is the same for the bureau as it is for Buzzfeed: just keep churning out disingenuous bullshit.”
“I often find myself wishing Putin would behave a bit more like Trump, hamming it up online for attention, instead of pulling away altogether from the engine that churns up short-lived influencers such as I still hope our last president will turn out to be. Instead, Putin seems to remain stuck in that old way of seeing things, where reality is still out there in the world itself, in the form of territory, of oceanic shelves and transcontinental pipelines, while the online is a distraction for fools.”
Technology
How I Got Pwned by My Cloud Costs by Troy Hunt
“I guess I’m looking at this a bit like the last time I lost data due to a hard disk failure. I always knew there was a risk but until it actually happened, I didn’t take the necessary steps to protect against that risk doing actual damage. But hey, it could have been so much worse; that number could have been 10x higher and I wouldn’t have known any earlier.”
tl;dr: Calculate your expected budget. Set up an alert when you’re halfway there. Set up an alert when you exceed it. This gives you enough time to react. You can also set up bandwidth alerts if you know what your expected bandwidth is (and you should).
Programming
Remix vs Next.js by Ryan Florence (Remix)
“Since Remix uses HTML’s <link rel=“prefetch”> (instead of an in memory cache like Next.js) the browser actually makes the requests, not Remix. Watching the video you can see how the requests are cancelled as the user interrupts the current fetch. Remix didn’t have to ship a single character of code for that top-notch handling of asynchrony. #useThePlatform … or, uh, #reuseThePlatform 😎?!”
Two reasons Kubernetes is so complex by nelhage (Musing in Computer Systems)
“In general, any system which is not designed as a control loop will inevitably drift out of the desired configuration, and so, at scale, someone needs to be writing control loops. By internalizing them, Kubernetes hopes to allow most of the core control loops to be written only once, and by domain experts, and thus make it much easier to build reliable systems on top of them. It’s also a natural choice for a system that is, by its nature, distributed and designed for building distributed systems. The defining nature of distributed systems is the possibility of partial failure, which necessitates that systems past some scale be self-healing and converge on the correct state regardless of local failures.”
“For the core built-in primitives in Kubernetes, you have a decent guarantee that they are well-tested and well-used, and hopefully work pretty well. But when you start adding third-party resources, to manage TLS certificates or cloud load balancers or hosted databases or external DNS names (and the design of Kubernetes tends to push you in this direction, because it’s happier when it can be the source-of-truth for your entire stack), you wander off the beaten path, and it becomes much less clear how well-tested all the paths are.”
“I’ve tried to avoid making value judgments on whether I think these design decisions were good choices or not in this post. I think there is plenty of scope for debate about when and for what kinds of systems Kubernetes makes sense and adds value, versus when something simpler might suffice. However, in order to make those kinds of decisions, I find it tremendously valuable to come to them with a decent understanding of Kubernetes on its own terms, and a good understanding of where its complexity comes from, and what goals it is serving.”
“Even if a system is designed in ways which seem — and may even be — suboptimal in its current context, it’s always the case that it got that way for some reason. And insofar as this is a system you will have to interact with and reason about and make decisions about, you will have a better time if you can understand those reasons and the motivations and the internal logic that brought the system to that point […]”
“[…] it front-loads complexity instead of, or in addition to, adding it. This design makes you deal up-front with practicalities you might otherwise have ignored for a long time. Whether or not that is a desirable choice depends on your goals, your scale, your time horizon, and related factors.”
This is an excellent point. One drawback of this kind of design is that it can discourage what I call an “appropriate level of quality” for projects. If something’s a POC, then why pay in time and money for effort up front? Be aware when that changes, though, so you can make sure to go back and reevaluate the decisions where you “skipped” certain “practicalities”. It’s Like TypeScript vs. Elm. You can ignore type errors in TS until you’re ready to deal with them. Not in Elm. You have to handle all cases up front.
For example, say you want to test some concept quickly, something on a web page. One way to do this is to just add the test code to an existing application, just to see how it feels. This is absolutely not how you would share the POC with someone, but it’s a good way of just getting a feel for it. You can leverage a configured test harness and web stack to try something and have a very tight and immediate feedback loop.
Once you’ve confirmed your idea is interesting, then you can set up a separate solution, with its own Dockerfile, test harness, etc. Just hacking something into an existing application isn’t at all how we’d encourage anyone to build production code, but it would be a shame if the tools and environment got in the way of allowing a developer to do so, in order to be able to answer a question in a few minutes without a huge amount of ceremony.