There was a similar problem in Sweden. In the old system a person could first seek asylum, get denied, then seek a work visa, get denied, then seek a student visa, get denied and then repeat the process since now enough years has passed. People could also simply go underground for a period of time and then restart the process.
Two law changes was added last year to prevent this. First, any decision remains in force indefinite as long the person remains in the country. The second is that all applications will be running simultaneous and the final decision is given at the same time, with no option to change application afterward if the result returned negative.
The system has some drawbacks, especially if the applicant apply for the wrong thing and don't change it until the decision has been reached, but it removes stalling and delaying tactics.
> In the old system a person could first seek asylum...
Yes but that still means communicating with the institutions and having some sort of legal status. What is en masse happening in the US and to a lesser extent was (or is, not sure, but see for example the Windrush scandal) happening in the UK is that people legally enter the country and have for a time legal standing to reside there, but that lapses, laws change etc., and just nobody cares deeply enough to solve the situation one way or another? And then decades pass and bad things start to happen. But all of this was entirely avoidable and I don't mean just 'not voting for Trump' avoidable, but in a systematic manner.
We could compare that to the situation in Spain where there is a group of illegal migrant workers who are exploited as cheap work force. Now they are given a chance to legalise their status but that too is happening after decades of neglect. Of course there are similar groups in other countries.
> We could compare that to the situation in Spain where there is a group of illegal migrant workers who are exploited as cheap work force
The term we should be using here is human trafficking. It is a extremely common practice in construction and farming. As a police officer said here in Sweden in a news article, if they went to a single major construction site the yearly budget for human trafficking violations would be used up for that site alone. It is an open secret that construction sites has a tier based system for workers, where the most illegal workers (and there are different degrees to that) get the most dangerous assignments, least amount of safety equipment, longest hours, and with the lowest pay.
A lot of the calculation on the cost of reduced immigration get based on the resulting increase in costs to construction and farming. It is quite insane how much of the economy is based on exploiting people.
The Windrush situation is a bit different - the people involved were British Subjects, and didn't need any documentation when they arrived in the UK.
The only thing that changed was the introduction of the "hostile environment" policy in 2012, meaning that everyone (including full UK citizens) must now prove that they have permission to be in the country before getting a job, renting a home, getting a bank account, etc.
The Windrush generation always had that permission, and continued to have it - what they didn't have was the documentation to prove it. And, to make matters worse, the Home Office had disposed of their arrival records so in many cases it became all but impossible for them to get it.
(I know this is a minor quibble, but I think it's worth pointing out that the people affected shouldn't have needed to regularise their situation, because it was never irregular in the first place!)
> I think it's worth pointing out that the people affected shouldn't have needed to regularise their situation, because it was never irregular in the first place!
This is what I don't agree with and exactly why I mentioned Windrush as an example. The situation was irregular because while they were legally entitled to stay, they didn't have a simple way to prove it. And once they needed that, it became an issue.
Now I assume most of them regularised their situation and some didn't and since the state knew enough about them to try to deport them, it should have fixed their status in the first place by issuing them the needed documents. But it didn't! And that was my original point - the state neglected their situation for decades, let them adapt to changing legislative environment on their own (or not), only to swing the axe (wrongly) without warning. If they were issued a citizen ID long ago none of that could ever happen.
It is a major simplification to put the political spectrum on a single line
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum). If we put it as a triangle, the Overton window can be as far from left to right as left/right is to the middle.
The Overton window is not involved in defining the middle, and the middle definitively do not need to agree 50% with any specific decision done by the left or right.
> An employees actions would be a matter of judgment between the company leadership and themselves
There has been a few news articles (and court cases) where this question has been raised and it is not strict true. Employee actions are only actions for which the employee has been given as an task as part of their employment and role. Actions outside of that is private actions. When this end up in court, the role description and employee contract becomes very important.
A clear case example is when a doctor is looking up data on a patient. Downloading patient records from people who they are not the doctor for can be criminal and not just a breech of hospital policy, especially if they sell or transfer the data.
I was tempted to add this very line when I wrote my message but I hoped it would be obvious I don't mean things like illegally stealing private data. I was talking about things like "falsifying" data to the contractor, which doesn't seem like a crime to me just a contract violation.
If the employee are destroying property owned by the employer, for which is not part of the employee role or assignment, then they could be charged with hacking and property destruction just as if it was done by someone outside the company. The way around this that some people can attempt is work-to-rule strike. That would be a legal way to sabotage a contract without actually going beyond that of the employee contract.
Several years ago in Stockholm (2014) during a conference focus on the Internet, the Chief Technology Officer for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign held a talk on how they revolutionary the campaign process by using targeted advertisement campaign on social networks, mostly Facebook, and how effective the technique was to reach voters during fund raising and getting their voters to vote. In their view, this was the first major use of social media during an election. The talk is still available on Youtube for those interested. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3WS9bs3Aps)
There are also articles from 2011 where political commenters noted how the Obama campaign broke new ground using targeted Facebook advertisement and outreach, and how EU politicians could learn from it. The many smaller, but in total larger donations given to Obama was contrasted with Hillary Clinton who had larger individual donations but less in total, and the commenters attributed this to the use of Facebook and finding and meeting a younger audience on those online platforms.
People thought that targeted advertisement was a good thing and politicians looked on the techniques from that election and saw the potential for power. It was mostly just those privacy advocates, free software advocates and security experts that expressed doubt and warned about the dangers.
Yes! I distinctly remember the time magazine issue and article about this. This is exactly what I mean: we normalize and celebrate technologies without realizing what the repercussions are when we give the same tools and power to others.
I wonder how much companies pay yearly in order to avoid having an employee pick up a drive from a local store, drive to the data center, pull the disk drive, screw out the failing hard drive and put in the new one, add it in the raid, verify the repair process has started, and then return to the office.
I don't think I've ever seen a non-hot-swap disk in a normal server. The oldest I dealt with had 16 HDDs per server, and only 12 were accessible from the outside, bu the 4 internal ones were still hot-swap after taking the cover off.
Even some really old (2000s-era) junk I found in a cupboard at work was all hot-swap drives.
But more realistically in this case, you tell the data centre "remote hands" person that a new HDD will arrive next-day from Dell, and it's to go in server XYZ in rack V-U at drive position T. This may well be a free service, assuming normal failure rates.
Yes, I did write that a bit hasty. I changed above to the normal process. As it happened we just installed a server without hotswap disk, but to be fair that is the first one I have personally seen in the last 20 years.
Remote hands is a thing indeed. Servers also tend to be mostly pre-built now days by server retailers, even when buying more custom made ones like servermicro where you pick each component. There isn't that many parts to a generic server purchase. Its a chassi, motherboard, cpu, memory, and disks. PSU tend to be determined by the motherboard/chassi choice, same with disk backplanes/raid/ipmi/network/cables/ventilation/shrouds. The biggest work is in doing the correct purchase, not in the assembly. Once delivered you put on the rails, install any additional item not pre-built, put it in the rack and plug in the cables.
In the Bay Area there are little datacenters that will happily colocate a rack for you and will even provide an engineer who can swap disks. The service is called “remote hands”. It may still be faster to drive over.
In Sweden there is a additional review board that go through the decision made by the inspector. The idea is to limit the power that a single inspector has. In practice however the review board tend to rubber stamp decisions, so incompetence/malice still happens.
There was a huge mess right after metoo when a inspector went against the courts rulings. The court had given the father sole custody in a extremely messy divorce, and the inspector did not agree with the decision. As a result they remove the child from his father, in direct contrast to the courts decision, and put the child through 6 years of isolation and abuse with no access to school. It took investigative journalists a while, but the result of the case getting highlighted in media was that the inspector and supervisor is now fired, with two additoal workers being under investigation for severe misconduct. Four more workers would be under investigation but too long time has passed. The review board should have prevented this, as should the supervisor for the inspector, but those safety net failed in this case in part because of the cultural environment at the time.
It is fairly lenient. The review board, assigned political, do hold a bit of moral responsibility and got no punishment.
The reason I mentioned that this occurred right after metoo is that the cultural environment in Sweden was a bit unstable. Some people felt they could not trust the courts, which include people who worked as inspectors for the government. The review board is also selected politically, which may add a second explanation for why they permitted the misconduct. It was a very political time and everyone wanted to be perceived as being on the right side of history.
The case has been debate in Swedish parliament but the reaction has been to not really talk about it. People ignored the law and rules, and they shouldn't have done that, and that is then that.
Given the period of 2010-2012, the president at the time was Barack Obama. It does not seem realistic that people would accept opening a criminal case.
It is approaches like that which gives some hope to the future. War crimes are indeed something which should never be allowed or overlooked. Being a political leader doesn't make people immune to criticism, but rather should be someone held to a higher expectation.
Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power? Sure, their politics influence the nation's foreign policies. But domestic partisan politics is largely irrelevant to the international partners. To the foreign nationals affected by it, you're just USA either way.
I mentioned just the other day, the problem with anti-intellectualism in the US and how it's fed by these sorts of egregious meddling by the administration. There are much less educated and affluent countries that are nowhere near as anti-science as the US. Yet unfortunately, the US exports it abroad too. I explicitly referred the same Pakistani case as an example of that. I'm all for Osama's elimination, but they jeopardized the entire humanity's future by misusing the vaccination program for it.
Despite a century of this nonsense (remember the radium girls?), neither political party cares enough to not pervert science in the interests of humanity. Smallpox and Polio were horrible diseases that caused untold miseries. Even the remote tribes of Pakistan knew their dangers well enough to participate in their elimination, until the US pulled off this dirty stunt. This is a deeply ingrained toxic culture that was reinforced by both parties over the decade. This should be a war crime irrespective of party allegiances.
>
Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power?
If Bush was in Power, of course the accusation would have to made against Bush. So, of course, the accusation has to be made against the president that was in charge at the time. Dark skin color does not give him a "Get Out of Jail Free Card".
> Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power?
How can you open a war crime case against a guy who already got a Peace Nobel Prize? And what war crime? Was there a war? Maybe some special military operation against Bin Laden.
Are you kidding? A way to smear Obama and portray him as disrespectful to non-whites? The only reason it’s not on Fox is that it reminds Americans that we’ve only had one victory in the War on Terror and the Republican Party contributed nothing positive.
Listened to a story about a fairly large company that switched to cloud and then back to on-premise. When they went cloud they quickly found out that they needed employees to manage the cloud infrastructure. The employee costs were similar for both setup.
Compliance and security testing does not go away just because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have extensive requirements regardless if you implement it yourself or buy it from an external supplier.
I would also not recommend to go with a single cloud solution with no backup solution and overall redundancy, unless a $5 voucher is good enough compensation for the service being down a whole day. The general recommendation after the latest waves of outages was for cloud users to use multiple cloud providers and multiple backup solution. It is just like how on-premise solutions need off-premise backups.
> Compliance and security testing does not go away just because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have extensive requirements regardless if you implement it yourself or buy it from an external supplier.
That’s a bit disingenuous. If I don’t operate a physical server rack, I also do not need to take care of physical access control, fire suppression policies, camera monitoring, key handling, and a wide range of other measures I would be otherwise obliged to take care of under GDPR. You can absolutely outsource classes of problems. What’s true is that that doesn’t lift the responsibility from you to check your cloud provider fulfils these obligations, but that’s very different from having to fulfil them yourself.
Go through a security review. It not as simple as just saying "we outsource that so we have no idea what they do or how they manage the data". It is disingenuous to claim that people can just outsource the whole problem and not care.
This would be part of the responsibility of the cloud managers, which need to be hired, paid and trained, on top of the cost of paying the cloud providers. There is no free lunch.
I am responsible for security reviews. I never claimed it was that simple, nor that there was free lunch. I said it is easier to outsource it than to handle it yourself to an equal level of what a cloud provider is able to do, from a legal and operational perspective.
Easier is a very subjective measurement. Lets compare two solutions with different hires. One hire system administrators that rent space in a serverhall. The other hire cloud managers that rent space in the cloud.
What can we definitive say about the difference be in salaries, training, and team size? Can we say anything specific about legal and operational perspective?
Sorry but I think it is indeed much easier to have a cloud provider take care of those things. That's partly how we came to the situation we are in: a lot of people outsourced this type of work to Microsoft or AWS, because it was easier.
I get what you are saying, that responsibility is still yours for making the correct choices, and to know what the cloud providers are doing. In the real world though hardly anybody cares, even though we have threats like the CLOUD act in place. So, yeah, people should care but ultimately they often don't.
Yes, it is true that no one ever got fired for buying IBM. It is also very common that people just use an AI for reviews and then deal with the fallout if anyone actually calls them on the bluff. Paying fines, if anyone do care, are just part of doing business.
However in the same way, it doesn't then matter much if you are using the cloud or not. The work needing to copy the output of an AI to fill in the forms takes similar amount of time.
If you drive in Sweden you will occasionally come up to a form of speed reduction strategy that may seem counterintuitive. They all add to make driving harder and feel more dangerous in order to force attention and lower speed.
One is to merge opposite directional roads into a single lane, forcing drivers to cooperate and take turn to pass it, one car at a time.
For a combined car and pedestrian road (max speed of 7km/h) near where I live, they intentionally added large obfuscating objects on the road that limited visibility and harder to navigate. This forces drivers to drive very slow, even when alone on the road, as they can't see if a car or person may be behind the next object.
In an other road they added several tight S curves in a row, where if you drive anything faster than 20km/h you will fail the turns and drive onto the artificial constructed curbs.
In other roads they put a sign in the middle of two way roads while at the same time drastically limiting the width to the curb, forcing drivers to slow down in order to center the car in the lane and squeeze through.
In each of those is that a human driver with human fear of crashing will cause drivers to pay extra attention and slow down.
In Bulgaria we have a similar speed reduction strategy but we are a bit ahead of Sweden:
We use medium-radius but very deep potholes. If you lose attention for even a split second, you are forced to a full stop to change a tire.
Near schools it gets more "advanced": they put parked cars on both sides of the road, and the holes positioned so you can't bypass them. For example, two tire-sized holes on both sides of the road right next to the parked cars. You have to come to a complete stop, then slowly descend into the hole with the front wheels, climb back out, and repeat the process for the rear wheels. Occasionally, even though we (technically) have sidewalks, they are covered in mud or grass or bushes, so pedestrians are forced to walk in the middle of the road. This further reduces driving speed to walking pace and increases safety in our cities. Road markings are missing almost everywhere and they put contradicting road signs so drivers are not only forced to cooperate but also to read each other minds.
That’s genius but one has to ask: how much does it cost to maintain these speed restricting features?
In the UK, the cost of owning a car is high yet our potholes, while frequent, are small enough to survive. Thus being more of an annoyance rather than a speed restriction.
It's fairly common at least in the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland too. In Switzerland they also place street parking spots on alternating sides on narrow streets, which also makes you more attentive and lower your speed.
I've heard that that is why roundabouts are safer than their alternatives: counterintuitively, they're safer because they're less safe, forcing the user to pay more attention as a result.
Roundabouts are safer. They're safer because they prevent everybody from speeding through the intersection. And, even in case of an accident, no head-on collisions happen in a roundabout.
They're safer specifically for vehicles, as they convert many conflicts that would be t-bones (worst for passengers) into getting rear-ended (maximum crumple zone on both vehicles).
Roundabouts are worse for land use though, which impacts walkability, and the safety story for pedestrians and bike users with them is decidedly not great as well.
> and the safety story for pedestrians and bike users with them is decidedly not great as well.
The what now? Seriously, what in the world are you talking about? Roundabouts are heaven. They physically force drivers to slow down when approaching or leaving them, creating a safe environment for pedestrians and cyclists.
For example, there's no such thing as "running a red light at full speed" at a roundabout, no speeding up to "make the light", etc.
For cyclists specifically, they're amazing, because they eliminate the deadly left-turns. Every turn is a right turn, which is super safe.
As a cyclist, I'm not a big fan of roundabouts, because I'm always worried I'll get hit on the side by a car entering/leaving the roundabout whenever I don't take the first exit, mostly because I feel like I have less visibility in the direction from which the car might come from, compared to a standard crossing.
Though I've never been in an accident either on a crossing or roundabout, so I can't really judge how true my impression is.
>Roundabouts are worse for land use though, which impacts walkability, and the safety story for pedestrians and bike users with them is decidedly not great as well.
They're much safer for pedestrians than intersections. You're only crossing and dealing with traffic coming from one direction, stopping at a median, and then crossing further over.
Unlike trying to navigate a crosswalk where you have to play guessing games as to which direction some vehicle is going to come at you from while ignoring the lights (people do the stupidest things, and roundabouts are a physical barrier that prevents a bunch of that)
In Waterloo Region I used to cycle through multiple intersections that were "upgraded" some years ago from conventional stoplights to roundabouts and imo it was a huge downgrade to my sense of safety. I went from having a clear right of way (hand signal, cross in the crosswalk) to feeling completely invisible to cars, essentially dashing across the road in the gaps in traffic as if I was jaywalking.
I could handle it as an adult just walking my bike but it would be a nightmare for someone pushing a stroller or dependent on a mobility device.
Especially bad when crossings are like 30cm from the roundabout. Some are better with at least one car's length between the two.
Otherwise you either risk getting run over by a car exiting the roundabout without seeing you; or getting run over by the car that stopped, but was rear-ended by another inside the roundabout.
One-lane-roundabouts are very safe. I lived in Hannover (Germany) in the 80s and 90s, they had 2 or 3 lanes in the roundabouts. There were large signs that counted the accidents (200+/year) to raise awareness and during the trade fairs (anybody remembers Cebit?) the number of accidents peaked. Today they are all a lot safer because of a lot of traffic lights.
I thought that the idea of roundabouts was that they lead to slightly more accidents than before, but they are of much lower severity than before (the 90 degree intersections they replace).
I would say it depend on where you are. City driving is generally not a great experience and its not that uncommon to see a speed bump before almost every crossing, to the point where you get surprised if there isn't one. That said, as long you don't leave the designated main roads that goes through the city areas it is not that bad. They do demand a lot of attention.
Street parking has mostly been turned into exclusive residential parking, so parking houses are often the only choice. As a result they are quite expensive, and you got to walk to the destination.
Parking and access is much better in the country side, and the highways are fairly good and similar to those found in the west Europe. It not as straight or wide as authobahn, but not as much traffic either.
why not just put in speedbumps if all you're trying to do is slow people down? Are you sure this was the purpose of these designs? sounds a little too freakonomics to me.
They also are rather expensive to maintain, because the leading ledge gets many repeated stresses. And in nordic climates like Sweden there is a snow plow in the winter to remove snow - those occasionally snag on the speed bump - which tends to chip of big chunk, triggering rapid wear.
It's a runaway process of prioritizing safety over convenience -- and it's wrecking their road base just before self-driving cars would allow them to have both.
I was wondering how much convenience is worth one kid's life. This thread reminded me of some interesting terms like "value of statistical life." It appears that all those annoying low speed limits and purposeful obstructions in residential areas really do save lives.
> An evaluation of 20 mph zones in the UK demonstrated that the zones were effective both in reducing traffic speed and in reducing RTIs. In particular child pedestrian injuries were reduced by 70 per cent from 1.24 per year in each area before to 0.37 per year after the zones were introduced
20mph residential is pretty close to standard. Note the Waymo car was going slower than that. That's far from the 5mph GP was reacting too, or the super tight curves.
What an American framing. My convenience at the cost of your eventual safety. I guess this is why we also have toddler death machines with 5-foot grills that we call “full size” vehicles.
> If you've ever driven more than 5 miles an hour, you risked hurting someone for your convenience.
Taken literally, that's clearly not true.
For example you can easily drive 150mph in the flat desert where there is nothing for a hundred miles and you can see many miles ahead. You have zero risk of hurting anyone else unless they somehow teleport in front of you.
But driving 5mph in tight street full of elementary school kids running around can be extremely dangerous.
You’re egocentric instead of system-centric. Life has risks, but risk is to be managed, not accepted blindly with disregard of available options. A systemic approach to minimizing risk of injury on roads looks exactly like inconvenience to the individual.
In many civilized countries and locales, even bringing up the word “convenience” in the context of road safety would be considered tasteless. Maybe a phrase like “excessively obstructive” or other euphemisms would be used, but the word “inconvenient” regarding safety measures that would e.g. help prevent the death of toddlers today would be appalling.
There’s this techbro utopia mindset leaking through as well, just like it does for climate change topics, that pragmatic solutions that work for us today are deprioritized because some incredible technology is right around the corner. This is also distinctly American, specifically Silicon Valley, culture.
Gosh, no, the self-driving cars will be forced to drive at safe speeds in pedestrian corridors as opposed to voluntarily driving at safe speeds in pedestrian corridors. How awful.
Does the phrase "5mph speed limit everywhere" convince you it's possible to go too far? If not then I don't think you're in alignment with most of the world.
It is, but it's laughable to suggest it's happening anywhere. Our world is dominated by cars. You likely can't see it precisely because it's so normalized.
“Just before” … this would mean all cars would be required to be self driving and that they’re forced to adhere to the set speed limits. You think this is just around the corner? In a country like Sweden with a lot of snow? Let’s talk about that this when we’re actually close to hitting 100% of self driving cars on the road.
And it’s not “runaway”, it’s exactly the right prioritisation. I’d encourage you to spend some time on Not Just Bikes and the say whether you’d like to live in a Nordic or an American neighbourhood. The Nordic style is also about convenience because car centric infrastructure makes a lot of things less accessible and convenient.
Those things all sound easy to remove in some hypothetical future where there are enough and safe enough self driving cars to have both. Makes sense to design for human driven cars for now though.
Many roads in London have parked cars on either side so only one can get through - instead of people cooperating you have people fighting, speeding as fast as they can to get through before someone else appears, or race on-coming cars to a gap in the parked cars etc. So when they should be doing 30mph, they are more likely doing 40-45. Especially with EVs you have near-instant power to quickly accelerate to get to a gap first etc.
And putting obstacles in the road so you cant see if someone is there? That sounds really dangerous and exactly the sort of thing that caused the accident in the story here.
Yes. They have made steady progress over the previous decades to the point where they can now have years with zero road fatalities.
> And putting obstacles in the road so you cant see if someone is there? That sounds really dangerous and exactly the sort of thing that caused the accident in the story here.
Counterintuitive perhaps, but it's what works. Humans adjust their behaviour to the level of perceived risk, the single most important thing is to make driving feel as dangerous as it is.
I think the humans in London at least do not adjust their behaviour for the perceived risk!
From experience they will adjust their behaviour to reduce their total travel time as much as possible (i.e. speed to "make up" for lost time waiting etc) and/or "win" against other drivers.
I guess it is a cultural thing. But I cannot agree that making it harder to see people in the road is going to make anything safer. Even a robot fucking taxi with lidar and instant reaction times hit a kid because they were obscured by something.
> I think the humans in London at least do not adjust their behaviour for the perceived risk!
Sure they do, all humans do. Nobody wants to get hurt and nobody wants to hurt anyone else.
(Yes there are few exceptions, people with mental disorders that I'm not qualified to diagnose; but vast majority of normal humans don't.)
Humans are extremely good at moderating behavior to perceived risk, thank evolution for that.
(This is what self-driving cars lack; machines have no fear of preservation)
The key part is perceived though. This is why building the road to match the level of true risk works so well. No need for artificial speed limits or policing, if people perceive the risk is what it truly is, people adjust instictively.
This is why it is terrible to build wide 4 lane avenues right next to schools for example.
There are always going to be outlier events. If for every one person who still manages to get hit—at slow, easily-survivable speeds—you prevent five others from being killed, it’s a pretty obvious choice.
I know the research and know that it's generally considered to be effective (at least in most European cities where it is done). I wonder whether there are any tipping points, e.g. drivers going into road rage due to excessive obstacles/trying to "make up for the lost time" etc., and whether it would work in the US (or whether drivers just would ignore the risk because they don't perceive pedestrians as existing).
Does physics work? If it does, then these physical obstacles work too. Go ahead, try to drive faster than 10mph through a roadway narrowed so much it's barely wider than your car, with curbs. And yeah, I'm describing a place in London.
In the old time with init scripts you had to figure out where to put all those sleep(10) based on the servers specific hardware and software stack. Far from everything in the initi script blocked execution until they completely finished, and things that previously worked could suddenly stop working if you changed hardware or software.
The big difference that created deterministic servers in the past is that you could install the server once and then leave it for 10+ years without doing any updates. People were proud of servers and services with massive uptimes with no patches and no reboots. I only see those now if they either have no internet connection or are locked down containers with very restricted network access.
I mentioned it in the comment above. Commands that you run in a shell script do not always block execution until the underlying resources is fully available. If we take the network as an example, the script to open a vpn tunnel and providing the tap0 device may not be available for the next command to use just because you first run the network script, then start the vpn daemon, and then start the next daemon. What people did was to add a bunch of sleep(10) in hope that the tap0 was up by the end of the sleep, and this might had worked great for a few years until the admin added a few too many complex rules to the network daemon and now it need to be sleep(15) instead, but only on some days in the week. Everyone also knew (and ignored) that adding sleep in the initscript was a sign of bad design and extremely brittleness.
Debian did have a fairly good init builder that attempted to do some form of dependency ordering and trickery to get things done in the right order and in the right time, where you wrote a service-like configuration file and than rebuilt the initscript. The builder then compiled the configuration files into an generated shell script. Redhat did something similar if I recall right.
Manually editing the generated shell script was seen as both dodgy, brittle and dangerous given that it could be arbitrary changed by any installed package. Some packages also sed and awk directly at the generated init script.
e.g. Starting something in the background and having to stick sleep statements into the script to wait till it is ready to receive requests on whatever port it uses. The sleeps are fine on one machine and on another they aren't enough.
Stashing the PID somewhere and writing code to use the PID to work out if the process is still running and hasn't crashed so you can report a status on it. It's just a waste of one's own time doing this repeatedly and there are ways to do it badly. Every initscript repeated the work.
You could probably do something quite good with bash if you provided a library of functions and demanded that scripts be written to use them.
I think it's the brittleness. Tomorrow your ethernet adapter is enp4s1 instead of enp3s0 (because of systemd) so your rc script doesn't set up networking and you have to fix it.
This was almost 30 years ago so my memory is fading, but pre-devfs when they were just in the /proc tree you could tell the kernel to bring them up in a given order and so assign the name you wanted to a given card.
Network interfaces always had names sequentially assigned by the kernel. systemd overrides them based on PCIe bus location, which changes when you install new hardware. Lennart insists that PCIe bus locations don't change when you install hardware, even though this is obviously wrong as proven by real–world evidence.
Two law changes was added last year to prevent this. First, any decision remains in force indefinite as long the person remains in the country. The second is that all applications will be running simultaneous and the final decision is given at the same time, with no option to change application afterward if the result returned negative.
The system has some drawbacks, especially if the applicant apply for the wrong thing and don't change it until the decision has been reached, but it removes stalling and delaying tactics.
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