On Mutual Exclusivity

Lots of the things on this blog talk in terms of “it is better to do good-thing-X than good-thing-Y”. Just like there’s an implicit “too” after “Black Lives Matter”, there’s an implicit “if X and Y are in conflict” after these statements. Often, they aren’t in conflict. In many cases, in fact, good prior engineering practices should have brought about an environment in which X and Y is easier to achieve than either X or Y alone. However, sometimes that ain’t what we got, and that’s where the advice in these posts applies.