957 karma · joined November 18, 2013
When employers and politicians herded workers through tightly packed public transport with zero effective protection (partially due to lack of discipline, partially due to lack of investment), I felt save & secure in my movable tin box.
Yes, I am paying a lot for that box.
And, do realize, that public transport is and will be for the plebs. Even if it's green. Not spoken in derogative manner, it's just that. Noone of high enough status is going to bike or limit themselves in any way, shape, or form. If they do bike, they'll be taking the car when you aren't looking or helicopter in. That probably still is going to solve the problem of mass transit, but the few who are not mass are going to continue to enjoy unlimited individual and privat transport whereas the rest of us won't. It's a decline in a dimension of freedom and not recognizing and admitting that fact is dishonest.
Anybody who is usefully skillful and economically useful will be earning north of 57k. Anybody who is all that and earning less than the equivalent German is a means to keep salaries low. There is an oversupply of cheap labour fuelling the Niedriglohnsektor already.
That also means that high-performing individuals with an already appropriately high base income will be paying 42% on any € pay increase, which is not a good incentive to make people work more and/or more stressful and/or more highly skilled jobs /in Germany/. Why here, if you can be highly skilled and high earning in Switzerland and be able to achieve a multiple of net income and get a better pension system to boot?
To add to your point, the pipeline of cheap labor is also getting cut at the other end --- with quality of life increases, skill and education increase, manufacturing hubs like China are getting continuously more expensive to use vs already expensive local hands.
With this diminishing cost differential, the only way out is for the countries that were depending on that differential to increase their value-add to the global economy in order to eke out a new differential by being able to demand a premium on local products (knowledge products and physical products) because of tech/quality advantages.
Unfortunately, exactly in this regard Germany is also falling back in the world. After losing leading positions in consumer electronics (80s/90s), mobile communication technology (90s/00s) and so on, little is left except from big auto, and big auto is already generating most of their profits abroad rather than at home. Frankly, it's getting hard to see what the country is wanting to sell to the world. There might be some highly competitive businesses left (see BionTech by sheer luck, a so-called and often-praised hidden champion), but that's hardly entire sectors of the economy.
Again, I'm not able to discern what the selling point of Germany is supposed to be. And no politician has made any honest attempt to tell and plan instead of running on hope alone. At the moment, Germany's migration-fueled economy parts are growing based on the most primitive producitivity factor in existence --- head count. And head count is not going to be enough for the future. You need factor productivity, and that's not coming.
A large bill is probably chump change for someone like Troy, for others it's a year or two of savings. The risk is not worth it.
Jenkins is a batteries excluded pattern in one of its worst possible incarnations.
Jenkins is basically a CI framework for trusted users only. Untrusted workloads must not have access to anything Jenkins.
And for me, that's a key difference. Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, all garbage --- staying logged into several AWS SSM sessions in different accounts at the same time w/ full features, logged into several paypal accounts at once etc etc etc. The containers fix so much of web dumbness that they've become indespensable in my workflow, both at work and at home. Unless the other browsers have feature parity regarding MAC, they are not even among the competition.
For example, you can use latest systemd to basically replace all of docker and then some. It provides advanced sandboxing, resource control and job control for units and even manages "containers". Which is why my private servers mostly use systemd properly configured to provide what containers are thought to provide. The deployment is switching out a binary or add a directory tree, override a .service line and then reload and restart. Easy.
Though over a 10 year period, companies, developers and operators went all-in on "container runtimes" and here we are.
That being said, things like kubernetes are NOT NEW and NOT DIFFERENT from solutions like corosync+pacemaker (who remembers them?). They do the same thing, with the same levels of flexibility and extensibility and pluggability, just with containers. From my POV people who are surprised by k8s and its complexity never lived or forgot the cluster tech of the 00s. It's just about to come together as a circle, and the next iteration seems to be micro VMs instead of containers.
- unit tests should always complete locally - integration could also complete locally but are allowed more complex scenarios - in any case, we require developers to pull all their deps through a caching proxy (external system) to keep a lid on what they use, keep a lid on licenses used in our software, and keep open a door to centralized vuln tracking & management.
Though if you can't fully test a software locally by getting all units and integration components to spin up, this is mostly a consequence of bad system design, for example, if the one application depends on another one which can't be run locally, reasons for which are (a) no bootstrappable dev environment (b) no test data management/generation (c) no license (d) too complex for the originating team to provide or (e) proprietary applience no one but the operating team understands. (a) through (e) all encountered at $currentjob and not happy about it, but what can you do? beg the other team to fix their shit and wait or just bite the apple and deploy to "dev stage" to get the testing done.