PeterHolzwarth

I wonder if the deeply isolated experience of covid actually feeds into and supports the original premise, in its own inverse way.

Win 10 continues to be the most attractive OS Microsoft currently kinda provides, despite being borderline unsupported.

It continues to astonish me just how staggeringly anti-user MS's OneDrive push has gotten: think of Word or other tools - they actively hide the option (buried in small-text sub-sub options) to save a damn file onto your local computer.

It's just opinion blogging.

Good point - the linked article, and the article it itself links to, essentially, but without realizing it, indicates the American experience of WWII.

The entire country suddenly and powerfully altered to support total war. Every fit man under 40, pretty much, shipped off to be in the military (you can see hints of this in late-war films, where each male actor has a line explaining why they are in an American setting vs being in foreign lands ("I'll be shipping in out in two months, so I have time to solve this murder mystery til then")).

All industry shifted to produce the massive needs of the war, vast swathes of the female populace brought in from being a housewife to become factory workers creating the materiel for combat at a truly astonishing scale.

All of this jarring shock to the entire country creating the novel collective experience of total war that temporarily upended and transformed the society. All this creating that "collective crisis."

But, that's a bit of a tangent. On the other hand, Apple is accused of (and a jury ruled against them on the issue) hiring from Masimo to steal trade secret. Appeals are pending, of course, but it's a reminder that Apple is not lily white on this topic.

There are excellent engineers in India, but the system they operate in unfortunately doesn't allow them to shine.

And look at Michigan - given the odd spatial realities of the state, that's just bloody minded. I didn't realize Arizona was that county-by-county nuanced: I assumed the whole state did its own "screw clock changes" thing (tho the oddity of Wendover, a recent change, makes sense). And Puerto Rico looks to be doing Eastern time merely out of politeness.

I've never understood the value in comparing relatively densely populated European countries to America. The practical realities of each just make them quite different in terms of basic utilities and infrastructure.

A nation-wide-ish utilities business in America is just a different kind of beast relative to whichever European country one wants to compare it to.

<edit> Some commenters have usefully brought up the example of Sweden. Sweden is a larger country than the rural US state of Idaho, and has a large population as well. But I notice that the population density is less widespread than Idaho, to a fair degree, and also has a GDP that is about 10x than the state of Idaho. I think the general idea of scale - given that basic infrastructure favors being nation-wide - plays into this. America is a very large country that makes infrastructure have it's own unique rules to play by. That is, infrastructure tends to favor being nation wide. Large countries have their own calculus to run with when it comes to very sizable scale (not to discount the important impact of regulation!)

<second edit: sorry! I know this is not cool when it comes to editing, but I keep thinking about this topic due to interesting comments>.

Another key point is what I'll call "distance from density." A person living in a typical European country is not that far from a major conurbation - not all that far from a place of serious population density. High speed infrastructure favors the customer-density of such places. But, when one looks at a variety of far-flung US states, you see that those states' major cities are, well, not all that major.

Looking at my example of Idaho, it's largest city (far to the south) has a population of about a quarter million within the state. Just west over the border is another city in a different state - also about a quarter million. The distance to a business-favoring high-density city for this kind of place is a bit staggering. These areas are truly far from anything the rest of us would call a proper city, with all the efficiency-favoring density (and business density) that it entails.

I think we are past the point where we can just dismiss their input - these new tools do legitimately add value, it appears.

I think we've gone beyond anecdotal evidence of experience engineers finding true value in this new tech. It may not have registered yet, but skilled people are unequivocally finding value in these tools.

I agree that we have yet to settle down on the true costs involved (which will probably end up at "slightly less than a junior engineer" or something like that) - but we are months beyond the idea that it's all smoke and mirrors and no one is getting value out of it.