hguant

There comes a point where the money just isn't a motivating factor anymore, and companies are struggling to figure out how to work in that environment. This bit from the author hits the nail on the head:

>Is an extra $10k per year worth learning a new org, a new skillset, a new set of expectations, a new set of coworkers, and a new boss?

For many engineers, the answer is: “No.”

Yes I could quit and get a ~20k raise by shopping my resume around, but I don't need the money. I have enough for a down payment on a house, I meet my expenses for the month with 1/2 of one paycheck, I can buy a new car on a credit card if I wanted to. More money would be _nice_, and I imagine I'd be singing a slightly different song if I had kids, but it's much less important than knowing the work that I do has meaning and an immediate impact on the world, and about as important as working with new/interesting technology. I imagine there are a lot of early career (26-30 year old) software engineers who are in a similar boat. If money was a motivator I'd be serially founding companies and striving to be The Next Big Thing. I'm just not. I'm happy being hire number 13, or 99, and working with people I like doing work I find value in.

Edited for spelling

>they have to solve all those solved problems again because companies that solved the problems won't share their solutions.

...because those solutions are the company's competitive advantage that China has tried to steal for years on end now? Not to mention in many instances those 'solutions' are owned by or access controlled by the parent country of said company, many of which view China as at the least a bad faith actor, and at the worst an inevitable opponent?

Pretending China hasn't engaged in the world's largest industrial espionage campaign over the last two decades, and then victim blaming the companies involved for not "sharing their solutions" with China is a perverse form of logic.

Yes - basically, high quantities of volcanic ash act as a much stronger binder than is currently used/available now, and the chemistry of the cement they used meant that as it aged it got stronger.

Tangentially - it's not that we can't make concrete that way, it's that for many structures we're building of concrete, building to last 100+ years is over kill, and would increase costs drastically for a building or structure that will most likely be torn down before it reaches its life expectancy.

I think writing down your master password, or the hard recovery keys, on a piece of paper, and storing that with your lawyer or in a safety deposit box accessible by your lawyer/executor of your estate is the correct way to go about this.

I feel like there isn't really a strong need for a purely technical solution here, when the problem of "get information to person or persons after my death" has been largely solved by the legal and banking system.

This is being pitched like it's a DC issue, but any one who lives in the area can tell you that the stretch of road they're talking about - Fredericksburg to Aquia, from what I can tell - is god awful, has been god awful, and from what I can see will continue to be God awful for the foreseeable future.

As for the plowing and salting - in general it's pretty bad, and this year has been no exception. Fairfax County was, as of the day before this storm, putting up flyers in 24 hour laundromats and outside of grocery stores looking for anyone who had a license to drive a plow truck. The problem is that, while we get hit with bad snow once every 2-3 years, that's not often enough for the local governments to need to do something about it. They don't want to spend the money, only to not need it until the next big storm, which might not come until someone else is in office.

The accused's criminal history comes up more in sentencing than it does in actual criminal cases - in the US system you're being tried on the crime before the court, not anything from your past. There are obvious exceptions - someone who is suspected of murdering their spouse who has prior domestic violence charges is one you see a lot - but in general, that comes up during the sentencing, where the judge has a lot of leeway to tailor the sentence to the circumstances.

>but I don't see why the EU shouldn't be able to defend it's own territory in a conventional war.

Because money spent in an efficient and effective system has more power than money spent in an ineffective and bloated system. One example - Germany doesn't actually have enough helicopters operational to meet their needs, so they used civilian contractor helicopters in Afghanistan.

The structures are just so different that it's hard to make good comparisons. Germany can't keep its troops and equipment equipped or repaired _at home_, while Russian is capable of doing so thousands of miles from beyond its borders.

The German military in particular is "neither structurally capable nor equipped" to meet its defense obligations, according to the German parliamentary commissionor for the armed forces. Their helicopter readiness is something like 15%, they don't have the funding to keep their navy seaworthy, for most of 2018-20 they only had enough operational armaments to keep 4 of their eurofighter jets armed. They don't have enough body armor for all their troops, so they rotate it out to whichever battalion is active. Current bundeswehr projections are that they'll be able to equip all their troops in 2031.

It's gotten so bad that the German 2019 readiness report was kept secret, after the 2018 report was so bad.

Long story short, the German military is fundamentally incapable of meeting its basic defensive goals (defending the home territory of the nation), while Russia is a near peer competitor with the United States, and is capable of offensive force projection thousands of miles from it's home territory

Links for the quotes and numbers.

https://dsm.forecastinternational.com/wordpress/2019/01/31/g...

https://sofrep.com/amp/specialoperations/germanys-military-r...

https://www.strifeblog.org/2020/07/03/the-german-military-mu...

>There really needs to be a term for this widespread inability to differentiate between 'the science' as in the correct application of the scientific method to arrive at empirical conclusions about the world around us and 'The Science' as in the socio-political institution of various experts and technocrats.

The issue is that, at least in the US, it has become politically advantageous to claim that the socio-political institution of 'The Science' has given its imprimatur to the policies they wish to enact. It's advantageous to combine the institution with the process, so why would anyone stop?

Couple that with a media environment that seems fundamentally incapable of reading beyond the headline of any scientific publication, and the proliferation of p-hacking and less then replicable studies being churned out by academics who need N articles to have a chance at tenure this decade and...you get a situation where 'The Science' is whatever a bureaucrat in a lab coat says it is.

The UI issue is real, and is a problem, but the root cause of the 7th Fleet's crashes during that time period is lack of training and inadequate leadership, due to an operational tempo that's Thenot sustainable given current funding and ships. Instead of building new cruisers, or taking the time to dry dock and repair these ships, the admiralty has been ok'ing "at sea" repairs, leading to situations like this where primary systems aren't functional and back up systems are run for far longer than intended. The admiralty has been looking for technical solutions to a human problem for about a decade now, becaise they'd rather buy a new set of carriers and the F-35 than build the ships they need to support the mission given to them by Congress. The result is burnout, and incidents like this.

The Navy as a whole has a severe manpower shortage, and in the incident report for the McCain collision I believe it came out that the officer on duty was 17 hours into their watch, and didn't have a full compliment in the watch house because one of the crew who was supposed to be there was off in the lower decks for an unstated purpose (anecdotal evidence from my Navy friends, probably catching up on sleep, or seconded to repair something while they had "non-critical" time).

The collision only happened because instead of being trained on seamanship as a whole, incoming officers are trained how to work the computer systems they're interfacing with. The Navy cut down the training periods as well - instead of training under a senior officer for a few months, to offset manpower shortages, incoming officers are put in charge immediately, and given a stack of CDs (wish I was kidding) to complete their training.

The surface Navy is in an incredibly dysfunctional place right now, and Congress/the admiralty have been paperig over leadership failures by spending more money, and blaming technology

A lot of research institutions will have a greater number of graduate students than undergraduate students, as grad students are (supposedly) the focus of the organization - they're the ones who are training to be members of the academy after all!

A quick google shows that Yale has 7,357 graduate students enrolled for the 2020-2021 academic year. While the number of administrative faculty ballooning like this is absurd (one is reminded of the University of California system building a new billion dollar[0] campus _solely for administrators_), it makes more sense in the context of ~12,000 students, and ~5,000 faculty.

[0] - I don't recall the exact number off of the top of my head, all I can remember was that it seemed extravagant and absurd.

>they have some initial mission they can do efficiently

Because the initial mission is still, by and large, done by volunteers and unpaid editors.

Wikimedia is a bloated leech

> There's a couple of things in there that are just correlated to the fact that the author is around young/wealthy people, like the low obesity rate

The other issue is geographic - the author is a grad student in DC, which is one of the more fit areas of the country. This is one of the few cases where I'd say it's more a class thing than a wealth thing. Political staffers and the generic military types by and large, are not wealthy people, but are very scrupulous about avoiding obesity.

Literally everything you've said is is just patently false, and betrays a such severe lack of any sort of knowledge or understanding about the subject matter that one can only assume bad faith, or else that you're an object lesson in the failure of the US education system.

There's "uranium in the planet" - lots! - and "uranium accessible to humans" - not so much.

The other fuel used would be plutonium and thorium, I believe. My understanding (not a nuclear scientist) is that there's a cycle of enrichment and decay that produces more fissile materials than it consumes.

Interestingly, from my perusal of wikipedia, it seems like you effectively can recycle the uranium isotopes indefinitely in such a reactor, as well as generating fissile plutonium and thorium.

Again, the problem is that generating fissile plutonium is how you make a bomb

I had a conversation with a co-worker who used to work for Toshiba heavy industries on their nuclear stuff - he made the interesting point that there's only so much accessible uranium on the planet, to the point where we'd use up all of it in ~75 years if we were running the entire planet on nuclear. The only way around this is to use breeder reactors, which is a huge no-no from an international relations perspective because those are the same types of reactors used to make nuclear grade fissile materials.

>Honestly I think this is good and inevitable part of living with renewable energy.

"It's good that the little people suffer, it will make them pay attention and live a more virtuous life."

I mean, the quote and the article disagree with what you're saying - it's not the "invisible hand of the market", it's a policy choice by California to prioritize buying from renewables over "dirty" power. Oil and coal can eat that because they have lower operating costs and fill a different need than nuclear does. Implying that this is due to the superiority of "the juggernaut of solar" seems incorrect to me.

I get there's this utopian vision of solar, and the gains in the industry have been impressive, but those gains are backed by some really deep market subsidies and policy choices - which, to be fair, were needed to get the technology off the ground. However, it's not there yet, and it didn't get there under its own power. What we're seeing here is a repercussion of those policy choices, not the a market stabilization in favour of a superior player.

Most cities have comedy clubs; don't go to those. Go to the bars that do weekly standup, those are the places the comedy show folks go to try out new material, or where newer folks try to break into the scene. You get exposed to a lot of things that would never be allowed on any sort of broadcast medium, and are often uproariously funny.

> to having sparks generated by bullets hitting e.g. metal and even then, there's not a lot of sparks

Just wanted to chime in on this - it's impossible for most bullets to cause a spark, unlike what TV and movies show. Most projectiles (including the .303 round the British were using back then!) are lead with a copper plating, which are both non-ferrous metals.

Some Soviet era and US military ammunition (specifically m855 rounds) have a steel core, and those can cast sparks, but almost all handguns, and most rifles, aren't using ammunition capable of doing do.

It doesn't have any impact on inflation beyond what's already happening, I think is a better way of phrasing things.

The coin doesn't go into circulation, it just lets the member banks of the Federal Reserve have an asset (dollars) to borrow against and fund their current operations. This does have an impact on inflation, but it's not the same as dumping USD one trillion in bills into general circulation.

Chomsky, again, finds what ever facts he can to fit his theories, and disregards everything else. He's a proponent of the sort of effete liberalism of the 80's and 90's, which says "well, if you're not perfect, then you're not allowed to say anything about other's actions"; a liberalism that's very comfortable, very twee, and quite content to do nothing, having shown how very very clever it is, and how very very little anything other than being clever matters.

Unfortunately, we do not live in Mr. Chomsky's world, where genocide can be waved aside as "internal repression" and immediately dismissed with a coy reference the US allowing misbehavior in Israel, as if it was a 51st state. Sadly, we cannot take a bare statement of the ridiculousness of US military power, and uncritically assume that there's no deep value the world gets from US hegemony, crumbling though it may be.

The whole article boils down to "The US has done things I think are bad, therefore it shouldn't do anything because it has no moral leg to stand on." That might work for wowing undergraduates; it does not make for good international policy.

I think the key take away from the article is this line:

>...higher-level innovation? Ironically, factory owners said that's happening where the industry is — overseas.

I don't think there's anything ironic about this. Innovation happens close to the product, where you can get a true understanding of what you're doing and what the process is. We see this in projects gone awry all the time - until you're sitting at your desk working on the project, you don't know what the problem space actually is.

In addition to all the obvious problems with the dismantling of America's manufacturing capacity, I think this is one of the real, critical, and silent issues - for a country that keeps touting innovation, not a lot of that happens here... apart from industries where there still is a strong manufacturing core in the country. The mercantilist rhetoric about buy American is stupid, but so is the blind faith that global capitalism won't destroy the ground it's built on.

Does an instructor who trains someone who goes on to commit murder using the techniques they taught become legally culpable for the murder?

If your company offers some service - consulting to set up their infrastructure, or helping them navigate AWS - necessary to the running of the company, and that company goes on to commit a crime are you at fault? They couldn't have done it with out you, after all.

I was typing up a response, but "space enthusiast" on your profile sums it up - you're statements show your enthusiasm, but not any real understanding of the problem space.

The statements above are wildly optimistic, and don't actually take into account the actual capabilities and capacities of the launch vehicles in question. Furthermore, you're showing an extreme disregard for the actual engineering problems at hand here. It's a multi-decade process to design, build, and certify a launch vehicle _for LEO_. Handwaving "we can do it in 5 years" because the sales teams at SpaceX said so is, frankly, not a real answer. Talking about the "good state" the SLS/Orion are going to be in is, frankly, optimistic to the point of being naive.

Spewing factoids about spacecraft that don't actually exist beyond a "we blew it up on a launch pad" isn't an answer - it's a pipe dream.

Furthermore, you've deftly evaded even acknowledging the core problem - we don't have a space craft with an engine that can do the "back again" part of an L2 mission. That capacity literally doesn't exist right now. You can't just whistle up a rocket that works a few million miles from home.

Right, but the timeline of getting a human certified flight vehicle for a mission of that duration, carrying the amount of fuel needed for the "back again" portion of the trip is probably equivalent to the (delayed and prolonged) development time of the JWT.

We're on track for a manned moon mission in approximately 10 years, and the 'best minds' view building a robotic refueling station in cis-lunar space as the ideal means of making the launch realistically happen, owing to the issues of fuel weights. The rocket to do this mission doesn't exist, the space craft to go there doesn't exist, and the designs we do have (crew dragon, soyuz) aren't easily retrofitted to the mission requirements of going out to L2.

Theoretically solvable, yes. Practically impossible, especially when building another JWT would cost less, take less time (just do it again, but better!), and most importantly, risk fewer lives (0, by my count).

I think one of the foremost solutions to this problem set is Substack. There are a non-trivial number of journalists on there who's pitch is "hey, I don't want to be part of an institution that has bias/that I don't believe in, give me money and I'll deliver long form 'pure' essays to you."

The potential pitfall is that one can end up only subscribing to journalists that agree with ones point of view. I personally think this is offset by the kinds of view points that are attracted to or do well on a space like Substack, but that might just be me.

>But actual certified N95 masks just became unavailable instead of having high prices.

Part of that is because 3M has been incredibly good about not raising their prices, and has been very clear to its distributors that they're not ok with them raising the prices. Of course this does nothing to stop the hoarders/private sales jacking up prices on eBay...

>Now, more often than not, I work with teams that have been copy/pasting git commands not knowing what they do, that have never, ever looked the source code of their framework or don't know how to use a debugger.

Thank you for reminding me that it's about time for my yearly reread of Pro Git. It's amazing how many people look at you like you're a wizard when you just...read the documentation.

My understanding is that this goes back to Rotterdam being a free or open port, since the late Renaissance period. The Netherlands has been a proponent of free trade and what we'd call international citizenship for a very long time

>If you weaponize an exploit against US targets, you'll never get a US based broker to sell further exploits to you.

If you weaponize an exploit against US - especially US government - targets you jeopardize the military and intelligence alliance that keeps your country alive, not to mention the standing FBI warrants if you have the misfortune to enter the country, nor the forfeiture of your ability to use the world banking system.