kreims

RSS is a pretty good way around this. Disabling JavaScript is also a good option to cut down on the silliness. If it breaks the site, it was probably not worth reading.

Four years.

If only you knew how bad things really are.

I’d suspect there is significant growth of businesses acting as intermediaries for cloud storage. I think that other software providers have also realized that ransoming users data is a great way to extract predictable, hedge-fund-owner-pleasing revenue without performing useful work.

AEC software providers all do this. ProjectWise is worse than owning or renting a plain file server in every way I can imagine, yet every consultant in transportation dutifully cuts Bentley a five-figure check or larger every year so they can hold your project files hostage and pretend to develop software.

I pray for a merciful asteroid to end it all.

I think universal conscription is a good idea for the sole reason that everyone should get a bit of this perspective. The people who’ve never left the nice-people bubble of college and professional employment will go to completely inappropriate lengths to avoid feeling offended. You said the manager’s idea was maybe not as good as the other thing in a meeting? You just made an enemy for life. Meanwhile soldiers have productive and respectful working relationships with people who they physically fight with the day before because that’s a better alternative to however UCMJ allows your commander to screw up your life.

It’s a great exercise in personal growth for coping skills.

You go to school and learn that 2+2=4. You get a consulting job and learn 2+2= whatever the client says it is.

I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the consulting engineer was incompetent. Sometimes a bureaucrat tells you to sharpen your pencils and come back with the answer That fits the budget they have if you want to keep your professional services contract going.

Never bet against a CIA spinoff.

Small benefit with externalized costs, I think.

There are benefits to in office work. I don’t consider them valuable enough to offset the cost of 10hrs of uncompensated time every week or doubling my mortgage cost. I hope tax codes will incentivize allowing remote work options given the reduced burden to transportation infrastructure.

Well, for the sake of clarity I would say Tor is safer only if it’s not a honey trap. That is not knowable as a user, but I think that suspicion is well-deserved.

I think the Middle East gave us a very clear example of how state actors may target channels in unexpected ways.

You know, I’m actually pretty surprised that there’s not more lobbying for some kind of tax incentives to promote remote work. It takes a lot of burden off transportation networks. Honestly, it’s probably cheaper than building more roads and more rail.

I suppose the best you can do is just use the commute cost in your calculations of what your compensation is worth. I made a lateral move to a company that offers hybrid work. The irony is the company I came from was all in office, but I worked exclusively with people outside of my office so I would drive to work just to interact with people on MSTeams.

The disturbing societal implications speak for themselves. Personally, I suspect a significant fraction of transactions on Only Fans or “influencer” platforms are money laundering or social engineering campaigns by deeply resourced actors. There may be a large number of clients that are bots making random subscriptions to keep the network alive and large enough to make moving targeted funds harder to observe.

A plausible scenario might be an FBI agent paying a confidential informant without creating an unexplained income stream. The FBI and friends disclosed spending around $0.5B on informants. The truth could be more. We don’t know what other agencies around the world spend. I imagine they aren’t putting cash in brown bags under park benches.

Please keep harping. The marketing myths that gets circulated about these models are creating very serious misunderstandings and misallocation of resources. I am hopeful that more cautious and careful dialogue like this will curb the notions of sentience or human intelligence that exciting headlines seemed to have put in the public discussion of these tools.

I’m more familiar with transportation grants than food grants, but I would imagine you write a proposal and get matching funds up to a certain ceiling, like 80-20 state-private up to $250,000, hypothetically. The costs on those blogs seem to refer to just furnishing equipment in a ready commercial space, though. If you’re having to develop a new site and incur construction costs, I could easily see spending $5M on a single site.

I’d think this is going to help producers upgrade or replace some existing equipment. Probably a good thing. $5.5M more than the market had, right?

I do wonder if there is some low hanging fruit on more efficiently connecting different stages of food production. Like a traveling salesman problem with getting food producers to packing.

ESOPs are common in the civil engineer world. I have mixed feelings about it. Private company stock valuations look like a magic show to my untrained eyes. Employee-only buying can lead to weird cash-flow schemes, like your ESOP contribution being held, unbeknownst to you, in a zero-interest slush fund until stock frees up.

What gets me most is that rank and file employees in the ESOP almost never have directly exercisable rights as shareholders to vote or have any say in the business. You don’t get to say no to a merger. You don’t get to fire the CEO when his big idea is a flop. The ESOP vote is wrapped up in a trust or some abstraction controlled by an advisor or a board probably appointed by the real board of the company. Ultimately the executive staff and hand-picked insiders will have all the real authority of ownership. Employee stock thus is not much more than a complex pension program for almost everyone. Regular employees will not be real owners in any meaningful sense unless they get into the small trust network of existing owners.

If you’re an early arrival to an ESOP with good growth potential, you will do way better than someone with a little 401K match. They also get great tax breaks. Overall they’re good for employees, but the messaging is usually misleading.