netjiro

If the buyers' dogma is that the housing market will always go up, it is a great deal to buy/build very expensive houses. They will always appreciate.

Reality will disagree at some point.

bottom up molecular machinery

I think the most common mistake is the assumption that the coordination by the manager is essential to supply direction and avoid errors and mistakes. This is consistently assumed without actually measuring the amount and severity of mistakes without management direction.

I know I can trust my people to coordinate themselves with very low error rates as long as I provide them with the information and incentives they need to make the correct decisions by themselves.

The total cost of extra full time managers is significantly larger than the measured error cost.

Some of the common management tasks will be loaded onto leaf node staff. This costs less, mostly since they aggressively minimise those tasks to the bare minimum friction while a full time manager tend not to.

It is not 1950. We can trust our people to function much better given the right environment and tools. I've run several large complex international projects with very low management overhead.

If the reason we are discussing it is the climate effects, we need to look at systemic total CO2-equivalent emissions which are around 50 gigatons per year.

From my limited experience:

If the gemeinde wants more of the kind of professional skills you bring they will process the paperwork within a week.

There is a huge difference between cantons and gemeindes. There are tons of information online, but I cannot recommend without knowing, a lot, about what you are looking for.

I am really not trying to be an asshole. This is my limited experience.

Real estate prices are what I see as current. I am sure they were lower before, and outside the main tech regions, as always, everywhere.

Rental prices are accurate if I want the person to start within a few months. I am aware that the "normal" prices are much lower. But there are 5-15y queues to get a regular contract. None of my people have managed to get a "normal" apartment contract. Ever. We have had to rent from the private market pool which is much more expensive.

The issue with health care is anecdotal. But too many times my people and my friends have had excessive waiting times for simple consultations and treatments. This can be drastically reduced by having private insurance. Compare days vs months or years. When the health care works, it is very good.

Let's get some data, Sweden, 2020 SEK/y:

Approximated historic exchange rates: SEK / euro-dollar-franc: ca 0.1 - 0.12

Gross salary income at 90th percentile: 567 600

Actual sales cost for a small-medium company: 1 084 050

Included: VAT ca 25%, social fees ca 31%, other misc ca 10%

Net income after taxes: 420 492

So, about 61% is lost in taxes from gross billing to net income after tax, for someone earning at 90th percentile. "The world's highest taxes" is misleading. It really depends on your family situation and lifestyle:

For those 61% you get quite a lot when the system works. Free health care, education, child care, work-life balance, freedom, nature, social life, etc. I do not recommend living in Sweden without a good private medical insurance. The public health care is top notch when it works, but without private insurance odds are it will not work well in your case. If you are willing to put in 10-15MSEK for a house/apartment you can choose areas with very good schools, but it will take you many years to find a decent rental below 30k/m.

Society is generally very nice, open, liberal, clean. Nature is wonderful. 6 month winter is made for working, 4 month summer is made for swimming. I generally expect to get ca 1500h efficient time on target from the people I had in Sweden, and I expect to pay around 1kSEK/h effective.

I used to hire people and place them in Sweden. I have sadly not done that for several years. Slowness of immigration, severe lack of rental housing, etc. A good gemeinde+canton in Switzerland is much faster and smoother.

* sources: statistics office, tax office: SCB, SKV

> You need mass to accelerate.

* momentum , impulse , force

Even a simple design gives 80% capture

Plenty of options to fix that problem.

E.g. a cheap addition to existing installations: aircode.se

Limited but sane research from around 2013(?) points to even cheaper options of ventilation treatment.

Delivery drones are constructed for fairly narrow usage scenarios, and will get more specialised with time. For short hops with light loads air drones are already better than traditional solutions if they are allowed to be used as intended.

Air drones span orders of magnitude in cargo capacity, speed, distance. Drone ships, drone cars, ...

Don't use a hammer to drive a screw.

Regulatory compliance is, in many areas, a major cost of development. Sometimes the largest. Much of the regulation is in form, not function. Comply with box ticking and you pass, regardless of whether the product is safe in reality or not.

If regulation was focused on function it would be less expensive and yield better results for society.

> ... is not hindered by regulation.

It is effectively stymied by added total cost.

Agree.

Misaligned expectations. A todo list is an overhead. It is only helpful if it actually helps you remember / plan / coordinate / communicate more than the cost of maintenance.

Common misconception / misuse: a todo list is a hard set plan of things that have to get done.

For most, this is simply not reality.

Reality, for most ppl: it is a wishlist.

It is better to have that realisation from the start and avoid the negative psychological effect of unfinished todo items or miscommunication / malcoordination of mistaking it for future reality.

One startup I was helping a while back had serious todo-itis, with the common negative effects. To help: I bought shitty post-it stickers with very poor glue. They would fall to the floor in random fashion after a week or two [1]. This created a ridiculous exercise where the founder would update the notes that were still important to new stickys. But he would also start throwing things away. Stuff that was no longer that important. Wishlist.

Always work on the most important stuff. Items of lower priority can be allowed to fall off the list. By the time you might get around to them the circumstances have probably changed, rendering the original task irrelevant anyway.

1) occasionally by sabotage

> As a side note: I'm very much wondering whether I should insist on 40 hour work weeks

Productive h/w varies way too much from person to person and by circumstance. I let ppl set their own expected work schedule for the next few weeks by themselves as long as they keep the prediction up to date and their accuracy is reasonable.

I have had ppl get solid 40-60h/w effective time on target, and I have also seen <10h/w. The ppl I bring in are better at predicting their productivity and current life situation than I am. They are competent adults. Let them plan, structure, coordinate by themselves and only interfere if evidently necessary.

One size fits all is nonsense. If in doubt: measure and analyse.

Trolling is done in bad faith.

Exploratory discussion is (hopefully) done in good faith.

Allowing for rough corners and prickly spikes makes it possible to have more efficient and productive interactions. But only if participants act in good faith and put on their thick skin hat. Having to self-censor and shave of anything protruding is limiting and inefficient.

This is not an endorsement to misbehave.

From what I see when I step in to help various organisations improve I'd argue the opposite. Google docs improves coordination, which is the largest real cost of using ms office. To the point where most orgs have structured their whole operation around _how_ they are used to using ms office, with it's limitations. Stepping away from ms office allows concurrent distributed work, which radically improves efficiency.

google docs is a low friction entry into modern work coordination. It's not what I recommend for heavy work. But for heavy work ms office fails as well, just a little bit later, and with more costly result.

"just works" is a big factor.

Another part is front end vs back end. I still get contacted occasionally on various back end and infrastructure stuff I built from 1995-2010, while I never hear from anyone about the user facing code. Front end has been replaced many times over, while the back end infrastructure just ticks away quietly...

> middle man role is visibly unnecessary

Yep. One way forward is to move "middle" to other leaf node tasks in organisation. I have restructured a bunch of organisations towards globally distributed remote work since early 2000s. Every time: Unless I have strong investors' support I _MUST_ find a way to get the "middle" excited to move away from traditional management and coordination tasks into other things. Often this is back tech or sales where they originated. If you do it right most are happy and you get great improvements in productivity, staff retention, decision making. Do it wrong and you get mired down or sabotaged.

Both IKEA skarsta (€200 manual) and bekant (€500 electric) are great. I've helped several of my friends install them this year.

It's easy to switch out the desk surface to whatever you want. I switched out the plastic for a much larger (0.8*2.0m) edge glued robinia wooden surface. Love it.

I want to try the logitech ergo k860.

Otherwise, try a dactyl or ergodox. Great stuff!

+1 for ms ergo sculpt - unless you have above average size hands.

For me there is a plastic raised edge below the wrist support that very uncomfortably cuts into my hand. I have above average but not large hands.

I've recommended it to a bunch of women who do not have this issue with it.

I honestly apologise. I did not pass my statement through my net post filter, as I should have done. That is completely my failure. No snarkiness or diminutisation intended, just my poor formulation.

As for the curves. Do I interpret your point correctly as follows? The major factor of the discrepancy was the undetected cases in April vs October, due to lower testing? Does that hold true when comparing with the quite low numbers coming out of antibody screening? I remember this being drastically overestimated (4x?).

Cmon Andy. According to the graphs you reference: October incidence is comparable to April, while October hospitalisation is much lower than in April.

Have another cup-o-joe and tell me why I'm wrong ;)

Want data behind that statement. From what I've seen it is the other way around.

Though I do not have significant data myself.

I did a transition for a company back around 2003. Total cost of transition was a net saving already in the first year. Including training, my work, minor new hardware, etc. A couple of their guys learned the systems maintenance enough to take over my work, so I made myself redundant. Just like it should be.

Let it die. Free up lots of skilled engineers to work in smaller more productive enterprises. E.g. the Nokia collapse [1]. The growth a few years after the dinosaur death is significantly better for society than keeping the beast alive on life support.

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/10/surviving-nokia-how-oulu-...

Switzerland! Clean. Great nature. Stuff actually works. People do their jobs well and without argument. Transportation is reliable. Easy living.

Also nod to NL, as other poster. Lived there for three years. Again, stuff works.

I've had great experiences from couchsurfing. Hosting, surfing, and events. I've met several close friends through couchsurfing.

I've heard about the negative experiences people have had, but never from direct source, always someone heard about someone. I have no clue about the actual numbers.

The community died off with the mismanagement, but also shrunk from the rise of airbnb and meetup.

High unemployment periods should be used to build common infrastructure. Electricity, water, roads, rail, airports, etc.

Be careful when changing running style. If you change too fast you increase the risk of injury. Happened to me. Had knee problems. Switched to barefoot running with short fast step and very light to no heel impact. Felt great! But I pushed too fast, got a foot injury which is still bothering me and limiting my long distance running.

For me a fast very short step on varied ground worked best to slow down.

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0gXKdNPW-2U/V4EW8HkpSfI/AAAAAAAAi...

1) A bit of cleaning up of an online tabletop game.

https://github.com/netjiro/hactac

Happy to host a game for anyone interested once I have functional internet restored. Stuck in France and connectively handicapped.

2) Baking cakes !

The best one yet is an almond chocolate cake which functions really well as proper-food-replacement.

3) On the work side I've been helping a few companies migrate to remote work. Improving organisational habits and behaviour so people see that remote can be a positive thing. Measurably.