rebootthesystem

These are long and complex topics hard to discuss on a platform like HN.

In general terms though, this view that business is bad, evil and greedy and that it (as an amorphous mass) conspires to abuse workers, drive down wages and hoard cash is a fantasy of unknown sources. Not reality.

Being in business is hard. Very hard. Nobody enjoys unlimited cash until you've achieved great success. Even then, one could argue there's never enough cash.

Most businesses operate at the ragged edge of failure for N years (variable based on the nature of the business and the industry). I don't know many businesses that could survive a 6 month to 1 year negative event. We were fortunate because we had a number of really good years and, yes, hoarded cash because I've always been of the idea that preparing for that moment was important.

Ask almost any business owner if they could survive if business fell by 50% to 75% overnight and most are likely to say "no".

And so, a business HAS TO seek lowest costs and maximize revenue in order to remain healthy, grow, develop new products and survive glitches (be they due to the economy or business issues).

Forcing randomly high minimum wage on businesses is locally destructive. A business, if it has the option and is forced to do so, will always find ways to control it's costs. In the case of skills and function that can be off-shored, well, a "we pulled it out of our collective asses" high minimum wage having no relationship whatsoever to local economic reality will result in those jobs being exported to the extent possible.

So I'll say, based on my experience, artificially manipulating minimum wage isn't in the best interest of the local economy. You force businesses to act against the interest of the local population as they could very well be facing a choice between remaining a viable concern and exporting jobs in order to stay alive. Bad idea.

Taxation is another interesting topic. We should all be for the absolute lowest taxes possible. Somehow we've migrated into this thinking that ever-higher taxes is a good thing. It isn't. And it isn't because of a number of reasons, both local and global.

At the global level it is easy to see that an environment where, to exaggerate, a government charges businesses 0% taxes will be far more competitive in the short and long term than a location where government, let's say, punishes businesses with 100% taxation. In other words, we take all of your profits at the end of the year. It should be enough for you to survive and make zero profits. The asymmetry of these two scenarios should be obvious. Identifying where destruction will occur in the long run is easy.

At the local level it should be equally easy to understand that we should pay just enough taxes to pay for what we need out of our society in order to have it function as desired. This has many convoluted facets. Health care is one of those. Can't get into all the details here.

At a fundamental level taxation is a necessary part of a society. We need to pay for stuff. We need people to administer and run various things. And we all need to pay for that. At the same time, we need to also demand that the people and organizations we effectively fund and hire to perform those functions do so efficiently and without waste. We don't do that. We are all too busy to force optimization of this very important metric. And so, somewhere between 25% to 50% of our money is wasted.

It's like giving your kids $1,000 a month for college and he proceeds to burn 80% of it. And, of course, the solution is to give them more money. No. Not at all. The solution is to use the available funds as efficiently as possible. More money makes the situation worst.

Taxing corporations is a weird thing to me. A company with 1,000 employees has a thousand people paying taxes. Now we take their work product and tax it one more time. The people we hire to run the town, city, state are taking a dip into this economic activity twice. And then our money is taxed again at the gas pump, the supermarket, the grocery store, our property is taxed, utilities are taxed, our investment income is taxed.

We have somehow created a system where nearly every single activity is taxed in some form. If this money were used effectively it'd be one thing. Yet, it isn't. Where I live (Los Angeles area) roads are in dire need of maintenance despite the fact that we've been pouring tax money into the very agencies that are supposed to be done this work. It's a mess.

And so, focusing on punishing companies through higher taxation levels seems completely counter intuitive, it will make things worst, not better. Our focus ought to be in forcing a change where it matters most: The effective utilization of tax revenues. We ought to demand that they do more with less taxes. The surplus we would have by paying less taxes for the same services would then go into the economy and have positive effects.

Got to stop there. Real work to be done.

> there is no legal (or historical) basis for the idea that maximizing shareholder value is the primary concern of a corporation

Please folks, stop posting comments if you don't have the slightest concept of how businesses work.

OK, let me demonstrate how flawed this is by using a hypothetical scenario.

A friend of yours has an idea for a business. She goes to you and two other friends. She needs $300K to launch the business. All three of you are really bold and give her $100K each. In your case you sell your your home to come up with the money. You end-up bunking with one of the other investor/friends because, while you have some money left over, you don't have a place to live.

You are a shareholder.

Ten years later the business has gone nowhere. You don't have your money back and your investor friend just got married and you have to figure out where you are going to leave because he wants you out of the house.

And then you read a comment on HN about there being no basis for a corporation maximizing shareholder value.

> That means that 1) wages are too low, and 2) taxes are too low.

No, it does not. There is no correlation there at all.

Not one person I know who has ever run a business would make that connection. Why? Because they understand business reality vs. the fantasies floating around out there.

I'll give you just one easy-to-assimilate example:

Economic collapse Q4 of 2008. I was able to keep about 20 people employed because we were profitable enough prior to this event to, as many like to say, hoard cash. I hoarded cash like there was no tomorrow. Why? Because I had played that game and learned a few valuable lessons.

Without this war chest I would have been forced to lay off all twenty of them and probably even a few more people. Instead I made the decision to keep everyone employed and, yes, lose money for over a year (2009 and 2010 were horrible). We used that money to pay people's salaries and even more hoarded money to actually make the decisions to devote that time to develop new products. In fact, it got so bad that I actually paid a few salaries with credit card money for a few weeks. It was awful, but I was committed to keeping everyone working.

We came out of the recession drained of cash but with new products and a team that was as loyal to the company and the mission as I was to them.

Higher taxes or ridiculous wages (like $15/hr minimum wage) would have certainly put a bunch of people on the street despite my best intentions.

My standard recommendation to anyone who thinks they understand the economy is to write down their ideas/ideology today. Then mortgage the house, take out a loan or do whatever you need to do to self-fund a business (no playing with other people's money here). Work your ass off to grow it to a non-trivial business. Check what you wrote every year for ten years. Somewhere between five and ten years you are almost guaranteed to ask "What the fuck was I thinking?". And that's when you'll understand.

"A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way" --Mark Twain

Thank you for bringing attention to this. Experiencing this on our W10 workstations.

I hope MS does something about this immediately. It's maddening.

As I read through some of the comments on this thread what jumped out at me is that products today are designed with DFM in mind rather than DFR. Design for Manufacturing vs. Design for Repairs.

Industrial products are different. There's a class of product that must be designed for easy maintenance. Not so in consumer-land. For example, to replace some of the lights on a BMW you have to remove the front bumper. Crazy.

I think you missed this part:

"Public access to Martins Beach, and to all land seaward of the mean high tide line in California, is guaranteed in the state’s constitution and mandated within the Coastal Act of 1976."

I love APL, used it professionally for about a decade.

I hate the APL ecosystem.

Well, of course, "When in Rome do as the Romans".

Not saying OO has no place. Of course not. That would be crazy.

> Unlike the people I met in the Silicon Valley, only a handful of our tech-oriented students had participated in hackatons, contributed to open-source software, had started a personal blog or answered questions in online help communities such as StackOverflow.

The overwhelming majority --by a huge margin-- of entrepreneurs have never done any of this.

Your perception is skewed by reading HN and following the Silicon Valley "culture". That isn't at all a reflection of the majority. In Silicon Valley and in politics there are certain things you might have to do to signal club membership.

In the case of starting and running a business none of the items you list are a necessary part of success at all. I know people who are doing multiple millions of dollars a year in revenue who have never gone to hackathons, contributed to OSS, started a blog (that one is particularly funny) or spent time answering questions on SO.

The shadows you are looking at are not reality.

Note: Before anyone thinks that's an insult, google "Plato cave" and read it.

You missed my point.

No problem with any of this except their use of tax money to fund it.

If they need a capstone project they can pay for it themselves. Don't create a bullshit grant for something that will not be delivered. I mean, a five minute napkin calculation would quickly reveal the solar-whatever idea was nonsense. They still took the money and built exactly what the Air Force did not ask for. That's wrong in more ways than one.

It's just a silly observation. I come from a generation that had to create products like AutoCAD to run on CP/M systems with 64K of RAM and precious little permanent storage. As an aside, few people know that software like AutoCAD started on such --by today's standards-- crippled systems.

Anyone who came up in software development through that path has a full understanding of the cost of every bit of code written, every abstraction.

Today's programmers, unless they've taken university courses to expose them to the low level stuff, are extremely isolated from the innards of what they write. They reach for classes and objects by default and seem incapable of thinking outside of these boxes. All of this adds overhead and bloat, something you had to be keenly aware of with limited memory and horsepower.

I do understand that a higher level of abstraction in the context of massive amounts of memory and horsepower can be nice. What gets me is that this is often an unnecessary default.

Going back to state machines. One does not to create a bunch of classes and methods to implement them. I see that almost as a violation of the conceptual simplicity of state machines.

I mean, to go in a different direction, I use state machine in FPGA's all the time. The synthesized hardware works fine and represents the bare minimum necessary to implement these very high speed state machines. No classes involved. One can do the same in software development.

I'm sorry to have to be negative on this. I look at a bunch of this stuff that is DOD/Armed Forces funded and all I have seen for decades are nothing less than what I would call scams. Total waste of taxpayer money. And this isn't universities only, it's companies that win stupid-as-fuck "research" grants and produce crap in return.

There are a few companies out there playing with what are nothing more than ridiculously expensive toy RC planes (< 6 ft wingspan) that almost anyone could build out of parts available in the open market.

This MIT thing is nothing less than an overgrown model airplane. It uses what looks like a stock 4 stroke model airplane engine with a stock model airplane propeller. It probably uses stock model airplane servos, electronics and 2.4 GHz TX/RX.

Oh, wait, advanced materials. Nope. I have been designing and building RC airplanes as a hobby for three decades. I was vacuum-bagging large (12 foot wingspan) glider wings from fiberglass, carbon fiber and also Kevlar twenty years ago. I still have and use my vacuum bagging setup to build planes today. I have also made custom carbon fiber propellers by CNC machining aluminum molds and stuffing them with epoxy impregnated carbon fiber rovings.

So, this is what I would call "advanced hobby" stuff.

Special airfoils? Nah. Any serious RC glider pilot who has built planes knows what airfoils to use. Not a secret. These guys didn't do anything special on that front.

Oh, but it can be taken apart and stuffed into a box for FedEx shipping. Guess what, so can any large scale RC glider. Nothing new there. Make the wing in six foot sections and you are golden.

Yeah but...

Yeah but nothing.

Here's a guy flying an OFF THE SHELF 6 meter wingspan RC glider. What do you think the wings are made from?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3xxjqpIRNg

That's nearly 20 feet. The MIT "drone" has a 24 foot wingspan.

Here's another guy flying a 6.5 m, 21 ft motorized glider:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_U_e_EEduo

Replace the electric motor with an internal combustion engine and a fuel tank and bingo. Again, off the shelf.

And here are a BUNCH of guys with huge gliders, powered and not, including one that has a 51 FOOT wingspan. And, look, no truck for launch, they use another large scale RC airplane to tow it up to altitude.

Here's a list of a bunch of large scale RC sailplanes you can buy off the shelf today.

https://www.scalesoaring.com/scale-sailplanes

Here's an 8 to 8.8 meter (~26 to 27 ft) DG 1000 S you can buy and build for about $5,000 Euro:

https://www.paritech.de/content/modelle/dg1000.php

Shame on MIT for being a part of a scam. It's embarrassing.

That's the problem with kids these days. Everything has to be a friggin class.

You know we did some pretty amazing things with computers before OO. We even landed people on the Moon.

Can anyone program without OO any more?

Just saying.

You might want to read-up on table driven state machines. I'm not sure you have a full view of what's possible.

I am always surprised to see how many software developers I come across who have no experience whatsoever applying FSM's in the course of their work.

I can unequivocally say that FSM's have made me tons of money. By that I mean that they have simplified projects, made them far more robust, easily extensible, simple to modify and, in general terms, quicker to develop with less bugs and errors.

I've used FSM's in FPGA's (for example, optimized DDR memory controllers), embedded projects, robotics and system software. In other words, everywhere.

How about steering the car with his right hand on the bottom of the wheel to make it look like there's a problem with the auto pilot?

If someone wants to claim there's a problem with any auto pilot they better have a camera view showing they are not interfering with it in any way.

The idea that one can do things that are not seen on the various reflective surfaces isn't a new concept, television shows rely on camera and object placement all the time to ensure the camera and crew are not visible.

If I were to make a claim about the auto pilot I would have both my hands in plain view in a "look ma, no hands" stance right above the steering wheel for all to see. I would also have a second camera shooting from the side or farther back in order to make it visible that nothing is interfering with the steering, like my leg for example or someone pulling on strings from the back seat.

I don't have a problem with the idea of issues with any auto pilot software. I simply want to make sure claims are not falsified through the use of trickery.

Chasing technology is a huge mistake. Your end users, your clients, where the money comes from, could not care less if you are coding your website in Visual Basic (is that even possible?). Nope. They are after a solution to a problem. That is ALL they care about. Nothing else. Do not waste your time with this ever-repeating nonsense of chasing the shinny objects.

That doesn't mean you stop learning. It does mean you inject a slow low pass filter in your life and don't react to every little movement in technology. You can learn about them while realizing your end users don't care and, in general terms, these technologies have no material advantages in delivering what customers are after.

Engineers are not business people. Do no follow what someone with no business experience says because you'll find yourself jumping from tech to tech and no servicing your customers.

This would be FAR, FAR more believable if the guy placed both his hands in view. You can't see what the right hand is doing. I remain skeptical. Does he show his hands in the rest of the video? I stopped watching after a few minutes of not seeing both of them up in the image.

You missed my point. That microprocessor has thousands of transistors. And then you need software.

Single part? That circuit has THOUSANDS of components. And, on top of that it needs software?

Nah, this can be done with a one transistor, one resistor and little transformer one can easily DIY wind.

No software required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_thief

Exactly. There are many mid-range colleges where a great education can be had for a lot less than $300K.

Here's a good article:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-elite-colleges-lead-to-highe...

Quote:

"What we found startled us. For STEM-related majors, average earnings don’t vary much among the college categories. For example, we find no statistically significant differences in average earnings for science majors between selective schools and either mid-tier or less-selective schools. Likewise, there’s no significant earnings difference between engineering graduates from selective and less-selective colleges, and only a marginally significant difference between selective and mid-tier colleges."

Another reality check quote from the same article:

"Our findings are crucial for families to understand because chasing a prestigious STEM degree can leave students burdened with huge amounts of unnecessary debt. Financial aid can certainly help, but for many families, the cost of education can still differ dramatically across schools. For example, if an engineering student chose to attend the University of Pennsylvania instead of Texas A&M, the average starting salary would differ by less than $1,000, but the tuition difference would be over $167,000. At that slightly higher salary, you’d have to work for more than 150 years before you make up for that vast tuition difference."

This is startling and should be considered by every single student and family engaged in choosing a school.

Still no multiuser capabilities. Truly disappointing.

Not upgrading. Not interested.

> reconsider mortgaging the house (figuratively) to

No, this is real.

One of my kid's friends is going for Mechanical Engineering at a school that will cost her $60K per year. And she is committed to go past and Bachelor's and obtain a Masters.

I have begged and pleaded with her to reconsider. I have done all the research for her showing salary potential, payments and a comparison showing what would happen if the delta in payments were to be invested in a Roth IRA for, say 30 years. She won't budge.

This girl is going to graduate with an M.E. degree and $300K in debt. This is insane beyond belief. That degree is not worth that kind of money, not by a long shot. Average salaries are in the $60K to $80K range depending on location and industry. Getting significantly north of $100K is very difficult and getting to $200K seems down-right impossible. And so this girl is going to have MD level debt with an earning potential nowhere near that of an MD.

In other words, she is signing up for financial slavery.

And worst than that, she is making a bad decision today that will cause severe damage to her future family. She will realize this when she marries and has kids. And, if her husband comes in with another $200K in debt. Well, that's a formula for a really shitty life for 30+ years. Great education, shit life.

I have to admit I don't understand how these decisions are made.

BTW, I forget the exact number but investing $500 a month on a Roth IRA from, say, 20 to 50 years of age has you waking up one day with something like $1.6 million in the bank. Keep at it until age 65 and it is somewhere around $3 million. Which means that paying an extra $500 a month for a high dollar student loan has a huge opportunity cost. A $300K loan probably means payments that are $1000 a month above those for a loan to go to a mid-tier university.

And so she said: "My parents are going to take out a second mortgage and pay $200K out of the $300K. It'll be OK."

To which I replied: You are smart, you took a lot of advanced math in High School. Go figure out how much you would have in 30 years if your parents gave you $200K and paid for you to go to an investment adviser to invest that money wisely. Then do the research and find out how much more you might earn if you pay $300K for your degree rather than $100K.

I have a feeling you've never spent a significant amount of time dealing with IP and patent attorneys.

You can't threaten to sue. That can backfire in a major way, having lawsuits filed against you.

The idea of reaching big settlements with minimal expenditure's does not align with reality. This simply don't work that way, particularly if you are up against a large or well-funded company.

The first thing an attorney is going to ask for is a retainer somewhere in the range of $100K to $250K to get started. Whatever they ask for, they are likely to tell you they will not move forward unless you can commit to $250K at a minimum to pursue a case.

They don't do this because they are greedy, they do it because this is expensive and they don't want you to burn through $100K and then discover you'll need more, don't have it and you got nothing for your $100K.

Selling IP is an entirely different conversation. Yes, patents can be worth millions, tens of millions, even without a real product behind them.

> Patents aren't worth the paper they're printed on unless you have money to defend them

Exactly. This is something I think most don't understand. Patents give you the right to sue. That's it. They don't provide any "protection" beyond that.

It's like freedom of speech. You have the freedom to say whatever you want but the first amendment does not offer any protection from the consequences of your speech. In other words, say the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place and you might just get beaten into a pulp. You had the absolute right to say whatever you wanted but no protections beyond that.

> Tesla added that Vandermeyden had been granted numerous positions over other more qualified candidates and was given special treatment and opportunities for advancement that were unwarranted based on her qualifications

Wow, they should not have made that statement. Why was she given these opportunities? Was there a sexual element? If those who were more qualified get a whiff of this they might have a pretty good case purely based on this statement of fact. I am not a lawyer but have dealt with enough legal crap to know you do not make statements like that. I cringe to think that a lawyer advised them to say this or was OK with making such a statement.

As for the merits of the case. Don't have a clue. That's what court is for.

I haven't paid much attention to Netflix originated content. Any more I absolutely dread switching over to Netflix because I know it'll be a 30+ minute exercise in frustration. My wife and older kid ignore it completely.

Unless things change I'm cancelling by the end of the year.

Amazon Prime seemed a bit better but lately it seems to be filled with the same kind of crud. Bad "B" and below movies.

Seriously, who watched this crap?

There are thousands of good movies out there. Maybe it's a revenue struggle with the studios, I don't know. The fact that you can't even find "The Marx Brother" or "The Three Stooges" or "Abbott and Costello" on these services might be a clue. In other words, you can't find popular black and white movies that by all accounts should fill these services. Or good 80's, 90's and earlier TV series. Not there. Maybe a few here and there, but not en-masse as they should be.

I was looking for Battlestar Galactica the other day. Not the goofy one, the other one with Edward James Olmos. It was there a few years back but no-longer available. My oldest kid wasn't old enough to watch it then but he could now (and it is a good series). Gone. Not sure why.

Netflix streaming, in my opinion, has degraded significantly in terms of programming choices.

A few years ago when we got the service you could find tons of fantastic movies and tv shows to watch. Today I've switched away in frustration after spending 30+ minutes browsing and searching for something to watch. The menu is mostly filled with crappy 1 to 3 star content. You can't even find good movies from the 80's and 90's. Sure, maybe a few here and there but, for the most part the experience is an exercise in futility.

My kids are watching a Spanish kid's show to improve their language understanding. They are 60 episodes into a 260 episode show. When they are done I think I might cancel Netflix and move on.

Here's the criteria: When I find myself browsing regular TV listings to record good movies to watch and endure having to commercial-skip every two minutes to watch them. What that happens. And you actually end-up with a bunch of really good contemporary movies recorded. That's the moment when you realize Netflix, today, has a bad product. And that's already happened multiple times.

It's kind of funny watching people who've never used one try to adjust to it. My kids grew up with them and wouldn't use anything else. They have them on their laptops too. I hate laptop touch pads, the single worst UI ever put on computers.

This is very interesting. Since the trackball worked well for me going back nearly twenty years I stopped looking for other solutions. I coded for 20 hours yesterday and I'm perfectly fine today.