Maybe not average, but in Oakland after the ‘91 fire we now have yearly inspections, including overflying drones and helicopters as well as foot inspections of our properties. They alert us if we have any problematic vegetation, most especially accumulated dead brush or trees that need to be trimmed to keep them out of power lines. We have to address them or we will be fined. I’m not sure beyond that what happens, I haven’t gotten one of the fines, we keep our greenery pretty controlled, as do our neighbors. Maybe it’s because you can still regularly meet people who lived through that fire, but no one is crying “‘Murica!” when the firemen come by here.
The other thing that is subtle and maybe not obvious about American culture — firemen generally are not lumped in with the rest of the government. Police are looked at with extreme suspicion very frequently, but firemen are just generally liked. Yes there are people who don’t want anyone on their property that they didn’t invite, and in some states those people have the law behind them (I grew up in Texas), but firemen coming by to let you know that your property has too many trees near the home are probably the least likely to be shouted off. There is one group, though, that doesn’t want to hear the message - the wealthy. Often they have an image in their head of how they want their house to look and what kind of landscaping they want, never mind what best practice is. They will listen politely and then completely ignore the advice they get because it would keep them from having the picture perfect English cottage look, or maybe they’d have to see their neighbors in their winter ski chalet, or whatever it is that’s in their head. When the Tahoe area has a fire like this, it will be because of these attitudes, 100%.
Internal policies at these companies are rarely subject to a level of faith that you're implying. Instead external access to systems is logged, internal systems are often sandboxed or otherwise constrained in how you interact with them, and anything that looks like exfiltration sets off enough alarms to have your manager talking to you that same day, if not that same hour.
Fasting is a funny thing, because the definition is highly variable. As a teenager I fasted a few times[0] while doing construction work —- mostly carpentry. How the hell does a 17 yr old get the energy to move lumber, swing a hammer, etc while fasting? The answer is liquid calories. Juice fasts feel the same to me, I’m going to guess that someone could easily gain weight on a juice “fast” if they drink enough.
0 - religion causes you to do strange things sometimes.
The balancers could literally be part of the plan in your bus. Maybe you branch off a line of iron and two of copper to a green circuit plant that is then coming back onto the bus and being used downstream by both modules and red circuits. You know that for the next few hours those lines will be completely consumed by the number of modules you’ll be creating but after that your red circuit production will be able to go full speed and feed electric engines for robots. Your argument seems to be that you should just have enough lines to do both at full speed. That’s reasonable for the late game, but earlier the needs of your production are variable.
I think that would be trivial to model in Factorio. Honestly every factory beyond beginner size is dealing with that, not always in a principled way of course.
Personally I find the new DLC with compact design on space platforms to be really fun that way. Back pressure has been a necessary mechanism to create to prevent all sorts of deadlocks for instance.
Equal consumption of all the miners on an ore patch. The opposite ore loading, unloading at an equal rate so trains spend the minimum at a station (probably the more critical part to balance since you can solve the input side with buffering). Taking multiple less than full lines down to fewer full lines in a way that is evenly distributed, either to conserve space or, in larger bases, UPS. On Fulgora, with uneven recycler load, balancing the flow of an unfiltered belt before you separate it. Those are examples I just pulled from my current play through but I could probably find more.
> I usually just put a few splitters before and after tapping off of main bus lines
You are literally describing balancing. You are using an ad hoc solution as opposed to a blueprint, which can be fine, but I wouldn’t dismiss the convenience of being able to belt off a line of variable consumption from your bus and then guarantee each line down the bus will continue to have a fair flow of components. You clearly appreciate that this is desirable, and are solving for it in your own way.
Any time you find yourself dismissing something many people put a lot of work into, you should be suspicious that maybe you aren’t operating in the same context they did. For instance a problem some balancers solve (but many do not) is lane balancing, such that each input has an equal chance to show up in either lane of the output. This solves problems with balancing the pull (input) side, as opposed to the push side, and can recruit idle machines that otherwise wouldn’t get work. This in and of itself doesn’t apply to fully utilized production chains but in times of lower utilization it may matter. As another example, maximizing freshness of components is a factor in the latest DLC and this is much easier to do if you can guarantee equal drawing from all assemblers.
It’s very good at modeling real world distributed systems problems and solutions, so it would not surprise me to find applications to production line design. For instance a very basic realization is that the typical throughput/latency tradeoffs have to be made.
English is likely not your first language and it’s fairly obvious what you mean, but the word you’re using a lot is spelled “intention”. Not at all how it sounds, stupid English.
(It’s also likely that this minor error is spawned by the use of intension, a very uncommon word, in the description of Tree Calculus.)
I would argue that often the car or other hardware being delayed is not an option and so you get rushed software anyway, that has to be dealer serviced. We’ve seen that a lot in cars now that they’ve started having non-trivial amounts of software that is expected to multi-task. I don’t even know how many networks your typical EV has, it’s usually at least 4 or 5.
Correct, the car can function without the infotainment system but you lose conveniences like climate control, the backup camera, and sometimes even audio, which is weird because you get no feedback from the turn signals. It’s not great but not an immediately pulling over kinda thing.
I mean, Microsoft would surely love to be the browser leader again. The web has always been an amazing device and OS neutral platform play, which is why they entered the space in the first place. Do I expect this to happen? No I do not, but there is clearly a huge value to owning the most popular web browser. Safari is a distant second and is probably 98% iPhone usage.
I'm going to go out on a (thick, short) limb and say your parents weren't picking crops in a field or washing dishes at the back of a restaurant. Immigration is a complicated topic and neither party has a plan that will do anything to fix it.
The first time he got elected I had a woe is me, what does this mean for our country perspective. These days I'm better informed and I know that America is nothing special here. Brexit, Orban, Berlusconi, Alternative for Germany, Le Pen, Netanyahu, Modi -- feel free to throw stones, but I guarantee you have an anti-immigrant group in your country that is doing better than they ever have.
> It's pretty clear to me that he did think about the election. That's the problem.
I disagree with your analysis. I think it's likely that Alvin Bragg is not a dumb guy. It is well known that a conviction would not prevent Trump from running for President. He also probably had a number of smart people giving him advice that this was going to do a lot to increase Trump's visibility and in general energize his base. If anything, the degree to which he considered it probably acted as a detractor, not the reason he went through with it.
I think Bragg prosecuted because of the reason that all prosecutors go after high profile cases in big regions. He knew it would bring him attention and he thought he had a good chance to win. In Alvin Bragg's world, that's enough to get you over the line.
Hey dude, you may be overdosing on those pills you’re taking when you start saying things like Musk is a uniter. The red ones are fine, just limit it to one or two, okay?
He’s far from the first person to have been tried for something that is unevenly enforced at best. Talk to any black men in your community, it happens all the time. More relevantly, prosecutors have to decide which cases to pursue and that calculation seems to often involves factors like the notoriety of the individual and the likelihood of obtaining a conviction. Famous people are routinely prosecuted for things that regular schmoes don’t even get arrested for. The latest example is probably Jason Kelce, being in the public eye means you get more legal scrutiny.
Btw I’m not saying I think this is particularly fair, but it’s been happening as long as we’ve had laws and likely will continue as long as we have some sense of privacy and humans running things.
It’s also not surprising to me that it amped up his supporters. As I said above it was completely predictable. Asking Alvin Bragg to think about the election when choosing whether or not to prosecute would be wrong whichever direction you think it should have been decided.
I don’t think the conviction’s effect on his support was lost on anyone who was paying attention. He was convicted for breaking the law by a jury of his peers. Should the case have been brought to trial? That’s debatable, but he clearly is a felon. Not the first felon to run a country, as it happens.
Btw I would argue the assassination attempt did far more for him than the felony conviction.
One last thought before I stop thinking about this thread. Many places are now starting to adopt a policy where the company will offer a choice to the employee. Choice A is to run the PIP process, and live with the outcome. Choice B is effectively an immediate layoff with severance. These are sometimes referred to as PIP or PEP (Prompt Exit Program). If you truly believe all PIPs end in exits you may find it strange that companies would make this offer, but I think it’s a very healthy way to give the employee some agency in the process besides just dusting off their resume.
I know this forum is suspicious of managers on general principle, and that’s sometimes appropriate, especially the more layers there are between decisions your manager is executing vs where they were made. That said, it is my experience that some managers truly want people to improve when they’re operating below expectations at a given level, and furthermore that some people need that feedback written down, formally, for it to really land and produce change.
I am happy to accept that the majority of cases where you’ve gotten a formal PIP that HR is involved with will end with the employee’s termination. I don’t have industry data on this but it would match both my actual experience and the experience of my peers as has been relayed to me over the years. But someone in that situation should be open to the possibility that they can truly succeed if the dominoes fall correctly. There are many signals along the way that will also inform you what your manager in turn believes and even HR sometimes gives themselves away despite the legal risks they are trained to avoid.
Finally, there’s a spectrum of how people use the term PIP. At the far end is what you’ve described, a written document that exists to provide evidence in the event of litigation and is largely HR driven. However a manager can absolutely use the same structure and terminology and never involve HR and hopefully we both agree those are more likely to result in win-win outcomes. In fact the trend in this space is towards a continuous performance management environment where expectations are formally defined and updated and checked in on at least quarterly if not more frequently.
Re: PIPs, it depends on how they’re used. For stronger managers, who address issues quickly, a PIP (even informal) can be effective at creating behavior change that sticks. However the way many companies practice them, they are simply a formal recognition by HR that things have gotten intolerable. The only way out of one of these other than leaving is to move to another team. Thankfully companies who practice this style of PIP are also usually full of junior managers who are easy to convince that they can “fix” whatever issues have caused the situation to arise.
You’re most likely confusing Flutter with the Python team which was laid off but the work moved to a team in Germany. The Flutter team has not been laid off to my knowledge.