> Hiring and firing is hard. Creating a strong and healthy culture is hard. Defining success, and steering the ship to it is hard.
A big subset of these issues are American business culture.
> Public companies basically cannot evolve their form, because boards and shareholders will rarely agree to leave money on the table for an opaque long view that prioritizes culture over profit.
> And you can not add memory after purchase because it’s integrated/soldered on.
For as much as I dont like this aspect of modern computing, I understand why it is done from a technical perspective. Power, heat, and performance are all "better" when ram is on the motherboard vs in a "stick".
I do consulting, I see lots of teams using LLM's to "speed run to a legacy code base".
Much of what goes on in corporate America is not blindness its accretion. They simply dont have the culture to evolve. The devotion to next quarters numbers and share holder value play a massive part in this.
As a late Gen X I grew up when the "it's 10pm do you know where your kids are" ad's ran. When "just say no" was all I heard for a decade. When sex ed was marginally controversial. Honestly, I remain shocked that I never got arrested for some of my shenanigans. The rest of it was drinking, drugs and partying.
I was candid with my kids about what I did in my youth, I was also honest with them about how terrible the tech was. They also got unfettered access to it (tech), and there were lots of conversations and consequences around its (mis)use.
Given the history of "abstinence only" sex ed, and "just say no" drug campaigns, and their massive failures; just not letting them have it seemed like it was going to create the problems that many are looking to avoid.
As they have moved into adulthood they have taken those lessons to heart, and are now the ones who complain about their peers and their abuses of social media and inability to self moderate. These same conversations continue now, with the added topic of AI -
The "high level waste" is the stuff that takes 10k years to decay.
The big things that you get out of reprocessing nuclear fuel (other than usable uranium) are plutonium, Strontium, cesium ... the rest of the material left over (4%) gets embedded in glass and dumped in a deep pit and forgotten about.
The things we might use (plutonium, strontium) have some rather "questionable" applications:
> is trying to loosen regulations around nuclear waste disposal
And here lies the problem that ever one wants to burry their head in the sand about.
Can one, in theory, make safe nuclear reactors. You bet you can.
The thing is that you cant leave a bunch of "we will deal with that later" problems laying around. In the case of the US thats spent fuel rods. Should one worry about these, no, but you also don't want them as the slats on your kids mattress frame. They are fine where they are.
The French, because of fuel constraints, built fuel reprocessing into their nuclear "system" (and it is that, a whole system). We just leave spent fuel sitting around as a "later problem", because for us, its just much cheaper to mine and refine more uranium than it is to clean up the "spent" fuel we have.
The moment that you need to build in reprocessing (and solve that pesky later problem) the economics of nuclear stop making sense.
> When you install Go, it does just that, to some approximation; it will try to fetch from the module proxy first and fall back after that fails.
Go is telling you that your VCS has a deficiency, without saying it out loud.
That proxy should be your own repo... but git sub modules, sub trees, sub directories are non starters for 99 percent of cases...
Git is an amazing tool, and if you want to manage your development like the linux kernel its dam near perfect. Most orgs dont work that way, and the tools and machinations that we have built around these shortcomings are rather burdensome.
I long for google to productize piper for the rest of us.
Good call out, and an interesting case I was unaware of.
It looks like this is another facet of the "bitter medicine" that we're seeing around housing in general.
The first article that I saw pointed out that there is a correlation between productivity and regulation (of construction permitting etc). I would believe that because it has a corollary with "housing starts" (a measure of new construction) and its regional strength in the red/south portion of the country.
> And I am still convinced Gleba was a terrible idea even though I have conquered it twice now.
I hated Gleba at first. I have come to love it, and it might be my favorite part of space age. Embrace its organic nature, stop trying to centralize an focus on "flow"...
Nauvis is a monolith, then gleba is micro services...
Does being poor cause mental health issues, or are mental heath issues a cause of poverty... The answer here clearly better access (read free) to mental heath care, and it wont have the impact one would think (see the UK data).
> Look at other stats like rising infant mortality
The thing is we changed how we collect this data, to something that would be considered bad: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/13/maternal-mo... - There are tons of criticism on how we collect this data, they are valid, if you dont like this source, find another its a mess of our own creation.
> dropping IQ etc.
The largest root cause is that people spend too much time on their cell phone dumbing themselves down. Think about that one... no one feels the need to elevate themselves, they are happy to spend time on what amounts to leisure. Would you have sympathy for the person who gets fired cause they chose to play 18 holes of golf 5 days a week rather than do their job?
The chart you're showing, absolutely reflects the reality of some of the most productive segments of our economy.
Ford now makes more cars, with fewer people. Sears used to have people who took photos, laid out catalogs, opened envelopes (with checks in them).... Amazon has none of that. We replaced switch board operators, with mechanical, then digital switching. More calls routed, fewer people required. go back 45 years and "draftsmen" was a job - replaced by auto cad.
All these industries have seen massive productivity.
Are the people flipping burgers more productive? Plumbers? Welders? Teachers? Nurses? -- to some extent yes, because of technology but not to the same extent as the previous businesses. Anything that qualifies as "service economy" work has not seen the same gains as Ford (see: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/phenomenal-gains-in-manufactu... )
Because we as a society have drastically changed how we use housing: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q... -- Multi generational housing was a thing. Having roommates was a thing... the premise of "golden girls" would be lost to a modern audience, because cohabitation is dead. The premise of "bosom buddies" would get canceled for its insensitivity, but no one would understand because boarding houses are all but gone.
Building every one in the world an American style house, would cripple the globe. Concrete, Sand, Copper, Wood are going to become massive problems long before we get close to getting the job done.
> Ignore my vacation homes in Aspen, Jackson Hole and Nantucket.
You think that vacation homes are causing the housing crisis? Are eroding wages elsewhere? The industry of these locations is TOURISM, and a fair bit of it is international. (Not Nantucket).
It's not like whaling is going to make a comeback to make Nantucket a viable place to live again.
> Just think about how much better you have it than the people in Haiti and get back to work!"
Plenty of Americans look at musk and say "lets eat the rich" ... the problem is that the rest of the world has those same hungry eyes for us.
"I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing.
In the water I am beautiful." ― Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House
Chernobyl is going to be a problem on a time scale that most people can not comprehend. It already requires a "atomic priesthood" kind of outlook... https://www.zygonjournal.org/article/id/14327/
In China in 1992, a cobalt-60 source was lost and picked up by an unsuspecting individual. Three persons in the family died of resulting overexposure;
In Georgia in 1997, a group of border frontier guards became ill and showed signs of radiation-induced skin disease. Eleven servicemen had to be transferred to specialized hospitals in France and Germany. The cause of the exposures was found to be several abandoned caesium-37 and a cobalt-60 sources of varying activities, abandoned in a former military barracks that had been under the control of the former Soviet Union;
In Istanbul, Turkey in 1998, two cobalt-60 sources in their shipping containers were sold as scrap metal and ten persons were inadvertently exposed to radiation and had to be treated for acute radiation syndrome;
In Peru in 1999, a worker put an iridium-192 industrial source in his pocket and suffered severe radiation burns;
The most serious of these accidents occurred in the south-central Brazilian city of Goiânia in September of 1987. he Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission sent in a team and they discovered that over 240 persons were contaminated with caesium-137, four of whom later died.
These things should be somewhat easy to keep under control, yet we cant. There are currently 90,000 tons of spent fuel in the USA. We keep hearing that the cost of nuclear is cheaper than gas... because we just leave the problem sitting on site. The moment that you either dig the massive hole in the ground to dump this, or build a fuel reprocessing site(s) that economic value pretty much disappears. And fule reprocessing doesn't get rid of the problematic parts, only concentrates them, you still need a hole.
A big subset of these issues are American business culture.
> Public companies basically cannot evolve their form, because boards and shareholders will rarely agree to leave money on the table for an opaque long view that prioritizes culture over profit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. makes a lot of this possible.
Other corporate structures are possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation