I worked in oil / gas on international projects for 10ish years.
I think the dollar will still be the de-facto reserve currency in 20 years, but it will be more as a medium of exchange rather than a true "reserve" currency for central banks. Central banks are buying gold like crazy.
Comparatively speaking, the dollar is pretty stable. But, the inflation genie is out of the bottle. The USA keeps deficit spending like there's no tomorrow, and is on an unsustainable path. If tax receipts don't increase, we will have to print our way to debt servicing.
Also, the western global hegemony is shifting. Many non aligned countries frankly don't care about the wests causes; they simply want cheap energy and to grow themselves out of poverty. The middle east is facilitating all this for southeast asia and the like.
TL;DR the dollar will remain, but it will be an intermediary exchange between currencies and not a real "reserve" store of wealth.
The Apache OpenOffice Development Team is proud to announce that the next releases will introduce an important change: a text-only user interface.
We all know that today's applications are shifting from local systems (desktops, workstations etc.) to the cloud and to browser-centric user interfaces. This process does not always increase the overall usability: web browsers and related technologies (HTML, Javascript, etc.) still cannot achieve the performances of stand-alone applications written in C++ or Java, and different browsers often introduce quirks and small problems that developers are chasing every day.
Apache OpenOffice is stepping ahead of this process, offering an user interface that is actually simpler, and will surely work smoothly on any computer.
This is so spot on. We (assuming you live in the US) live in a country where the purpose is to work for as little as possible, "grind," then throw money into an index fund and have it support us the rest of our lives. Own property, while having the bottom 50% of society continually support us in the gig and service economy.
Look, I'm no Bernie Sanders, but you have to be honest about the morality of it, and the feasibility of it. I don't see the current system lasting.
Pandoc saved my ass so many times when I worked in research. I would write a beautiful typeset paper in latex and then have to send a colleague a word doc.
You can turn any file into anything. PDF to rtf, latex to .doc, etc. It does a great job. Written in Haskell, too!
I'm not a techie, but I love lurking on this website.
My only comments from someone who found Linux in high school, used to love computers, the old internet, and used to do scientific computing in Fortran and matlab.
I read through some of these posts and feel like I'm on a different planet when it comes to computers. So many packages, podmans, stand ups, etc etc. seems like there's a package, library, git runner whatever for everything. Micro services, web apps, the word app in general. Virtualize everything.
When did software design / engineering change so much? Are things really getting better, or is computing power allowing the industry to duck tape a billion things together instead of writing in low level languages and using standard packages and compilers?
And there will never be competition. It cost Cirrus (small, single engine GA aircraft) $100 million to get a type certificate. The Boeing 737 max is still on its original type certificate.
Boeing and airbus is what the (western) world has for big jets. It's a duopoly and has no signs of not being one. Boeing probably shouldn't be a public company either.
The rest of world's aircraft manufacturers are quasi majority state owned enterprises.
When the Clinton administration forced the downsizing of the military industrial complex (https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2015/12/2/f...), the USA lost all competition in the larger than regional aircraft. To compete with Airbus (subsidized by the EU), Boeing turned from manufacturing their own airplanes (and using suppliers in America) to assembling planes in Washington and forcing procurement of their products internationally through contracted parts. (https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-rctom/submission/its-complic...). Nippon airways would buy x number of 737s, etc. as long as they were making the brakes. Hell, even Airbus assembles in the USA now to force procurement in America.
I liked your office / partner comment; I think there's a lot of truth in that.
I think a lot of people are really worn out. We have endless scrolling, tons of wars in the world, people are indebted, and realistically it doesn't matter how much you work; it's all unaffordable and many are losing hope.
I think the first world needs a large structural change. Government, capitalism, the whole nine yards. I think a lot of people are seeing the bullshit from the left and right and saying to themselves "surely I'm not the only one who thinks something is wrong."
This probably won't resonate to the HN crowd, but I was in NC last week visiting a pump company that I distribute two of their lines.
The office was a ghost town. Completely empty, eerie, creepy. I think the applications engineers, accountants, office folks, etc. work from home 3-4 days a week. Meanwhile, there were 80 some employees in the factory on the lower level milling and lapping away, and fabricating pump skids.
I don't see this ending well. I know a lot of young folks and admins are singing the work from home praise, but it does create a lot of animosity when machinists are grinding away on 8 hour shifts and HAVE to be there. On the other hand, it's really fresh for someone like me to state any opinion since I'm a sales engineer and work alone out of an aircraft hangar and only see people when I go see clients at their own facilities or travel to see my vendors.
I don't think humans are meant to be in isolation, though. But, the modern American life is full of shitty commutes, long hours in traffic, and mental drain. With the rising cost of homes, fuel, life in general, who the hell wants to sit in an hour traffic each way to work? And at the end of the day, who the fuck cares? Any extra profit you generate is going to some boomer shareholder. Might as well sit at home and create what little sanity you can.
I think consultants, programmers, sales, and some technical folks and the like are safe. They could do their jobs from home in 1990, and usually frequently travel. Programmers have had svn and git for a long time. Consulting / professional engineers tend to sit on software packages and conference calls much of the day, etc. etc.
This is my opinion on the matter, whether popular or not.
Yes, I'd rather own than rent. Instances I really don't mind paying a subscription for:
1) an open source product that has a free / freemium model where the base product is great, and the "extra" stuff is cheap like $10 a year (Bitwarden and Zotero came to mind) and well worth the extra $. I'll happily pay for that and think that's worth.
2) anytime hardware is involved. Email and storage services come to mind. You're spinning other peoples disks and using their servers. Shit breaks.
Things I despise paying subscriptions for:
1) desktop software that runs on your own hardware that comes with no support (Microsoft office, adobe, etc.) piss off Microsoft 365
2) desktop Linux. I love RHEL, but paying $175 a year forever to have a workstation with zero ticket support is annoying. I know developers gotta eat, but it's a big turn off. I know Macintosh computers are overpriced for the hardware but you get 10+ years of updates.
Forgot to add; anything I get on the internet is in the Downloads folder. If it is anything I can get again I consider it junk and don't save it. If it's important it gets saved to zotero or put in my documents. Otherwise, it's garbage and I clean out my Downloads every other week or so.
I use a Nextcloud box with Hetzner. My general file org looks like this: Camera Upload (from Iphone) Documents zotero (webdav sync for publications with zotero).
Inside my "Documents folder" I have a shared folder with my wife (bunch of junk / pdfs), a personal one with a bunch of random crap, a linux folder full of config files / scripts / readmes / backups and a Work folder. Inside my work folder it's organized based on the company I was working for at the time, then by project or customer. I have been consulting for a few years, so inside that folder it's all organized based on the client, usually named by their company name, then inside of that it's individual projects. Granted, this is just me, so the org isn't too bad. I also have folders labelled "paperwork" inside my business which is, like it sounds, full of receipts, contracts, templates, etc. One thing I do that may be different to others is I'll keep invoices and company specific paperwork inside that companies folder. If I get an NDA from company xyz, it will usually go in xyz/paperwork or something like that.
I do the Doctor's office approach; each client or project is a folder where a bunch of stuff gets thrown in.
Maybe this helps you? Maybe not? Been working for me for a few years. For code I'll save the code in my Nextcloud and then also do commits with my git server.
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