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.
Ricardobeat is sipping the kool aid. First, just because an energy source has a name plate capacity of x does not mean it generates x. Typically, wind and solar generate 10% of their nameplate value (while fossil fuels generate 100%)! Also, there has to be a baseline power source on the grid (which is fossils fuels, using gas from Russia in your part of the world)!
Just because the morons in your home country are buying shit mobiles to drive 1 km a day to and from work (or whatever stupid units you use) is not an indicator for the world at large. 2030 is gas and diesel cars! Just like how 80% of our power is still going to be hydrocarbons in 2030. Read all the fantasy you want; physics and thermodynamics do not change. If the world does not split atoms in a large scale we will burn coal or natural gas.
My comments along with SV's comments is how ignorant most people are to how things are made and done, because the majority of the folks on sites like this type code for a living and argue things for arguments sake, and don't actually make real, tangible things.
Your comment is the best and most realistic one on this thread.
There's so many people on this website sitting behind Chinese made computers spitting bullshit on "well if we could just get those container ships to pull some solar panels to then grow corn onboard and create a micro climate and process ethanol for said ship, then this whole process would be negligible and carbon neutral and not matter." Give me a fucking break. The world economy is based on exploitation and consumption. There is no "carbon neutral" consumption. There is no getting rich on a USA 1800s type agrarian low human footprint economy.
Like your correct comment indicates, the fact is the global economy is logistically insanely complex, politically complex, and mostly exists for pure consumption and waste. The Greta's are making "moral" arguments and brain washing the first world in order to ship production of "dirty" industries to china, LATAM, and Russia. They are wall streets biggest lobbyists!
After reading Thomas Piketty's theories on "Capital in the 21st Century," a lot of these issues have really come to light.
Capital grows about 2-4% each year in real terms, while the economy (labor) in general grows 1-2%. i.e. if you own stuff (shares of companies, property (real or intangible), land, etc. etc.) your worth grow twice that of a working person. Compounded over 60 years (time after WW2), capital has grown ~100% more than labor. There is real generational wealth in America & the rest of the OECD world, and this wealth is growing at absurd rates. I'm not to lobby or claim that I have a solution or that wealth should be distributed. All I'm saying is there is a giant monkey in the room. And this isn't just and Elon or Bezos or Ivy League elite problem. There are even small $1-$10M blue collar businesses that no one could possibly start today even if you had the skills & knowledge with how money it would take to buy equipment, have a shop space / real estate, cash burn in the first few years, etc.
I do think it is worrisome that businesses and its capital are largely going private. Public companies have much more scrutiny with the SEC, big labor, and has more checks & balances. It's also a vehicle for normal folks to invest money into a retirement plan; you can throw tens of thousands of dollars and actually own parts of major companies.
I also think the economy of scale for PE is very worrisome. Many folks here have talked about Vet clinics, medical clinics, etc. When PE gets together, they can buy buy buy and bleed bleed bleed money until the competition is out, and then they can jack up prices to make the difference up.
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