blantonl

The only way you can prevent damage from falling trees is to completely remove them.

But if you do have above ground power lines feeding your house, how likely would it be that you'd be in favor of having your entire backyard dug up for a couple weeks while they implemented this huge public works project? How likely would you be willing to shoulder the cost burden? And of course, it's just as simple as digging a trench and burying the lines, right? I'm pretty sure there isn't any buried oil and gas infrastructure in the Houston area.... right?

It's specifically an issue with the sheer amount of above ground power lines and population density. There is no easy fix, preparation, or practically anything else that can be done to prevent something like this. Plus, what causes the same amount of power outages (wind damage) isn't going to be different between 90mph winds and 150 mph winds. The effects are going to be the same on the power infrastructure.

The hurricane, while even a Cat 1, still brought what would effectively be a localized extremely severe thunderstorm over vast swaths of, and a direct hit upon, major population areas over the 4rd largest city in the country.

New Orleans was in the same boat with Ida in 2021. There were areas of the city that didn't get power back for over a month. Everyone was furious with Entergy there, but there's just a simple reality with this stuff.

This is exactly what I do with my business (RadioReference/Broadcastify). If you have a premium subscription, you can pay with a credit card, but we do not auto-renew subscriptions. We'll simply send you an email 7 days before your subscription is about to expire, and if you want to renew it, you go ahead and submit a new payment.

I've been told by a number of PE firms and others that I'm missing out on significant revenue, and I KNOW that is probably the case, but I just cannot gather enough energy to climb that summit and commit my users to such dark patterns. Even in the face of clear and concise evidence that my revenue would probably increase >20%, I'm more afraid of the loss of customer goodwill, and chargebacks that would occur. I can simply look at my own rage when I see dark patterns that extract money from my pocket.

Sadly, it's one of those things were if your business is in a crowded space of players, the ones that do participate in the dark patterns will earn more money, which leads to more funding, which often leads to winning. So most companies don't have a choice but to foist dark patterns like auto-renewals on their customers.

You know damn well what happened - it was well known what was going to happen but the bean counters drowned it out and won out by enshittifying the process and "generating revenue"

and they do this right alongside active, legit meant US military users. It’s wild.

* dealer didn't have a good handle on what was available in stock on the lot * anything related to a title for a tradein was massively hampered. * appears USAA's auto insurance online add/replace vehicle on your policy is broken * everything was literally hand written, down to the sales contract

I would imagine the impact of this is in the tens of millions of dollars

Rolex stainless steel models are highly desirable, but they really don't appreciate in value. They simply sell on the secondary market for a >50% markup because they are still less expensive than a lot of the precious metal versions. So a rolex authorized dealer will typically have a huge ratio of buyers to watches available for steel watches. Precious metal rolexes - it's a big "depends." Any of the platinum watches are highly desirable as well as the meteorite dial watches - they sell well above msrp on the secondary market. Note that rolex authorized dealers are not allowed to mark up new watches at all. The price is the price set by the brand. Most authorized distributors are also jewelers so they allocate steel sport watches to people who buy a lot of jewelry.

Pateks are a different beast. The sport watches are highly desirable, and generally not available to the average buyer under any circumstances unless they have > $100K Patek spend, which means you're going to have to buy what is typically more of an art piece type watch (complication, calatrava, etc) before you'll get a shot at a $20K Patek sport watch. This means you can very easily get a beautiful brand new Patek dress watch for 20% off on the secondary market, since buyers will simply purchase that watch to get the spend history, immediately dump it on the secondary market at a big discount, just so they can get the opportunity to purchase a $20K watch and sell it for a >100% markup. There's no shame for some of these people.

The problem is I didn't see a single web site that I visited where this was apparent. It was a mess of opt-in pop-ups and settings and whatnot that completely overwhelmed me with actionable things I had to do before I could interact with a site, and often many companies clearly just said F it and blocked anyone from Europe.

Like, the pendulum swung WAY too far in the other direction.

The act of tearing someone down purposefully, either with facts or non-truths, is almost always an act of revenge. Someone felt wronged by someone's current or previous actions, and they move to "take revenge." This paper essentially argues that no one is entitled to revenge.

As I’ve gotten older, and had more of an opportunity to interact with these players, and read articles such as these, I now have the perspective that a lot of these folks are monsters and are some of the craziest, narcissistic, abusive people on the face of the earth. They run fiefdoms and hold power over money and prestige and those under them and because they are brilliant people, they have the ability to damage so many more people around them as they do their work.

If you've ever wondered what the "Enterprise Application Server v21.5™ now with AI, Chatbots, LDAP, Active Directory Integration, Orchestration, and Web 3.0" experience looks like, this is it.

This is what happens when you bring enterprise software into the general public's view. This is what enterprise software customers see every day. Remember, at some point in the rollout of this dog, the team sat in a conference room and came to the right conclusion that the portal is terribly difficult to navigate, and thus the bright idea to write an 21 page PDF instruction manual for the portal was handed off to a 18 person team.

Edit update: The "Enterprise Chatbot Integration Plugin v2.1™ for Enterprise Portals - Enterprise Application Server v21.5" was an add on kicker for $1.6MM license revenue and $3.8MM for 21 years of support. This plugin was developed by one person who works for EnterpriseSoftwareCorp Inc at the behest of sales and marketing and management that decried "we must have a Chatbot AI offering for our enterprise customers because they are asking why we don't." The sales exec who inked the contract after the Broadcom merger ended up #4 in the company for sales, went to Hawaii for the EnterpriseSoftwareCorp President's club awards presentation. The Broadcom engineer who was forced to implement this plugin into the Portal just copied the example from the docs (a template of links) and realizes he'll really have to roll his own LLM to add any real capabilities to the bot. But, he was able to check the box that says "we have a chatbot"

Really what it boils down to is you are completely outmatched on the sales and marketing side. The decision makers have already worked with the sales exec and that relationship has been cultivated over countless steak dinners, expensive bottles of wine, and boondoggles disguised as "technical education."

And given they already have the tentacles in these organizations, all they need to do is turn the knob to zero for their <insert_shitty_complimentary_product> and practically give it to your potential customer for free. Now the CIO looks like a real winner to the CFO/CEO, the relationship moves forward, maintenance contracts get renewed, and the back slapping continues.

This right here is a 8 year project that would cost 1.2 billion dollars. And it would fail miserably before it got out of the requirements analysis phase.

Decision makers are simply a cog in the sales and marketing machine. 92.4517% of enterprise software decisions are driven by the relationship between the machine and decision maker without any regard to features, functionality, or fit.

Never underestimate the power of sales quotas, rolex watches, conferences, booth babes, president's club trips, expense accounts, and people yacking on their phones in airports talking about getting to the "decision makers."

You only need to review the org charts and financials of any enterprise software organization to see where the priorities are: 80% goes to sales and marketing, 10% to developers, and 10% to legal.