1,736 karma · joined November 4, 2018
I will gladly admit I like his storytelling and the anecdotes are interesting but I have to ignore the detours to make it to the end.
I can drive for miles and not see a single solar panel. I will be open to talking about nuclear when the US is full of solar panels and wind turbines.
Nobody should be surprised that losses of this magnitude are fresh in our minds, only 10 years later.
Chernobyl and Fukushima were massive disasters with long-term consequences. Exclusion zones were created. Many families lost their homes forever. Animals were abandoned and died. Should we minimize these problems or pretend they didn't happen?
Even if we picked such an outlier, the bookings would be sparse.
A mediocre SWE in the Bay Area has a paycheck every 2 weeks over the course of decades.
> And someone majoring in math can go as far as someone majoring in engineering
The choice in my personal story was about becoming a professional mathematician, not majoring in math and then getting a job in engineering. The latter in fact is what I did.
The world doesn't need pianists like it needs software engineers. This demand was also different 200 years ago.
This is basic economics that not enough people seem to understand when they choose a job. Or maybe they do understand but want to ignore the problem early in their careers.
As a student in my 20s, my love for mathematics exceeded my love of engineering. I studied both and was good at both, but never went far beyond undergrad level mathematics due to job opportunities.
Sometimes in life we need to clearly separate what to do as an amateur (for the love) and as a professional (for the money). Sometimes the interests align, and if they do, good for you! But it's important to be honest with yourself about goals and planning.
The United States bid on this contract with the F/A-18E. I can't imagine the U.S. approving the sale of F-35 technology to Brazil at any reasonable price.
It became a Ferrari due to feature creep and an enormously complex and expensive technology stack. The F-16 is not a Ferrari and NATO needs a multirole single-seat fighter that is affordable to purchase and fly.
My most charitable view is the F-35 became a jobs program for Lockheed Martin and subcontractors. People were trained and (allegedly) useful technology was developed. But the price tag appears unreasonable by an order of magnitude, and this puts no accountability on the program management or people signing the checks.
As for arguments about technology trickling down from the F-35:
* The argument needs evidence. I've seen no attempt to identify the value of the technologies developed against the time and money spent.
* Too much time was surely spent on integration and one-off details specific to the F-35 platform, and this is sunk cost unlikely to be recovered in future platforms designed by new teams.
Large equipment that's hard to replace was at one point designed and certified against IEEE and IEC standards applicable to the global industry, with high safety margin, modeling harsh (to a point, catastrophic) operating conditions. Far beyond the requirements of consumer electronics. And there is no reason to believe a manufacturer capable of this scale (think ABB) would design/build/test a substation transformer from a playbook intended for a global market, and then execute to a lower standard because the customer is in Texas.
For clarity, I am not referring to small stuff. Power pole transformers will occasionally blow up. But those get quickly replaced or bypassed without months-long outages.
Technically correct yet hypothetical bullshit.
Earlier in my career I worked in this industry designing automation equipment. A substation has more than enough protection relays with redundancies designed to shed load, turn on auxiliary cooling, trigger systems down the line, etc. The automation is far from rocket science, and reduces to comparing against thresholds and protecting the equipment or circuits as appropriate. Logic that matters defaults to a disconnected state, such that if the safety itself fails then the system is put in its most conservative mode, even if that means stuff turns off.
It would take work and massive negligence to override multiple layers of automation (software, firmware and physical connections), so based on the information provided I'm not giving the operators here any special credit. No blue ribbon to the guy whose job was to watch a circuit breaker trip.
> not a lot, but a bit
I don't know who you could persuade with such lack of conviction...
In the old days one would have to formally request margin. Then the broker would give you stern warnings, have you sign a form, mail you a nice booklet explaining margin, options and shorting. I assumed it was a legal requirement, but maybe not?
That's why valor only exists in the presence of opposition.
Facebook, Twitter, Google and AWS had 4-6 years to make the same choice made in the last few days. Yet they refused, again and again.
These major strategy shifts require enormous courage, support and trust at the executive level, because they represent cannibalizing an existing (real) part of the business for the promise of future profits in a business that does not yet exist.
Kodak is a textbook example. Execs refused to pivot to digital cameras and associated products, because this would compete with the enormously profitable (and internally powerful) film business.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, especially if they're as simple as imagining matter being built out of tiny blocks or disease being caused by tiny invisible things.
Based on the insanity (why try to patent this?), I suspect the author is a kook who convinced non-experts (e.g., patent attorney) to create this patent application, with no effective internal peer review. The author's colleagues and managers either lack the specialization in the field to call B.S., or decided to stay out of it because a patent application is not worth the drama.
The oddity here is still the involvement of the CTO. Who I assume is far detached from the actual research, lacks the expertise to review, and trusted the author's claims.
The title is super creepy though, so is the claim that "your reviewer will literally fall in love with you". I review code from my team every day, including code written by young engineers, male and female. I can't point them to this.
Tesla's market cap is crazy, but is a reflection of having actual products.
This is akin to a safety system taking over and restoring stability, despite a major component failure. From the outside, things "worked" but backups are designed for extraordinary and rare circumstances, not for continuous use.
Having known folks who lived in the USSR and modern Russia, I recognize the romantic elements are the effect of powerful propaganda. In reality, people were burdened by not being able to meet basic needs and were afraid of their government. Engineering was done under the barrel of a gun.
Romantic elements aside, I think we can all recognize the USSR was responsible for remarkable accomplishments, ranging from sublime to deeply horrifying.
To elaborate: my problem with the Facebook <-> Oil Company analogy is the magnitude mismatch in the utility axis. Facebook's operating niche describes very specific solutions for social interaction, in a space saturated with stronger and very enjoyable alternatives, some as old as humanity itself.
I think the scale might work out in the toxicity axis though.
This really blew my mind.
Reading these posts full of hyperbole, one would think human society couldn't exist without Facebook.
Facebook is not meeting a core need. It's peddling something entirely optional to society. At best it provides entertainment value, while being extremely addictive and dangerous.
Facebook is like crack.
But for the sake of completeness, let's discuss vegetarians specifically. I don't know where you got the 98% number for meat-eaters, but it's not correct.
Worldwide stats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#Demog... US stats: https://news.gallup.com/poll/267074/percentage-americans-veg...
Most vegetarians give up food for ethical and animal rights reasons (I'll leave the easy to find sources as an exercise for the reader).
Vegetarians and vegans are frequently reminded of animal suffering -- a visit to the grocery store or a look at a restaurant menu is all it takes. So in effect you've reduced to "no one" a 5% slice of the population (in the U.S.) which repeats the same principled decision on a daily basis. That's a lot of people to call "no one".
This is demonstrably false.
Even a 2°C average increase is very, very bad, with intense weather events every year, countries like India not being able to support their population density, tropical rainforests turning into savannahs. It is also a mass extinction scenario.
"it's too late" is a dangerous statement because it suggests actions no longer matter. And if no action is taken, several climate models project >4 °C average warming. The majority of the planet will be become uninhabitable at the current human density levels, with billions of people having to relocate and/or die.