Printing ABS is much improved with the later hobbyist-level 3D printers (Qidi and Bambu etc). My Qidi Plus 4 prints ABS as easily / well as PLA. Just remember to do it in a well-ventilated space.
Exactly. For as long as I can remember, in any organisation of any reasonable size I have worked in, you could get rid of the ~50% of the headcount who aren't doing anything productive without any noticeable adverse effects (on the business at least, obviously the effects on the individuals would be somewhat adverse). This being the case, there are obviously many other factors other than pure efficiency keeping people employed, so why would an AI revolution on it's own create some kind of massive Schumpeterian shockwave?
People keep tossing around this 50% figure like it's a fact, but do you really think these companies just have half their staff just not doing anything? It just seems absurd, and I honestly don't believe it.
Everywhere I've ever worked, we had 3-4X more work to do than staff to do it. It was always a brutal prioritization problem, and a lot of good projects just didn't get done because they ended up below the cut line, and we just didn't have enough people to do them.
I don't know where all these companies are that have half their staff "not doing anything productive" but I've never worked at one.
What's more likely? 1. Companies are (for reasons unknown) hiring all these people and not having them do anything useful, or 2. These people actually do useful things, but HN commenters don't understand those jobs and simply conclude they're doing nothing?
All of the big software companies are like the parent describes, in most of their divisions.
Managers always want more headcount. Bigger teams. Bigger scope. Promotions. Executives have similar incentives or don’t care. That’s the reason why they’re bloated.
Have you heard of Twitter? 80-90% reduction in numbers, visible effects to the user (resulting from the headcount cuts, not the politics of the owner)? Pretty much zero.
That’s a difficult example. I don’t think anyone would reasonably expect the engineering artifact twitter.com to break. But the business artifact did break. At least to a reasonable degree. The Ad revenue is still down (both business news and the ads I’m experiencing are from less well resourced brands). And yes, that has to do with “answering emails with poop emojis” and “laying off content checkers”
In summary, Finland has brought the policies that have caused much destruction in other Western countries into their own education system, where those policies have also caused destruction, much to everyone's amazement.
Yep, this country is no longer that special by European standards. Childcare is still good, but later education and healthcare are very mediocre.
In EU only greeks are less satisfied with the availability of healthcare. Our unemployment rate is pretty similar to Greece and Spain as well. This is what right wing governments want I guess.
It's usual in Finland to let babies sleep outside in the strollers (even when it's cold) but in this case no one checked how the child was doing for 3 hours.
"We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but four times bigger"
Four times bigger absolutely will not happen; China's demographic disaster is already baked into the cake. Forecasts suggest China's total population will be around 1.5x the USA by 2100, but the average age / working age population will be in the USA's favour.
Bob Mercer and Peter Brown laid themselves off from IBM when they were told to execute 10% across the board layoffs. They had argued their team was one of the highest performing teams in the company but were told that they had their quota. 10% of their team was 2 so they took the hit.
> So in your world, the people running the business should fire themselves first?
If they are needed to continue leading, they should consider cutting their own salary until the problems are fixed. Let them take their entire compensation in just their equity for a time.
However we all know this won’t be the norm, and that’s OK. Not great, just OK.
Been there and done that. One startup I was at instituted a 50% pay cut for senior execs, 25% for the level below that and no cut below that. The CEO took a 100% pay cut.
This let us get through a short rough patch without layoffs.
I worked at middle-sized company that instituted a pay cuts, cutting all bonuses and stopping raises.
After year, company lost almost every person in tech managenent and most of team leaders, their clients actively executing forking rights and no one believes in company future now.
I once heard wise words from some CEO. In harsh times, clients do not want cheaper and worse services from us. They want less services. So we are moving out headcount down, while keeping pay and even execute raises for those who stay.
I do know of one guy who took a pay cut because unless he hamstrung his own team badly he was looking at needing to lay off about 2.3 people and so he cut his own salary to make it 2 instead of 3.
That's one story surrounded by a hell of a lot of shitheel stories.
If they're running the business, and it's at a point where it needs layoffs; sounds like they're not doing their job properly, and should be replaced with people who can-- like every other position in the business.
Imagine the organization you are imagining in your head.
Now imagine there is a Super-boss, who is exactly like the "people running the business" (attribution needed), but one level above them.
If the Super Boss were to look at the situation, I think it'd be pretty obvious that the issue would be "The people organizing the company at the highest level" who are responsible for the failures of the company. That may involve over-hiring, which is itself a bad practice that causes unnecessary pain and (personal, financial) suffering, and would be a good cause to fire them for almost crashing my beautiful super-company that I, the Super-boss, super-founded.
You're saying that if we return the Super-boss to the realm of the fictional, then suddenly it isn't the C-suite's fault anymore?
If we're discussing should, then yeah, their heads should be the first to roll. I agree its idealistic to imagine them having the sort of decency this requires, but I agree it should be the case!
If you've spent any time in business at all, you know it's always the tea lady who gets fired first and the managers last. Many commenters here seem to live in some kind of fantasy world.
>the people running the business should fire themselves first?
You were questioning whether they should, not whether they will. That's what people are responding to. They understand perfectly well who will get fired first.
I was questioning the idealism actually. There’s not much to be achieved by wishing the world was a certain way, it’s generally more useful to deal with the world as it is.
What idealism? The person you responded to said they didn't expect things to change unless there were real consequences. Not expecting things to change is the opposite of idealism.
But even if they were idealistic, arguing with people for wishing the world was better is a genuinely odd thing. If you followed your beliefs, wouldn't you understand that telling people not to wish for things is pointless? If you actually dealt with the world as it is, you would not argue with people on the Internet because changing somebody's mind, particularly in the way you are attempting to do it, is just as much wishful thinking as hoping that CEOs will fire themselves.
It's stating a preference. Having a preference is not idealism because idealism requires some amount of belief that the preference can be achieved.
"I believe I will be a millionaire by age 30" is idealism.
"I won't be a millionaire by age 30 unless I rob a bank, but I should" is not idealism; it's just a factual statement about one's preference for wealth.
And, again, why are you arguing with me at all? If you followed your advice, you'd understand that it is pure idealism to expect me to change my mind. As somebody once said, "There’s not much to be achieved by wishing the world was a certain way; it’s generally more useful to deal with the world as it is."
It's odd to scold people for stating their preferences, and it's even odder to scold them for something you seem to be doing yourself. If you actually believed in the things you advocate for, you would not be in this thread.
Can't even try if we don't talk about it. The issue with line of 'clear thinking' is it leaves no room for change.
If enough people take talk into action, we could reasonably see a change in behavior. It may come from sources than we don't expect, but it can happen all the same and we only have a chance at getting there if we are wiling to talk about what is ideal and raising that awareness. Its an important piece of that puzzle
An honest question: why is this being downvoted? I thought that downvoting is meant to be used when someone is trolling or bringing the level of discussion down, not when you simply disagree with someone's point. I mean sure, it's stated a bit sarcastically, but my gosh if we're going to downvote every sarcastic comment, that would include a good portion of HN comments.
My read is that the parent is immature and needs to be reminded that "starting at the top" means the people in charge. What does it add to the discussion?
I probably failed to account for the differing backgrounds of HN commenters & the resulting overly-literal interpretation of sarcasm, to be fair to the downvoters. Of course the owners & managers should take responsibility for poor corporate performance.
Correlation != causation. The US economy in the 1950s and 1960s was a very different beast - Europe (the main industrial competitor) was in ruins, wealth was very much more tied up in factories and plant, and less in equities and other soft assets. The currency was still tied to the gold price. It may as well have been another planet compared to today.
It depends - Western countries exist in a fiat currency world without a gold price tether, so governments that are sovereign in their own currency do not depend on tax receipts to provide services (the Eurozone is a different kettle of fish due to the common currency and lack of defined horizontal stabilisation).
Generally, if governments foresee the need to encourage economic activity, they should reduce tax rates. If they predict their economy is or will become overheated, they should increase tax rates. If they wish to buy votes from people who don't understand how money and tax work in an untethered fiat currency world, they should increase tax rates into the 90%+ range; however, this will cause economic disruption with some time delay, which those responsible will hope they can blame on the party in power at the time of the disruption.
Yes, I am more cynical now than I was 20 years ago.
That's the wrong question. The correct question is, "If California increased income tax, how many software developers would leave for another jurisdiction that did not increase income tax, and would the total tax taken from all software developers in California be higher or lower after?". There are also moral questions.
France seeks to solve its reckless spending problem by increasing taxes on the rich, and setting up yet another rediscovery of the Laffer curve? I can hardly believe it!
Why? The rich can easily diversify where there money is located, so their country being invaded wouldn't impact their wealth to much. They can also flee more readily than anyone else as they probably have their own jet. It would protect their nice house(s) in that country, but how much is insurance from invasion worth...
> Why? The rich can easily diversify where there money is located
Because you want to be in Paris. We’re also entering another xenophobic era. There is an argument to be made that the safest place for a Frenchman is probably in France. (Obvious counterpoints to that. And I’m speaking as an immigrant American.)
That might be the stated reason. It attempts to increase the overall tax take by increasing personal taxes on the rich, which will allow a new generation of bureaucrats and economists to re-learn the lessons that are already in the textbooks.
You know that the Laffer curve has basically no empirical support, right? Like it seemed to apply at really high levels of marginal tax (75%+) but there's been no replication at any lower levels.
The only economist I still here talking about it is Laffer, for obvious reasons.
If you are really pointing out the lack of conclusive evidence for the effects of a single factor in a complex real-world economy, you may have spent too many years in education playing with models and simulations, and too few years in the real world.
> If you are really pointing out the lack of conclusive evidence for the effects of a single factor in a complex real-world economy, you may have spent too many years in education playing with models and simulations, and too few years in the real world.
That's some quality assumptions you're making there, but whatevs.
You're the person who brought up the Laffer curve. Apparently (so Wikipedia tells me) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve (section income tax rate as which revenue is maximised) around 65% is the point at which taxes stop being as effective.
That's interesting to me as I would have thought it was lower.
Note that because of how economics work, this number is from correlational data so is probably not as robust as an experimental approach might be (but unfortunately that's basically impossible to implement).
Both the French and the Brits have nukes. They're at no risk of hostile foreign invasion and everybody knows it. Entire libraries of books and whitepapers have been written about it.
If it were about self-defense: Build more nukes, build some mobile launchers capable of also launching targeting satellites, maintain the missile and submarine fleets, and your job is done. This can be done on current military budgets, or even smaller budgets.
It's not for "self defense". It's for foreign adventurism and geopolitical posturing. Like the opposite of realpolitik.
Besides, waging proxy wars is very far removed from self-defense.
Building outposts in, e.g., Cameroon to ward against Russian aggression over there is perhaps justifiable in some abstract respect, but it's rather the opposite of self-defense. (Without getting into complicated game-theoretical "we have to stop them over there so we don't fight them over here" justifications, which have long been discredited and have even become something of a joke.)
Hydrogen embrittlement is a massive issue, I’d be interested to hear how this can be engineered around. My understanding is it requires more exotic materials than those used in any existing NG or oil pipelines. Everything I’ve seen claiming it’s viable to use existing infrastructure seems reasonable at first glance, but invariably contains a massive hand-wave or 2.
I think the obfuscation is that they are generally talking about stuffing small quantities of hydrogen into natural gas pipelines. Similar to alcohol in gasoline.
The existing infrastructure was originally built for town gas which is ~50% hydrogen, and run successfully for many decades as such. So this is mainly about checking out the more recently designed parts. My understanding is embrittlement is mainly a problem for storage tanks, which need to use high strength materials due to the enormous pressure -and ironically those materials are more susceptable.
Existing infrastructure is designed for & can be used for hydrocarbons with varying levels of hydrogen in their molecular structure; I don't believe there's an issue there. Most of the H2 in town gas is in the form of hydrocarbons, which are less reactive than pure H2, even if there's a relatively high percentage of H2 in the mix (as the H2 is strongly bound to the carbon). Embrittlement is definitely an issue for more than just storage tanks.
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