My question was more along the lines of how well you can live on that money in Belgium.
My wife and I together make about 60% more than the $140k euros stated, but we live in the midwestern US and we do not live luxuriously -- our home is just under 2k sq ft, my car is 8 years old and we just replaced her Honda which was almost 12 years old and had 150k on the clock.
We eat most meals at home, dining out as a family at lowbrow places maybe 1-2 times a week with maybe an expensive adults night out once a month or less. Neither one of us is into fashion, jewelry or expensive individual hobbies. At best the luxury we have is no credit card debt, 401ks, some savings, and being able to live comfortably without budgeting down to the last dime every month.
I'm thinking that 144k euros in Belgium as a sole family income would go a lot less further than in the US. Higher taxes, higher cost of living for power, food, housing, cars and clothing. I suspect healthcare may be cheaper as a percentage of income in Belgium, which might balance some of the other costs but overall I'd consider than $144k euro salary to be closer to maybe $110k in US midwestern purchasing power.
The cost factor is still a little painful, as I'd like about 4 TB usable which would put the drive cost north of $3k alone. With the NAS box I would need to build to house it, I'm now at $3500.
I agree with your prediction about SSD pushing out disks and I think it will be very disruptive to existing SAN vendors. Not that long ago, 5k IOPS was $100,000 and a lot of vendors like Compellent have entire sales pitches based around tiering data to "cheap" disks to minimize use of 15k disks and maintain high IOPS and storage capacity.
Those kinds of solutions are complex and require heavy duty controllers (Compellent uses 2x Dell R720s). What's the Compellent sales pitch going to look like when competitors are merely stuffing a shelf with 24 1 TB SSDs? No tiering necessary, no complex tiering software, ~20 TB of storage, 2 million IOPS, cheaper controllers due to less overhead, 10 gig NICs all for a fraction of the cost of 20 TB Compellent solution.
If you assume that you could do such a solution for $30k (which I think is on the high side), the competing solution from other vendors is well north of $100k. It'd still be a bargain even if you had to buy a replacement disk due to burnout once a month.
If Samsung is willing to warranty their 850 Pros for 10 years, I'd wager they could really blow the disk market wide open if they would partner with a SAN vendor and demonstrate their disks are viable in a SAN, even if replacement rates exceeded 15k SAS.
I don't doubt the performance would be stellar, but even with the encouraging news from the write endurance tests and stuff like Samsung's 10 year warranty on their Pro series drives I still am just nervous enough about long-term durability and some rubber-hits-the-road compatibility with systems like FreeNAS/Nas4Free that it makes me just a smidgen nervous about dumping $2500 into a new NAS setup.
My own personal usage patterns are probably low enough that durability really wouldn't be a major issue, although I wonder what the "write multiplier" effect is with even single parity RAID. Is every byte written to a filesystem multiplied by 2, 3, 5, or more? That could play into the durability angle faster than you might think. Just moving my 2.5 TB of VMs to a new NAS could end up being 5, 10 or more TBs of writes to the drives.
...using these con/pro-sumer drives and not high-dollar SLC enterprise drives?
I've been long tempted to and more so with the generally positive results from the SSD write-them-to-death-athon that wrote to SSDs until they expired.
I know it's "not advised", risky, etc, but I'm thinking that maybe the drives are more reliable than we think and between backups and maybe a double parity RAID scheme or hot spare the risk is dialed down, or at least worth taking on a what-if basis.
For my own home/lab VMware cluster I'd sure like more disk performance than spinning rust gives me.
I know it's wrong and I will go to hell for it, but when I get a spyware plant Microsoft support call I usually try to play dumb for as long as possible to keep the guy tied up (I'm kind of paying it forward to someone down the list who may not get called because I kept the guy going).
Once i get bored with that or they get irritated with me and it's obvious the caller is from South Asia, I start to get insulting. Some guys won't just hang up on you, they try to bully you and that's when I get really cruel and drag out truly offensive insults -- "So I hear you upgraded your residence recently, you moved from a cardboard box to a tin shanty. How's that working out? Are you still eating insects or have you moved to a fresh rat diet? Your wife, has she freshened her dot lately, or is it the same old faded one she's had for a while?"
If I get that far, the guy is usually really wound up and spewing profanity as fast as he can mentally translate it. One guy threatened to kill me and I told him that the CIA would be interested to know that he's probably a terrorist and might want to watch those drone stike videos on YouTube for a preview.
I know, it's awful, the worst kind of Americanism possible, but I figure these people are the scum of the Earth and deserve no quarter.
1) a sub-entry of the legal department budget 2) a main heading entitled something like "Regulatory fees, legal compliance and civil litigation unrelated to human resources" 3) a sub-entry under "Political contributions, lobbying and outright bribes"
#3 would be nice because they could force the "governmental relations" arm to eat it and reduce lobbying payments, political contributions and bribes. This would probably be the right feedback mechanism because if their political payees want to maxmize their income they need to make sure they are minimizing their fines and penalties.
What I'm proposing is a little more honesty in PR.
I think the basic technical fact is that this data center won't be "exclusively renewable" except on paper. The reality is that it will rely on non-renewable baseline power.
So it seems kind of dishonest to say it's a "renewable only" datacenter.
Is this one of those things where they site near a wind farm and tick a box on a form that says they want to buy green power but in reality the actual electrons that enter the data center are "from the grid" and not actually exclusively produced from renewable sources?
It would be more impressive if the data center was completely powered by renewables ONLY and unable to tap into the non-renewable sources of the grid. Basically, make it an off grid only data center. But I imagine that this would be much harder and more expensive than simply checking a box and producing a spreadsheet that says you use renewable sources when in fact you're probably using baseline power from non-renewable sources.
I can't help but think that the medical system feels something like a mix between an aristocracy and a cartel.
On one hand, it seems very much a class-based system. Doctors aren't involved in a lot of hands on medical practice, they get nurses to do a lot of it. Is this a specialty based division of labor, or is it a remnant of a class system from a couple of centuries ago where doctors were likely to be members of the social elite from birth?
On the other hand, there seems to be a lot of cartel like structure that's designed to limit competition. Filtering structures in training and education serve to limit who gets into medical school and who is able to finish residency. And by limiting the number of people who can be doctors, you are able to justify a class based labor system, high wages, etc.
Then there's the actual practice of medicine, where only doctors are allowed to do a fairly wide number of medical tasks or have to be involved in supervising non-doctors whose training would seem to make them reasonably qualified to do on their own.
Another poster in the comments suggested we need more, less well trained doctors. That's probably reasonable. Other than an emergency surgery I had a couple of years ago, I can't think of much of my exposure to the medical practice that couldn't have been met just fine by a nurse practioner or physician's assistant. Sure, we probably need the specialists and people with advanced education for diagnoses and speciality care -- your level 2-3+ ticket escalation -- but it seems like for the majority of ailments and regular care, a doctor is simply overtrained and underavailable.
And what about pharmacists? They have doctor-like training yet for the most part don't seem to do very much but count pills. Sure, they serve as a safety net in some regards to make sure that people who take a constellation of medications don't end up with complications from contraindications and side effects, but that's limited to a person getting all their prescriptions filled by one pharmacy, which is habit people have, not a requirement.
If you think about it, even with the class-based structure of medical practice, today's physician assistants and nurse practitioners are probably better trained and more informed than most general practioners were 50 years ago. It's not hard to see why it wouldn't make sense to have PAs and NPs make diagnoses and suggest drug therapies that could be vetted by pharmacists with a more detailed knowledge of drug efficacy and effects.
I don't think the media has ever really used the socialist angle on Nazi Germany, at least not as an explanation for its evils. To do so would be to invite confusion into the media's narrative of Nazism as right wing authoritariansm and the political spectrum -- the NSDAP labeled itself as socialist and implemented policies that looked socialist, so how could they be socalist and right-wing at the same time?
Before you know it people would start calling it the common sense party -- get rid of the unproductive, national pride, a strong military, reign in the rich, support the family man who is the backbone of our country...
That's what's so interesting about fascism, as an ideology it doesn't follow the economically driven left-right political definitions clearly.
The wartime nature of Nazi Germany's economy I think confuses the seperation of business and state in fascism. I also think the power of German industrialists relative to the Nazis is understated. Krupp, Thyssen, etc were extremely rich and influential and the Nazis needed their money and backing and their industries working.
I think that WAS their exit strategy -- just be incompetent enough that they'd look elsewhere for talent.
If you're a consultant/entrepreneur, you can't always know what your clients are ultimately up to so you're often into it before it's too late to just up and quit.
I think fascism as an ideology usually has a predominant nationalistic and ethnic component to it. I think business interests intermeshed with the government is largely a byproduct of a totalitarian political system.
Fascism can be tricky to extrapolate to a specific economic policy because we don't have many functioning examples of governments run by ideological fascists and the ones we do have were short lived and marked by extremes of policy and historical notoriety that make coherent analysis tricky.
The Nazi party (National Socialist German Worker's Party) parlayed its romanticism of the German Volk into some socialist policies while at the same time it coaxed and coerced skeptical German capitalists with big wartime spending.
Somebody once tried to explain fascism as the weird marriage of progressivism and racism into one ideology. I think it's a strangely apt definition that encompasses some of the strange outcomes.
I've worked as an SMB consultant and almost every SMB owner I've run into is some kind creepy, shifty guy who is coming as close as he can to "the line" and often crossing it. At a minimum it's every conceivable tax dodge imaginable -- luxury company car as a daily commuter, no-show family members on the payroll, tons of business-paid home technology for personal use, and so on. Who knows what it is at maximum. Probably outright tax fraud, siphoning cash, cheating employees, whatever.
You could make a believable narrative that has two small-time entrepreneurs looking for investors and/or work are just *used* to the kind of slimeballs that are out there and don't really ask too many questions. Call it conditioned ignorance.
I don't know how cost of living translates, but I do think their incomes, especially the guy with a regular job (IIRC) would make them be a little more selective. That part I find kind of fishy.
But it's also not hard to see once they saw they were dealing with guys with guns that going along with it but with willful incompetence wouldn't have seemed like a totally unreasonable strategy. What are your choices? Run away and look over your shoulder for years?
I don't know what you can and can't grow with this technique (grains, corn, soybeans may be an issue), but doesn't the lack of shipping (ie, using what you grow within a 10 mile radius) factor into the larger aspect of energy efficiency?
It would seem that shipping produce thousands of miles, often in refrigerated shipping systems, would use more energy than LED lighting.
The problem of course is competing against the ship there-eat--elsewhere economic model now.
The setup costs don't disappear, but when you have a system dominated by contract manufacturing the competition forces manufacturers to basically eat a lot of setup costs in order to compete against each other. The costs don't go away, but become reduced profit margins for manufacturers.
Aside from maybe some tshirts I really cannot think of any "ironic embrace of vintage" that resulted in a meaningful resurgence of a product. I've seen some legitimate attempts to bring back old products or aspects of them but the successful ones are pretty much never ironic.
1970s fashions? I think this got embraced by hipsters early and became very mainstream. I have a friend who was in the vintage clothing business and he can define where he could buy 1970s fashion clothes in bales by the pound one month and the next he was having to negotiate prices by the item from his suppliers. Not long after that they become unobtainable except as yard sale or Goodwill finds and new iterations of the same fashions were showing up new in department stores.
Beer also seemed to be kind of like this. 10-15 years ago, there weren't many craft beers -- you had a bunch of mainstream domestics, some well-known imports like Heineken or Becks. Hipster bars of the era tended to focus on "vintage" brands like PBR or Rolling Rock and this embrace of older, niche products seem to have something to do with the rise of craft alternatives (well, and quality, too..).
Is that an operating system feature, or just a historical case of a system modern enough to have online help but old school enough to have decent, comprehensive documentation of functionality and error messages?
The long term trend definitely seems to be that documentation is an afterthought at best, with a lot of things, especially errors, being totally undocumented. You might get lucky and find a decent O'Reilly-type book or roll the dice with some 900 page Sybex monster that's 80% screenshots of obvious GUI tasks.
I think your analysis is insightful (...and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter).
I feel like I either have very strong preferences or none at all. Things that I like I tend to have a kind of complex rationale for why I like them. Cost enters the picture, but only as a tail-end constraint, and usually if the cost is extreme. Generally I'm willing to pay more -- or not buy at all -- because the less expensive products fails my preference rationale.
This being said, I'm always surprised at the people who always seem to prefer lowest cost first, even when the price difference is negligible. I'm always struck by people who buy cheap first and then are disappointed/frustrated when their choices end up inadequate.
I'm even more surprised with people who seem to be cost only driven -- seeming to have no preference and seeing all choices as equal and only differentiated by price.
With regard to harbingers, I wonder if some of them just have unusual tastes that differ from average. They may just be buying new products more often because new products almost by definition differ from current popular products as vendors seek niches. As old niche products "fail" and disappear, these people just end up buying whatever is new because they want what's different. It's not a failure prediction as much as it is a market failure to provide consistent alternatives to mainstream tastes.
I think you have the concept of hipster exactly backwards. Usually hipsters seem to cluster around emerging trends and often seem to be influential enough that an ironic embrace of vintage/past products often produces a resurgence of that product.
It's debatable whether hipsters even exist, or whether it's a group that identifies products before they become popular or whether it's a group that's defined as clustering around products that became popular.
I don't know if its my perception or not, but it seems to me that very few products anymore have any persistence. It's not just a question of picking a loser -- it seems like so many products have an initial run and then disappear to be replaced by something else.
I suspect it's a byproduct of easier product design using computer aided design and the heavy use of contract manufacturing overseas. CAD makes it easy to tweak a design to create the new-car-model kinds of changes or just something different. Contract manufacturing lets vendors shop designs around for the best production cost and it wouldn't surprise me if the tooling/setup costs get eaten by the manufacturer.
HVAC is too mechanical and homeowners are too persnickety. You'd get killed on break fix and maintenance overhead and labor. If you tried not to, your service would suck and people would quit paying the leases or deduct out of pocket repair costs from lease payments.
Plus, what happens when you want to move? "Oh there's this weird lease on the HVAC..." could make it harder to sell.
The bigger problem is that HR and everyone else who sees arrest records take a "where there's smoke, there's fire" attitude towards arrests, assuming that anyone who got arrested is of questionable character, a troublemaker. Maybe there's even some assumptions that a lot of minor arrestees might get the charges dropped or dismissed.
They have no subtlety, willingness to understand what happened or differentiate why you got arrested, just that you were arrested.
Personally, I think arrest records without charges ought to be sealed after six months and it should be illegal for employers to even look at them at all. The unsealed database should be public but controlled and audited access, and not resold to database providers.
Convictions are trickier, and probably have a greater public right to know angle.
It's really not hard to think of increased Fed control over fiber being a cover for NSA tapping activity. If the FBI is monitoring your fiber and something goes down, it's easy to say "we're on the job, nothing got cut, you must have an error in your network".
It used to be such ideas were tinfoil hat, but post-Snowden nothing seems tinfoil hat anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
My question was more along the lines of how well you can live on that money in Belgium.
My wife and I together make about 60% more than the $140k euros stated, but we live in the midwestern US and we do not live luxuriously -- our home is just under 2k sq ft, my car is 8 years old and we just replaced her Honda which was almost 12 years old and had 150k on the clock.
We eat most meals at home, dining out as a family at lowbrow places maybe 1-2 times a week with maybe an expensive adults night out once a month or less. Neither one of us is into fashion, jewelry or expensive individual hobbies. At best the luxury we have is no credit card debt, 401ks, some savings, and being able to live comfortably without budgeting down to the last dime every month.
I'm thinking that 144k euros in Belgium as a sole family income would go a lot less further than in the US. Higher taxes, higher cost of living for power, food, housing, cars and clothing. I suspect healthcare may be cheaper as a percentage of income in Belgium, which might balance some of the other costs but overall I'd consider than $144k euro salary to be closer to maybe $110k in US midwestern purchasing power.
The cost factor is still a little painful, as I'd like about 4 TB usable which would put the drive cost north of $3k alone. With the NAS box I would need to build to house it, I'm now at $3500.
I agree with your prediction about SSD pushing out disks and I think it will be very disruptive to existing SAN vendors. Not that long ago, 5k IOPS was $100,000 and a lot of vendors like Compellent have entire sales pitches based around tiering data to "cheap" disks to minimize use of 15k disks and maintain high IOPS and storage capacity.
Those kinds of solutions are complex and require heavy duty controllers (Compellent uses 2x Dell R720s). What's the Compellent sales pitch going to look like when competitors are merely stuffing a shelf with 24 1 TB SSDs? No tiering necessary, no complex tiering software, ~20 TB of storage, 2 million IOPS, cheaper controllers due to less overhead, 10 gig NICs all for a fraction of the cost of 20 TB Compellent solution.
If you assume that you could do such a solution for $30k (which I think is on the high side), the competing solution from other vendors is well north of $100k. It'd still be a bargain even if you had to buy a replacement disk due to burnout once a month.
If Samsung is willing to warranty their 850 Pros for 10 years, I'd wager they could really blow the disk market wide open if they would partner with a SAN vendor and demonstrate their disks are viable in a SAN, even if replacement rates exceeded 15k SAS.
I don't doubt the performance would be stellar, but even with the encouraging news from the write endurance tests and stuff like Samsung's 10 year warranty on their Pro series drives I still am just nervous enough about long-term durability and some rubber-hits-the-road compatibility with systems like FreeNAS/Nas4Free that it makes me just a smidgen nervous about dumping $2500 into a new NAS setup.
My own personal usage patterns are probably low enough that durability really wouldn't be a major issue, although I wonder what the "write multiplier" effect is with even single parity RAID. Is every byte written to a filesystem multiplied by 2, 3, 5, or more? That could play into the durability angle faster than you might think. Just moving my 2.5 TB of VMs to a new NAS could end up being 5, 10 or more TBs of writes to the drives.
...using these con/pro-sumer drives and not high-dollar SLC enterprise drives?
I've been long tempted to and more so with the generally positive results from the SSD write-them-to-death-athon that wrote to SSDs until they expired.
I know it's "not advised", risky, etc, but I'm thinking that maybe the drives are more reliable than we think and between backups and maybe a double parity RAID scheme or hot spare the risk is dialed down, or at least worth taking on a what-if basis.
For my own home/lab VMware cluster I'd sure like more disk performance than spinning rust gives me.
I know it's wrong and I will go to hell for it, but when I get a spyware plant Microsoft support call I usually try to play dumb for as long as possible to keep the guy tied up (I'm kind of paying it forward to someone down the list who may not get called because I kept the guy going).
Once i get bored with that or they get irritated with me and it's obvious the caller is from South Asia, I start to get insulting. Some guys won't just hang up on you, they try to bully you and that's when I get really cruel and drag out truly offensive insults -- "So I hear you upgraded your residence recently, you moved from a cardboard box to a tin shanty. How's that working out? Are you still eating insects or have you moved to a fresh rat diet? Your wife, has she freshened her dot lately, or is it the same old faded one she's had for a while?"
If I get that far, the guy is usually really wound up and spewing profanity as fast as he can mentally translate it. One guy threatened to kill me and I told him that the CIA would be interested to know that he's probably a terrorist and might want to watch those drone stike videos on YouTube for a preview.
I know, it's awful, the worst kind of Americanism possible, but I figure these people are the scum of the Earth and deserve no quarter.
I wonder if it comes under:
1) a sub-entry of the legal department budget
2) a main heading entitled something like "Regulatory fees, legal compliance and civil litigation unrelated to human resources"
3) a sub-entry under "Political contributions, lobbying and outright bribes"
#3 would be nice because they could force the "governmental relations" arm to eat it and reduce lobbying payments, political contributions and bribes. This would probably be the right feedback mechanism because if their political payees want to maxmize their income they need to make sure they are minimizing their fines and penalties.
What I'm proposing is a little more honesty in PR.
I think the basic technical fact is that this data center won't be "exclusively renewable" except on paper. The reality is that it will rely on non-renewable baseline power.
So it seems kind of dishonest to say it's a "renewable only" datacenter.
Is this one of those things where they site near a wind farm and tick a box on a form that says they want to buy green power but in reality the actual electrons that enter the data center are "from the grid" and not actually exclusively produced from renewable sources?
It would be more impressive if the data center was completely powered by renewables ONLY and unable to tap into the non-renewable sources of the grid. Basically, make it an off grid only data center. But I imagine that this would be much harder and more expensive than simply checking a box and producing a spreadsheet that says you use renewable sources when in fact you're probably using baseline power from non-renewable sources.
I can't help but think that the medical system feels something like a mix between an aristocracy and a cartel.
On one hand, it seems very much a class-based system. Doctors aren't involved in a lot of hands on medical practice, they get nurses to do a lot of it. Is this a specialty based division of labor, or is it a remnant of a class system from a couple of centuries ago where doctors were likely to be members of the social elite from birth?
On the other hand, there seems to be a lot of cartel like structure that's designed to limit competition. Filtering structures in training and education serve to limit who gets into medical school and who is able to finish residency. And by limiting the number of people who can be doctors, you are able to justify a class based labor system, high wages, etc.
Then there's the actual practice of medicine, where only doctors are allowed to do a fairly wide number of medical tasks or have to be involved in supervising non-doctors whose training would seem to make them reasonably qualified to do on their own.
Another poster in the comments suggested we need more, less well trained doctors. That's probably reasonable. Other than an emergency surgery I had a couple of years ago, I can't think of much of my exposure to the medical practice that couldn't have been met just fine by a nurse practioner or physician's assistant. Sure, we probably need the specialists and people with advanced education for diagnoses and speciality care -- your level 2-3+ ticket escalation -- but it seems like for the majority of ailments and regular care, a doctor is simply overtrained and underavailable.
And what about pharmacists? They have doctor-like training yet for the most part don't seem to do very much but count pills. Sure, they serve as a safety net in some regards to make sure that people who take a constellation of medications don't end up with complications from contraindications and side effects, but that's limited to a person getting all their prescriptions filled by one pharmacy, which is habit people have, not a requirement.
If you think about it, even with the class-based structure of medical practice, today's physician assistants and nurse practitioners are probably better trained and more informed than most general practioners were 50 years ago. It's not hard to see why it wouldn't make sense to have PAs and NPs make diagnoses and suggest drug therapies that could be vetted by pharmacists with a more detailed knowledge of drug efficacy and effects.
I don't think the media has ever really used the socialist angle on Nazi Germany, at least not as an explanation for its evils. To do so would be to invite confusion into the media's narrative of Nazism as right wing authoritariansm and the political spectrum -- the NSDAP labeled itself as socialist and implemented policies that looked socialist, so how could they be socalist and right-wing at the same time?
Before you know it people would start calling it the common sense party -- get rid of the unproductive, national pride, a strong military, reign in the rich, support the family man who is the backbone of our country...
That's what's so interesting about fascism, as an ideology it doesn't follow the economically driven left-right political definitions clearly.
The wartime nature of Nazi Germany's economy I think confuses the seperation of business and state in fascism. I also think the power of German industrialists relative to the Nazis is understated. Krupp, Thyssen, etc were extremely rich and influential and the Nazis needed their money and backing and their industries working.
I think that WAS their exit strategy -- just be incompetent enough that they'd look elsewhere for talent.
If you're a consultant/entrepreneur, you can't always know what your clients are ultimately up to so you're often into it before it's too late to just up and quit.
I think fascism as an ideology usually has a predominant nationalistic and ethnic component to it. I think business interests intermeshed with the government is largely a byproduct of a totalitarian political system.
Fascism can be tricky to extrapolate to a specific economic policy because we don't have many functioning examples of governments run by ideological fascists and the ones we do have were short lived and marked by extremes of policy and historical notoriety that make coherent analysis tricky.
The Nazi party (National Socialist German Worker's Party) parlayed its romanticism of the German Volk into some socialist policies while at the same time it coaxed and coerced skeptical German capitalists with big wartime spending.
Somebody once tried to explain fascism as the weird marriage of progressivism and racism into one ideology. I think it's a strangely apt definition that encompasses some of the strange outcomes.
I've worked as an SMB consultant and almost every SMB owner I've run into is some kind creepy, shifty guy who is coming as close as he can to "the line" and often crossing it. At a minimum it's every conceivable tax dodge imaginable -- luxury company car as a daily commuter, no-show family members on the payroll, tons of business-paid home technology for personal use, and so on. Who knows what it is at maximum. Probably outright tax fraud, siphoning cash, cheating employees, whatever.
You could make a believable narrative that has two small-time entrepreneurs looking for investors and/or work are just *used* to the kind of slimeballs that are out there and don't really ask too many questions. Call it conditioned ignorance.
I don't know how cost of living translates, but I do think their incomes, especially the guy with a regular job (IIRC) would make them be a little more selective. That part I find kind of fishy.
But it's also not hard to see once they saw they were dealing with guys with guns that going along with it but with willful incompetence wouldn't have seemed like a totally unreasonable strategy. What are your choices? Run away and look over your shoulder for years?
I don't know what you can and can't grow with this technique (grains, corn, soybeans may be an issue), but doesn't the lack of shipping (ie, using what you grow within a 10 mile radius) factor into the larger aspect of energy efficiency?
It would seem that shipping produce thousands of miles, often in refrigerated shipping systems, would use more energy than LED lighting.
The problem of course is competing against the ship there-eat--elsewhere economic model now.
The setup costs don't disappear, but when you have a system dominated by contract manufacturing the competition forces manufacturers to basically eat a lot of setup costs in order to compete against each other. The costs don't go away, but become reduced profit margins for manufacturers.
Aside from maybe some tshirts I really cannot think of any "ironic embrace of vintage" that resulted in a meaningful resurgence of a product. I've seen some legitimate attempts to bring back old products or aspects of them but the successful ones are pretty much never ironic.
1970s fashions? I think this got embraced by hipsters early and became very mainstream. I have a friend who was in the vintage clothing business and he can define where he could buy 1970s fashion clothes in bales by the pound one month and the next he was having to negotiate prices by the item from his suppliers. Not long after that they become unobtainable except as yard sale or Goodwill finds and new iterations of the same fashions were showing up new in department stores.
Beer also seemed to be kind of like this. 10-15 years ago, there weren't many craft beers -- you had a bunch of mainstream domestics, some well-known imports like Heineken or Becks. Hipster bars of the era tended to focus on "vintage" brands like PBR or Rolling Rock and this embrace of older, niche products seem to have something to do with the rise of craft alternatives (well, and quality, too..).
Is that an operating system feature, or just a historical case of a system modern enough to have online help but old school enough to have decent, comprehensive documentation of functionality and error messages?
The long term trend definitely seems to be that documentation is an afterthought at best, with a lot of things, especially errors, being totally undocumented. You might get lucky and find a decent O'Reilly-type book or roll the dice with some 900 page Sybex monster that's 80% screenshots of obvious GUI tasks.
I think your analysis is insightful (...and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter).
I feel like I either have very strong preferences or none at all. Things that I like I tend to have a kind of complex rationale for why I like them. Cost enters the picture, but only as a tail-end constraint, and usually if the cost is extreme. Generally I'm willing to pay more -- or not buy at all -- because the less expensive products fails my preference rationale.
This being said, I'm always surprised at the people who always seem to prefer lowest cost first, even when the price difference is negligible. I'm always struck by people who buy cheap first and then are disappointed/frustrated when their choices end up inadequate.
I'm even more surprised with people who seem to be cost only driven -- seeming to have no preference and seeing all choices as equal and only differentiated by price.
With regard to harbingers, I wonder if some of them just have unusual tastes that differ from average. They may just be buying new products more often because new products almost by definition differ from current popular products as vendors seek niches. As old niche products "fail" and disappear, these people just end up buying whatever is new because they want what's different. It's not a failure prediction as much as it is a market failure to provide consistent alternatives to mainstream tastes.
I think you have the concept of hipster exactly backwards. Usually hipsters seem to cluster around emerging trends and often seem to be influential enough that an ironic embrace of vintage/past products often produces a resurgence of that product.
It's debatable whether hipsters even exist, or whether it's a group that identifies products before they become popular or whether it's a group that's defined as clustering around products that became popular.
I don't know if its my perception or not, but it seems to me that very few products anymore have any persistence. It's not just a question of picking a loser -- it seems like so many products have an initial run and then disappear to be replaced by something else.
I suspect it's a byproduct of easier product design using computer aided design and the heavy use of contract manufacturing overseas. CAD makes it easy to tweak a design to create the new-car-model kinds of changes or just something different. Contract manufacturing lets vendors shop designs around for the best production cost and it wouldn't surprise me if the tooling/setup costs get eaten by the manufacturer.
HVAC is too mechanical and homeowners are too persnickety. You'd get killed on break fix and maintenance overhead and labor. If you tried not to, your service would suck and people would quit paying the leases or deduct out of pocket repair costs from lease payments.
Plus, what happens when you want to move? "Oh there's this weird lease on the HVAC..." could make it harder to sell.
The bigger problem is that HR and everyone else who sees arrest records take a "where there's smoke, there's fire" attitude towards arrests, assuming that anyone who got arrested is of questionable character, a troublemaker. Maybe there's even some assumptions that a lot of minor arrestees might get the charges dropped or dismissed.
They have no subtlety, willingness to understand what happened or differentiate why you got arrested, just that you were arrested.
Personally, I think arrest records without charges ought to be sealed after six months and it should be illegal for employers to even look at them at all. The unsealed database should be public but controlled and audited access, and not resold to database providers.
Convictions are trickier, and probably have a greater public right to know angle.
The only real authority over any IP block is in BGP announcements and who believes them.
Normally I wear protection, but then I thought, 'When am I gonna make it back to Haiti?'
It's really not hard to think of increased Fed control over fiber being a cover for NSA tapping activity. If the FBI is monitoring your fiber and something goes down, it's easy to say "we're on the job, nothing got cut, you must have an error in your network".
It used to be such ideas were tinfoil hat, but post-Snowden nothing seems tinfoil hat anymore.