That blog fucked up the numbers. They apparently don't understand the difference between "normal breaking" and "emergency breaking."
The capacity of the hyperloop is 25% of high speed rail and one can question how realistic the high speed rail numbers are. Maximum capacity of X is utterly useless if you'll never reach close to it.
Assuming that the way we do something is the only way to do it and we can never figure out a different way is silly. I'd wager that a lot of the resource we mine today would have been considered "impossible" to mine fifty years ago. Then we invented new technologies and new approaches and adjust old ones to fit the new situation.
On Earth we have water, oxygen and gravity so we use them. In space we have abundant solar energy, no gravity and no friction/heat conductivity so we'd use those. Plus no real environmental contamination issues and no weather. Spin asteroids while heating them with giant mirrors to create massive centrifuges for example. Use relatively weak electromagnets to pick out conductive materials from pulverized asteroids. Or crisscross asteroids with tunnels with no worry of collapse. Maybe have robots grind asteroids into pieces automatically since the asteroid should be mostly homogeneous with less need to account for the location of "deposits." Strip mining with no need to worry about collapsing walls or angry environmentalists, just strip mine the whole asteroid from outside in until nothing is left.
Except for maybe Mars, space doesn't really provide that.
A relatively small asteroid has more metal in it than all of Earth's mining industries produce in a year. Space is filled with resources, the issue is as always getting them to where you need them. If you live in space that's a lot easier than if you live on Earth.
As for available land. Space... is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is.
No, some languages simply are slower to develop with and debug. The problem is also made worse depending on the frameworks and IDEs available. As an example, you're going to get your work done way quicker writing an application manipulating dates and times using C# and Visual Studio than you are Java and Eclipse because until Java 8 Java's date time functionality is shit and Eclipse is a dog slow IDE. With Java 8 and say NetBeans or JDeveloper though things will be pretty similar.
Java (and say Maven) makes it trivial to use third party libraries. A few minutes and Joda time is installed, seen by the IDE and properly distributed within any jars I make. I guess C# users are forced to deal with only the built in libraries but that's very much not the case for Java.
Also if you want a good IDE for Java then you buy Intellij IDEA and call it a day.
It costs $1 billion I believe to bring a drug to market, that's not engineering costs but rather FDA costs and costs of failed drugs. Drug trials are not cheap and you don't really know which ones will work beforehand.
Someone needs to pay that or the drug can never be manufactured and sold. Do you have a billion lying around and are you willing to hope people pay you back?
If you ban all curse words then people will simply invent new curse words and, most likely, words that you can't ban. Or words that if they ban them have hilarious side effects. Like, say, Putin.
Go putin yourself. You're such a putin. Your mother is such a putin.
More to the point, making phones is hard and making good phones is even harder. Look at the issues apple has had with their new phones and Apple is, from what I've heard, some of the if not the best in the game in terms of hardware talent.
I'd bet money they run into issues, start cutting corners and finally launch a buggy device that misses a number of features. Pretty standard really for a v1 if you think about it but not something I'd want to drop $800 for ahead of time especially without knowing what bugs and missing features there will be (ie: do I care about the particular short falls or not).
I can setup a server. I don't want to. I don't want to manage a server. To keep up with updates. To deal with issues. To read up on standards. To setup firewall rules.
Also, it'd take me five times as long to create a server that is half as reliable as one done by a proper sys admin who does nothing but that all day. That's time I'm not doing my job and that's time I'm basically being overpaid a lot to be a shitty sys admin.
I'm sure that's what my company was thinking when they bought low level un-managed switches for our office.
Then someone created loop when plugging in a router. Stupid switch couldn't detect it and couldn't be remotely managed. We had no network for 2 days as the IT guy had to be flown in to figure it out. Forty people basically doing nothing for 8 hours and barely doing anything for another 8. Including the sales staff who couldn't do demos. I'm sure you you can do the math on how much that cost with that MBA degree of yours.
Saving $100 on a switch cost the company a lot more in lost revenue and sales.
All those little slows downs and inefficiencies and failures add up to a lot of lost time and money. When I spend an hour dicking around with the shitty wifi router you bought that's an hour you're paying me to not do my job.
I can't speak for others, but I value my credibility as a reviewer, my % of helpful votes and my amazon reviewer ranking. Because of this, I never select books about technology issues (or technology items) that I do not already know something about (or am in the process of developing knowledge of). Similarly, I don't select or review genre fiction, since I don't read this for pleasure.
Clearly many don't. Your amazon reputation means very very little in any objective measure. For a professional reviewer their career depends on it. For a vine reviewer, their vine membership may depend on it but who knows how long the program will last anyway. So get as much expensive free stuff as possible and then sell as much of it as possible. Who cares about the reviews. Amazon wants 100% reviews? Churn out some pointless fluff so you stay in the program and get even more money.
Yeah, some Vine reviews suck.
Except as the linked product showed, it's a lot more than some.
I mean, do people actually find this behavior surprising given the incentive structure?
If companies are willing have a bidding war for my employment why would I not let them? Sure if you're a manager doing hiring you'd dislike it since salary expectations just went up but as an employee why is that bad?
There's very few companies that provide raises as high as you'd get by switching jobs and as many "promotion" opportunities. I can spend 10 years hoping a management position opens up that I'm considered for or I can accept a management position after 5 years or 2 years. Again, why is it worse for me to do the latter?
All I'm hearing from you is that as a hiring manager you'd like to make sure your employees are kept just content enough to never peek out and see if they're undervalued. I'm guessing most of that training is applicable only within the company so you've got a nice sunk cost hold on them as well. Probably their backgrounds are odd so again they'd be less employable at other companies that didn't spend time vetting them. In the end it's all about how you can pay the least for your employees. Which is good for the companies bottom line but my perspective is from the other side. I want the company to pay as much for my time as possible and not as little.
Ummmm, that's not called promotion. Promotion means you move up in the same company.
*Woosh*
For instance, before too long, you find that you are 30 in Silicon Valley and evidently nobody wants to hire you.
The people who can't find jobs at 30 are those who spent 8 years working at one company on dead end technology only to get laid off with no current skills or connections. I've had friends hit that wall and it's not pretty to be playing catch up while burning through savings. You know those co-workers I mentioned in my previous post? They're not 20 year olds and yet they find jobs without difficulty.
Hopefully in all of those jumps you develop some management skills along the way because by 40 you'll need them to keep your job from going to some kid.
Hopefully? I plan for my future, I try to not rely on luck and good fortune.
You think you're more likely to be promoted to management or to find a new job in management (or a lead of some kind) at a different company? I've found the former an utter crap shoot to pull off (and most who I've seen do it were ass kissers foremost) and personally I prefer not to gamble on my future.
My attitude of not being a miserable wage slave and actually wanting to be paid my market value? Or my attitude of understanding how the economies of my own industry?
I do find it amusing how people on one hand complain about companies exploiting workers but on the other hand bitch about workers not being team players if they don't let themselves be exploited.
I'd just reckon that the job market sucks no matter what the age even in SF
Hahaha, keep thinking that if it makes you happy. Everyone I know who actually is there or NYC thinks it's about as close to the dot com boom as you can get. Maybe better because the giants have a lot more money to throw around this time. Everyone I know who was looking for jobs had better offers than their old jobs within a few weeks and usually were booked solid with interviews. Usually people have interviews at decent companies the next day if they put themselves on the job market.
aren't most of their a lot of their workers technically just phone answer droids working low wage customer support, with high turnaround?
Neither one has much in the sense of tech support or call centers from what I understand.
that explains how average fb guy is just 1.1years at the company.
Are you even in tech? Promotion in tech means you find a better job somewhere else and everyone wants to hire ex-fb people. The shorter people stay in a tech position the better the job market.
The starting salaries for college grads at large SV companies are I think around $100k now and probably rising. It goes up from there mind you and goes up rather quickly if you switch to a competitor at the right time. As the fun facebook and google salary war has shown money isn't the problem.
Huh? Credit cards don't force anything onto the card holder, they take the money from the merchant and reimburse the cardholder without questions. In fact, they'll almost certainly catch the transaction before it's finalized. Now merchants hate the arrangement but it's golden for customers.
You do not, by the way, get this with debit cards or most any other form of payment. Amusingly one of the problems with biometric protection is that it's assumed to be perfect so when it exists the blame is moved to the customers again. So when someone steals your credit card you have to fight to prove it was actually stolen and good luck with that.
So yes credit card companies don't care but it's not the customer who will eat the costs so stop spreading FUD.
Real estate is insane, obviously... but you're also dealing with the transportation headaches. Where I work now, we already have some big problems with that, and we don't have NYC's density. (Everyone's pushed and prodded to use public transportation since cars are impractical with high daily parking costs, traffic jams, etc.)
No one that can avoid it drives in NYC, out of my company of 60+ people only one drives. Most take the train or bike.
But with public transportation, you're really limited in what you can carry.
What are you carrying?
Any kind of office outing requires renting an expensive bus to shuttle everyone to or from the event, too.
You walk to events in NYC because everything is within walking distance. I don't think there's been a company event that wasn't within walking distance.
And if the subway has a problem, you may as well shut the place down until they get things fixed.
Unless your office is in the middle of nowhere there's a half dozen separate subway lines near it and even with the main lines delays don't happen very often. That's like saying you can't drive anywhere because there might be a traffic jam.
Additionally, your employees who might otherwise be happy to work late or odd hours to finish some project are constrained by the hours the bus or metro runs.
The NYC subways and buses run 24/7 with rather good reliability except at 4am (and even then it's decent unless you live in the middle of nowhere).
If the physical presence makes no difference (software development, for example) -- then you want the CHEAPEST place you can build an office and still be able to hire good talent. I think what many companies would find if they actually thought "outside the box" a bit, is that there's a LOT of great computer talent in the small, rural communities. Kids growing up there don't have as much to do, so many gravitate towards the home computer and the internet, and spend a lot of time with it. The technical minded who don't envision themselves working the family farm like their parents did constitute a good hiring pool that's neglected.
Oh, you're talking about outsourced tech support services. You do realize that 90+% of tech jobs aren't that, right? Well tech jobs that pay well at least, the grunts who runs around the city repairing PCs isn't the top of the tech hierarchy.
See, when people talk about startups in NYC they mean software startups. As in developers, system admins, dev op and so on. Companies that create products.
Your tech company won't get far without employees and there's plenty of those in NYC. Also, investors won't enjoy having to go to Bumfuck, Iowa to talk to you and see the operation.
People did complain. Amusingly, the biggest counterpoint was that if you want to offer downloads you should probably use google code which is much more user (rather than programmer) friendly.
Shortage of competent programmers. There is a difference. A guy who spend three days reading a "java for dummies" book may be applying for a programmer position but he isn't a competent programmer.
Someone wrote a bit back that 70% of their applicants, who passed the HR screening I believe, couldn't even code fizz-buzz. As in couldn't code it at all, not even badly or not even mostly.
Worse, many would probably start getting involved in basically anti-social movements and groups. Cult groups that provide an illusion of meaning to their lives.
So basically those 50 hours will be spent helping some would be dictator gain power.
How does the VAT work regarding something that's being exported?
If you sold it in the UK you'd recoup the VAT from the components by the VAT the consumer pays you. What if you export to a country with no VAT? Do you need to charge more to offset the component's VAT?
You misunderstand the cause and effect. One of the main reasons for this whole mess, as I understand it, is the continual drop in government funding for higher education. That means that tuitions must go up to compensate and cost cutting must be done.
The same thing happens in one form or another in countries with publicly funded higher education when politicians decide to cut funding. You can even look at the state schools in the US to see that this trend has nothing to do with private colleges.
Voters want lower taxes and more "efficiency," that money must be made up somewhere else.
Universities are not replacing retiring professors, they are removing the positions and instead using cheap labor (postdocs, adjuncts, etc, etc.) instead.
Slashdot Mirror
That blog fucked up the numbers. They apparently don't understand the difference between "normal breaking" and "emergency breaking."
The capacity of the hyperloop is 25% of high speed rail and one can question how realistic the high speed rail numbers are. Maximum capacity of X is utterly useless if you'll never reach close to it.
Assuming that the way we do something is the only way to do it and we can never figure out a different way is silly. I'd wager that a lot of the resource we mine today would have been considered "impossible" to mine fifty years ago. Then we invented new technologies and new approaches and adjust old ones to fit the new situation.
On Earth we have water, oxygen and gravity so we use them. In space we have abundant solar energy, no gravity and no friction/heat conductivity so we'd use those. Plus no real environmental contamination issues and no weather. Spin asteroids while heating them with giant mirrors to create massive centrifuges for example. Use relatively weak electromagnets to pick out conductive materials from pulverized asteroids. Or crisscross asteroids with tunnels with no worry of collapse. Maybe have robots grind asteroids into pieces automatically since the asteroid should be mostly homogeneous with less need to account for the location of "deposits." Strip mining with no need to worry about collapsing walls or angry environmentalists, just strip mine the whole asteroid from outside in until nothing is left.
Except for maybe Mars, space doesn't really provide that.
A relatively small asteroid has more metal in it than all of Earth's mining industries produce in a year. Space is filled with resources, the issue is as always getting them to where you need them. If you live in space that's a lot easier than if you live on Earth.
As for available land. Space... is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is.
No, some languages simply are slower to develop with and debug. The problem is also made worse depending on the frameworks and IDEs available. As an example, you're going to get your work done way quicker writing an application manipulating dates and times using C# and Visual Studio than you are Java and Eclipse because until Java 8 Java's date time functionality is shit and Eclipse is a dog slow IDE. With Java 8 and say NetBeans or JDeveloper though things will be pretty similar.
Java (and say Maven) makes it trivial to use third party libraries. A few minutes and Joda time is installed, seen by the IDE and properly distributed within any jars I make. I guess C# users are forced to deal with only the built in libraries but that's very much not the case for Java.
Also if you want a good IDE for Java then you buy Intellij IDEA and call it a day.
It costs $1 billion I believe to bring a drug to market, that's not engineering costs but rather FDA costs and costs of failed drugs. Drug trials are not cheap and you don't really know which ones will work beforehand.
Someone needs to pay that or the drug can never be manufactured and sold. Do you have a billion lying around and are you willing to hope people pay you back?
If you ban all curse words then people will simply invent new curse words and, most likely, words that you can't ban. Or words that if they ban them have hilarious side effects. Like, say, Putin.
Go putin yourself. You're such a putin. Your mother is such a putin.
More to the point, making phones is hard and making good phones is even harder. Look at the issues apple has had with their new phones and Apple is, from what I've heard, some of the if not the best in the game in terms of hardware talent.
I'd bet money they run into issues, start cutting corners and finally launch a buggy device that misses a number of features. Pretty standard really for a v1 if you think about it but not something I'd want to drop $800 for ahead of time especially without knowing what bugs and missing features there will be (ie: do I care about the particular short falls or not).
I can setup a server. I don't want to. I don't want to manage a server. To keep up with updates. To deal with issues. To read up on standards. To setup firewall rules.
Also, it'd take me five times as long to create a server that is half as reliable as one done by a proper sys admin who does nothing but that all day. That's time I'm not doing my job and that's time I'm basically being overpaid a lot to be a shitty sys admin.
Fuck that.
I'm sure that's what my company was thinking when they bought low level un-managed switches for our office.
Then someone created loop when plugging in a router. Stupid switch couldn't detect it and couldn't be remotely managed. We had no network for 2 days as the IT guy had to be flown in to figure it out. Forty people basically doing nothing for 8 hours and barely doing anything for another 8. Including the sales staff who couldn't do demos. I'm sure you you can do the math on how much that cost with that MBA degree of yours.
Saving $100 on a switch cost the company a lot more in lost revenue and sales.
All those little slows downs and inefficiencies and failures add up to a lot of lost time and money. When I spend an hour dicking around with the shitty wifi router you bought that's an hour you're paying me to not do my job.
I can't speak for others, but I value my credibility as a reviewer, my % of helpful votes and my amazon reviewer ranking. Because of this, I never select books about technology issues (or technology items) that I do not already know something about (or am in the process of developing knowledge of). Similarly, I don't select or review genre fiction, since I don't read this for pleasure.
Clearly many don't. Your amazon reputation means very very little in any objective measure. For a professional reviewer their career depends on it. For a vine reviewer, their vine membership may depend on it but who knows how long the program will last anyway. So get as much expensive free stuff as possible and then sell as much of it as possible. Who cares about the reviews. Amazon wants 100% reviews? Churn out some pointless fluff so you stay in the program and get even more money.
Yeah, some Vine reviews suck.
Except as the linked product showed, it's a lot more than some.
I mean, do people actually find this behavior surprising given the incentive structure?
If companies are willing have a bidding war for my employment why would I not let them? Sure if you're a manager doing hiring you'd dislike it since salary expectations just went up but as an employee why is that bad?
There's very few companies that provide raises as high as you'd get by switching jobs and as many "promotion" opportunities. I can spend 10 years hoping a management position opens up that I'm considered for or I can accept a management position after 5 years or 2 years. Again, why is it worse for me to do the latter?
All I'm hearing from you is that as a hiring manager you'd like to make sure your employees are kept just content enough to never peek out and see if they're undervalued. I'm guessing most of that training is applicable only within the company so you've got a nice sunk cost hold on them as well. Probably their backgrounds are odd so again they'd be less employable at other companies that didn't spend time vetting them. In the end it's all about how you can pay the least for your employees. Which is good for the companies bottom line but my perspective is from the other side. I want the company to pay as much for my time as possible and not as little.
Ummmm, that's not called promotion. Promotion means you move up in the same company.
*Woosh*
For instance, before too long, you find that you are 30 in Silicon Valley and evidently nobody wants to hire you.
The people who can't find jobs at 30 are those who spent 8 years working at one company on dead end technology only to get laid off with no current skills or connections. I've had friends hit that wall and it's not pretty to be playing catch up while burning through savings. You know those co-workers I mentioned in my previous post? They're not 20 year olds and yet they find jobs without difficulty.
Hopefully in all of those jumps you develop some management skills along the way because by 40 you'll need them to keep your job from going to some kid.
Hopefully? I plan for my future, I try to not rely on luck and good fortune.
You think you're more likely to be promoted to management or to find a new job in management (or a lead of some kind) at a different company? I've found the former an utter crap shoot to pull off (and most who I've seen do it were ass kissers foremost) and personally I prefer not to gamble on my future.
My attitude of not being a miserable wage slave and actually wanting to be paid my market value? Or my attitude of understanding how the economies of my own industry?
I do find it amusing how people on one hand complain about companies exploiting workers but on the other hand bitch about workers not being team players if they don't let themselves be exploited.
I'd just reckon that the job market sucks no matter what the age even in SF
Hahaha, keep thinking that if it makes you happy. Everyone I know who actually is there or NYC thinks it's about as close to the dot com boom as you can get. Maybe better because the giants have a lot more money to throw around this time. Everyone I know who was looking for jobs had better offers than their old jobs within a few weeks and usually were booked solid with interviews. Usually people have interviews at decent companies the next day if they put themselves on the job market.
aren't most of their a lot of their workers technically just phone answer droids working low wage customer support, with high turnaround?
Neither one has much in the sense of tech support or call centers from what I understand.
that explains how average fb guy is just 1.1years at the company.
Are you even in tech? Promotion in tech means you find a better job somewhere else and everyone wants to hire ex-fb people. The shorter people stay in a tech position the better the job market.
The starting salaries for college grads at large SV companies are I think around $100k now and probably rising. It goes up from there mind you and goes up rather quickly if you switch to a competitor at the right time. As the fun facebook and google salary war has shown money isn't the problem.
And suddenly every patent produces negative profit just like movies.
Huh? Credit cards don't force anything onto the card holder, they take the money from the merchant and reimburse the cardholder without questions. In fact, they'll almost certainly catch the transaction before it's finalized. Now merchants hate the arrangement but it's golden for customers.
You do not, by the way, get this with debit cards or most any other form of payment. Amusingly one of the problems with biometric protection is that it's assumed to be perfect so when it exists the blame is moved to the customers again. So when someone steals your credit card you have to fight to prove it was actually stolen and good luck with that.
So yes credit card companies don't care but it's not the customer who will eat the costs so stop spreading FUD.
Real estate is insane, obviously ... but you're also dealing with the transportation headaches. Where I work now, we already have some big problems with that, and we don't have NYC's density. (Everyone's pushed and prodded to use public transportation since cars are impractical with high daily parking costs, traffic jams, etc.)
No one that can avoid it drives in NYC, out of my company of 60+ people only one drives. Most take the train or bike.
But with public transportation, you're really limited in what you can carry.
What are you carrying?
Any kind of office outing requires renting an expensive bus to shuttle everyone to or from the event, too.
You walk to events in NYC because everything is within walking distance. I don't think there's been a company event that wasn't within walking distance.
And if the subway has a problem, you may as well shut the place down until they get things fixed.
Unless your office is in the middle of nowhere there's a half dozen separate subway lines near it and even with the main lines delays don't happen very often. That's like saying you can't drive anywhere because there might be a traffic jam.
Additionally, your employees who might otherwise be happy to work late or odd hours to finish some project are constrained by the hours the bus or metro runs.
The NYC subways and buses run 24/7 with rather good reliability except at 4am (and even then it's decent unless you live in the middle of nowhere).
If the physical presence makes no difference (software development, for example) -- then you want the CHEAPEST place you can build an office and still be able to hire good talent. I think what many companies would find if they actually thought "outside the box" a bit, is that there's a LOT of great computer talent in the small, rural communities. Kids growing up there don't have as much to do, so many gravitate towards the home computer and the internet, and spend a lot of time with it. The technical minded who don't envision themselves working the family farm like their parents did constitute a good hiring pool that's neglected.
Oh, you're talking about outsourced tech support services. You do realize that 90+% of tech jobs aren't that, right? Well tech jobs that pay well at least, the grunts who runs around the city repairing PCs isn't the top of the tech hierarchy.
See, when people talk about startups in NYC they mean software startups. As in developers, system admins, dev op and so on. Companies that create products.
Your tech company won't get far without employees and there's plenty of those in NYC. Also, investors won't enjoy having to go to Bumfuck, Iowa to talk to you and see the operation.
People did complain. Amusingly, the biggest counterpoint was that if you want to offer downloads you should probably use google code which is much more user (rather than programmer) friendly.
Shortage of competent programmers. There is a difference. A guy who spend three days reading a "java for dummies" book may be applying for a programmer position but he isn't a competent programmer.
Someone wrote a bit back that 70% of their applicants, who passed the HR screening I believe, couldn't even code fizz-buzz. As in couldn't code it at all, not even badly or not even mostly.
Worse, many would probably start getting involved in basically anti-social movements and groups. Cult groups that provide an illusion of meaning to their lives.
So basically those 50 hours will be spent helping some would be dictator gain power.
How does the VAT work regarding something that's being exported?
If you sold it in the UK you'd recoup the VAT from the components by the VAT the consumer pays you. What if you export to a country with no VAT? Do you need to charge more to offset the component's VAT?
You misunderstand the cause and effect. One of the main reasons for this whole mess, as I understand it, is the continual drop in government funding for higher education. That means that tuitions must go up to compensate and cost cutting must be done.
The same thing happens in one form or another in countries with publicly funded higher education when politicians decide to cut funding. You can even look at the state schools in the US to see that this trend has nothing to do with private colleges.
Voters want lower taxes and more "efficiency," that money must be made up somewhere else.
Universities are not replacing retiring professors, they are removing the positions and instead using cheap labor (postdocs, adjuncts, etc, etc.) instead.
That is the real issue.