Advice as I see it is a bit of a risky affair because (assuming you do want to actually listen to it and implement it) you kind of give up on a situation and would like to be steered in a certain direction because you feel you cannot make the right decision at the moment.
I am well-intentioned but I don't know your life, your upbringing, nor am I empath / telepath and thus I don't know how do you feel inside. Hence, me giving you an advice assumes a lot of context that applies to myself only and not to you. So if you follow my advice you will likely end up in a situation that I can deal with. But will it be a situation that you can deal with?
Example: I am one of those people who can deal with meetings and people quite fine BUT I get tired of it and there's an upper limit to it, and surpassing that limit renders me literally useless for the next several hours. Thus, I could give people advice of the kind "you feel your job requirements are not clear and that's stressing you out -- go chat with your team lead, your colleagues, then your manager, it will help you have a peace of mind". Good advice, right? But some people can't be in a meeting more than 20 minutes a day before they need to retreat back into their shell and thus this person could have one small meeting but have no strength for the next ones. What's worse: from the perspective of the more outgoing people they started a good initiative but never pursued it to completion.
So I'd say that in this hypothetical situation I actually gave them a bad advice while still having only good intentions.
(A better advice in the above situation would be for this person to have a very quick voice/video chat with their manager and tell them they feel the requirements towards them aren't clear and that they would like to receive a document / Wiki outlining those in clear language. This avoids the additional meetings.)
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TL;DR: Advice, even when given with the best of intentions, misses a lot of context. The receiver of the advice has to carefully weigh this factor; it's OK to reject an otherwise excellent advice if it doesn't apply to you one way or another. And sadly there's also the aspect of people blindly accepting your advice and then blaming you for the consequences.
My first ‘job’ was going around to professors houses and setting up their modems and trumpet windsock so they could connect to the internet through the university’s modem pool. I was 12 and my dad came with me, the professors would reach out to him to get me to set up their internet. Hilarious!
The last bit of the post is interesting, in the author’s qualified opinion this heat wave would have occurred regardless of global warming, but global warming made it 2 degrees F hotter.
The anamoly causing the heat wave is independent of global warming.
Before anyone interprets that as a political stance on global warming, it is straight from the article.
For most users who are emailing, reading some web forum, social media, and maybe office that matters very little.
Even fully up to date there is always another zero day, so for individuals doing nothing of particular importance the best bet is good up to date backups of the important files and when your software tools are working well to help you get whatever it is you do done, don’t change them, and don’t update them, because odds are there will be some regression, some feature removed, a change to a subscription model, some functionality now depends on the Internet, or some level of telemetry/spying.
Software has become hostile to users. Everything is nearly malware now. Easily snap shotted and sandboxed VMs are just about the only way to maintain some level of consistency over a 5-10 year span where you are depending on the software to just keep doing what it is doing.
But, not surprisingly, "For most users who are emailing, reading some web forum, social media, and maybe office that matters very little." don't understand or know how to do rolling backups or operate a VM, so keeping their OS up to date is the best option. Denying them that, regardless of how little they use the internet, is reckless at best.
Tom green was even ahead of them. Who can forget the air brushed lesbians on his dads car, his dad deciding to take the bus to his government job, and then Tom trying to pick his dad up at the bus stop in the car.
My favorite was undercutters pizza, where he would follow pizza delivery guys, then beat them to the door and offer a lower price. He carried the toppings around in a tackle box to be added.
Yup, one can even argue that he was one of the progenitors of podcasts with his Internet show in the late 2000s. It's where Joe Rogan got his inspiration.
Say people with the skills and incentives to build these systems all go to faangs where they can make 500k/yr and have the budget to build the system since that system is the revenue generator.
Everywhere else it is 150k-200k a year with the bare number headcount and you are a cost center and treated like one.
So not surprising to me that every company in the world that has a large physical plant, so already has large single points of failure, doesn’t have redundant data centers or cloud based systems.
Given the number of hacks anything online literally can’t be secured, so they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
One answer is to go back to analog systems, which ain’t happening!
I'm sorry, but it is laughable to imply that a team of developers each making 200k a year can't build a stable product. It also isn't like the FAANGs of the world don't have downtime themselves.
I’m in industrial control and the move fast and break things never ending stream of updates subscription software mentality has taken hold of the big players like Rockwell and Schneider.
I was going to say the multiple failures at high profile cloud systems just in the last year is enough to prove that all the FAANG engineers in the world won’t save you.
Why would tech companies be more rational at pricing labor than other companies?
Because that's what it is - if your entire fleet is going down and you could have spent more to hire engineers, you just are irrational at pricing the value of engineering labor.
"Yet every other airline is up and running, having (presumably) spent roughly the same on engineers"
That's an odd line of thinking. Other airlines have catastrophic outages too. Just at different times/dates. They do sometimes share 3rd party dependencies, but that happened to not be the case this time.
Actually that's much closer to the definition of a cost center.
A cost is a thing you need to pay but if you spend more on it you get very little benefit. Thus it has a binary nature or at least a nature where "good enough" is all you need. A profit center is something where if you make it better you generate more revenue. Therefore things like necessary infrastructure is a cost, whereas adding more routes is a profit.
Whereas I think you are confusing cost and profit to mean "important" and "unimportant". Not having your headquarters fall down is important. Having HVAC for your office workers is important. But no one is going to say "Let's choose this airline, have you seen how awesome the HVAC in their main office is? And how the foundation to their HQ is going to last a hundred years longer than their competitor?" But they will say "Let's choose this airline because it has a direct flight to where we want to go".
Thank you. In retrospect, I had a feeling something was off about my thinking, but I couldn't articulate where. Importance and profitability are different domains. They might penny pinch weather reports, and risk management probably characterized it as "low risk, high impact", saw "low risk" and underinvested.
Southwest's stock price seems to be unaffected by the outage. Southwest is down 0.28% on the day, but most of that drop happened at market open, before this incident, and is probably related to the S&P 500 being down 0.21% over a similar time period. Southwest's stock stabilized at shortly before 10am, and is actually up almost a tenth since then.
Seems to me the MBAs ran the numbers a while ago, and here we are.
The news wasn’t priced in yet. Stocks are usually not priced rationally and there is plenty of room for someone good at performing accurate corporate valuations to become handsomely rich. Case in point: Enphase (ENPH). How can a stock of a predictable solar-parts company be priced at $130 then $220, then $120, then $164? All within a 7 month period. Finally what MBAs are you referring to?
And so it goes. A program solves a problem for you, it is good value, you start to use it, it is changed to further lock you in, and then it changes to a subscription
Yet neither of those are the problem. The problem is carbs and lack of exercise.
American bread is basically cake. We serve fries with everything. Ketchup, which is basically red sugar paste, is a go-to condiment. People drink fruit juice “to be healthy”, etc etc.
Even in big tech companies, nearly all of the snacks are carb dense potato chips, sugar glazed nuts, candy, instant noodles, and more.
Everyone eats like they work 10 hours of calorie-intensive labor while barely moving at all. It would be a wonderful if the only thing Americans ate was chicken and steroid milk exports.
The Dutch serve fries with everything. We use ketchup and sugar like you do. We eat and drink fruits like you do as well. Also, we deep fry like everything. Seriously, Google search for Dutch fast food. It’s literally all deep fried from cheese to noodles to meats.
The difference is your portion sizes are gigantic compared to ours. If you go to a McDonald’s in Holland and buy a meal, our fries are what you’d call small size, and our cola are what you’d call child’s size. At restaurants we don’t have unlimited refill of cola like you do, we pay for each bottle so we don’t typically drink an entire days worth of kcal in cola with each meal like you do. Our breakfast is smaller and cold, not big lavish feasts with cooked food. What you call breakfast we’d probably call lunch, and what we call breakfast you’d probably call a snack.
We also collectively exercise more than you do just by living. It’s not a secret that bicycling around is a huge thing and the primary transport we think of when we want to go somewhere unless we have a reason not to.
I’m sure the types of food you have are a big contributor, but at the end of the day you’re the ones stuffing all of that into your mouths instead of properly portioning out sizes.
Honestly, even those with high intensity jobs often can’t burn the excess calories from the typical diet. How many overweight construction workers have you seen?
I don't think either of those are in any way contributing to the problem I am describing.
Portion sizes, excessive fat and simple sugars, loading everything (even savory foods) with huge amounts of federally-subsidized cheap corn syrup, all sorts of things. It's not as simple as (or related to) livestock practices.
There are no more normal size candy bars for sale in the gas station by my winter home; only "king size" which are approximately 2x the size of a normal candy bar. This is just one of a million little examples.
I've actually seen the opposite where I live. A lot of stores have moved to smaller candy bars than in the past. But i suspect that's to increase profits as they still cost the same.
I strongly suspect that incredibly cheap lean protein (aka chlorinated / acid bath / steroid chicken) is net positive for American health by offsetting the low-quality processed carbs that would replace it.
How much of the cost of a flight is fuel? What percentage of the mass being moved is passengers and their luggage be freight and the plane and fuel itself?
Better question: what fraction of airline's margins could one explain with the variation of passengers' weights? Airlines' pre-tax margins are low [1]. Almost any factor, meaningless or meaningful, will look tiny relative to revenues or costs.
In terms of flight operating costs (FOC) per hour, about 16-36% according to the numbers for a 737-500 across for Continental/United/Southwest a few years ago.
It's very dependent on utilization. Fixed ownership (i.e. depreciation/leasing) costs start to dominate at low utilization rates.
Mid sized airliner roughly 90,000 lbs for the plane and equipment and 160 to 170,000 or so maximum take off weight depending on the variant. So a bit over half the weight is the plane itself the rest is fuel + people/freight.
100 lbs * 500 passengers is 50k pounds or about 10% of the max takeoff weight quoted there. Those numbers seem likely to be over-estimates, but that seems not inconsequential?
Edit: the plane holds 328-550 depending on seat configuration per the above link. I went with the upper end of that range per consideration of the “safety considerations” indicating it is the upper end of that range that is being reconsidered.
A 777 is not a mide sized airliner, wide body aircraft for long haul have very different calculations because their flight can easily be over 12 hours long.
The problem case for weight are the regional jets (E190 etc) and to a lesser degree the 737/A320 family. Those tend to be weight limited enough that you need to offload passengers or baggage if it's too warm outside.
fwiw, the old rule of thumb when I was trained is "it cost you one pound of fuel for every three that you carry", where 'cost' is in the form of increased burn (decreased efficiency).
Of course, fuel is no different than any other weight, so the same rule would apply to the revenue load (people, bags, freight)—for every three pounds it cost you one pound of fuel.
Incidentally, I've always felt ticketing should be pro-rata wrt weight. Well, where 'always' is defined as 'since I obtained my FAA dispatcher license.'
