Have you read REAMDE? A surprisingly large amount of text was dedicated to literal worldbuilding description of how an MMORPG world was derived from physical principles, geological processes, and so on. I haven't read Fall yet, but that those same physical processes are a big part of it, isn't surprising to me.
>Boeing, for what it's worth, has learned from their mistakes with this project
okay, learning is good
>they will never accept fixed-price contracts again
Yeah, that's not the lesson they should take from this fiasco.
Given how Boeing was reportedly acting regarding the development of a new crew vehicle[1], the hubris shown seems to be systemic, top to bottom. I have no empathy for the Boeing management that got them into this situation, and if their takeaway is "we're just not going to accept contracts like this", and not, "we need to deeply change how we engineer solutions", then coupled with the 737-max tragedies, Boeing can go bankrupt for all I care.
Please understand, putting a can of human beans into LEO using a preexisting flight proven rocket is very hard and there is no possible way America's most experienced aerospace company could have possibility come up with a realistic estimate for what it would cost.
There is a competency crisis at Boeing. Not in America generally, as some have suggested, but Boeing specifically.
I'm with ya. I've owned 4 (Model S P100D, Model S Plaid, Model X, Model Y) over the past 10+ years. When the lease on my Plaid expired, I couldn't bring myself to get another one.
I took a long look at the Taycan as the used ones are "almost" sensibly priced but the first 2 generations are simply not great cars. The new 2025 (3rd Gen) is much nicer but the pricing is doesn't make sense.
Hopefully 2-3 years from now brings a much bigger diversity of performance electric cars. The BYD sports cars look very interesting.
I've personally burned out a couple of times. First was a Fintech startup back in 2011 or so. Second was at an aerospace startup that you've heard of.
In both cases, the unique factor was an extended period of time where I was the sole person who could some considerable piece of work that the business relied upon for day to day operations, which meant that I couldn't take effective breaks and I lived constantly on call and in the critical path.
I had to quit both jobs in order to both grant myself the space to not feel captive and also to show management that more than a single person was necessary to perform the tasks that I had been performing.
I've burned out once, but that was enough. I am working again but it's been more than 7 years and I'm not fully recovered. I'm very careful now not to paint myself into a corner (or let some manager do it for me) as I know I wouldn't survive the next time it happens. Also my ability to put crazy hours or handle stress has been permanently impaired. While I function normally, if stress is a glass that can take water until it starts to spill, my glass has permanently shrunk in size.
I keep less vital, less exciting positions and compliment the missing excitement or fulfillment with things from my personal life. I do miss those times when I had the complete overview and agency but it wasn't worth this.
Im just like that more than 10 years after my last burnout and I think I found a ballance to not let it ever wreck my life again. But it’s a very fragile ballance and there’s this everpresent subtext that it could happen again at any time. Im lucky that im paid hourly and overtime requires approval and is rareley approved.
Avoiding overtime helps but if the work conditions are conducive to burnout it can happen even to part time workers.
How much work it takes to protect the balance to avoid burnout can itself also contribute to burnout, say if you constantly have to fight getting overstaffed or repeatedly having to push back on being on call...
Other than research, is the idea that this would be used for very expensive, made to order treatments? When you have to pay to launch the mass of the medicine into space, I can’t see any other model being economical.
AFAIK launching into space isn't actually that expensive anymore for the volumes and masses we are discussing. I'm pretty sure they get into the numbers inn the linked podcast but honestly don't want to relisten to the entire thing to be able to quote exact numbers.
This reminds me very much of Sidney Dekker's work, particularly The Field Guide to Understanding Human Failure, and Drift Into Failure.
The former focuses on evaluating the system as a whole, and identifying the state of mind of the participants of the accidents and evaluating what led them to believe that they were making the correct decisions, with the understanding that nobody wants to crash a plane.
The latter book talks more about how multiple seemingly independent changes to complex loosely coupled systems can introduce gaps in safety coverage that aren't immediately obvious, and how those things could be avoided.
I think the CAST approach looks appealing. It seems as though it does require a lot of analysis of failures and near-misses to be best utilized, and the hardest part of implementing it will undoubtably be the people, who often take the "there wasn't a failure, why should we spend time and energy investigating a success" mindset.
Yes you're 100% right. Dekker is a valuable complement to CAST & STAMP because Dekker emphasizes people aspects of psychology, goals, beliefs, etc., while CAST emphasizes engineering aspects of processes, practices, metrics, etc.
CAST describes how to pragmatically bring together the people aspects and the engineering aspects, by having stakeholders write a short explicit safety philosophy:
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