I typically try to take annual leave and to travel exactly on the opposite dates to what this tool recommends. That's because I care more about avoiding the significant extra expense, traffic, and crowds of travel over public holiday periods, than I do about getting a few extra "free days" of leave. No free lunch!
The military operates that way with 99% of their personnel, who are grunts, expected to only ever follow orders, to never think for themselves. They're expendable cannon fodder - think of them as pieces of hardware in a software company. But with the 1% at the very top (basically just generals), I'd say the bus factor comes into play, same as in any other organisation - certain individuals have all the knowledge of certain domains, and if enough of those individuals are taken out, the wheels grind to a halt. That's why targeted assassinations happen to the top brass.
Sure, if you manage to assassinate the entire command chain, things will go pear shaped.
I dare say you could likely assassinate half the command chain, and the military will still managed to get where they need to be, when they need to be there. Military command chains have levels of redundancy that civilian organisations wouldn't dream of.
As a concrete example, it's estimated that the British lost ~40% of their officers in the Battle of Albuera, and they still managed to repel Napolean's forces.
Speed cameras have been privatised in NSW, and the rumour is that the private operator is now the one deciding how many of them to install and where to put them. So, forget about all pretence of them being for road safety, they're putting in more of them purely to make money!
Do you think speed cameras don't make people speed less, and hence roads safer? I don't really understand your point here about a private operator wanting to maximise profit here.
Putting cameras in places where people are likely to speed so you can get more money would be directly correlated with being most impactful at reducing speeding. Another free market win in my mind.
In some countries, to increase public support for speed cameras, they are only installed in areas with an established history of speed-related accidents. For example, downhill sections in winding country lanes with poor visibility. The cameras are very, very clearly signposted - and project success is measured by issuing fewer tickets, as that means fewer people are speeding. So you might also install clearer signage and other traffic calming measures at the same time.
On the other hand, if your aim is to maximise revenue, then project success means issuing as many tickets as possible. Installing clear speed limit signage? More profitable if we don't. Making the cameras clearly visible, so people can slow down in good time? More profitable if we don't. And if there's a wide, safe freeway with great visibility and no history of accidents? Well, that's going to be a profitable place for cameras, as people will feel safe going fast.
Sydney's rollout was definitely not smooth! NSW spent a decade (late 90s - late 00s) trying to launch the "Tcard", after which time they had absolutely nothing to show except wasted $$ millions. Unlike Melbourne, Sydney still had ancient paper tickets well into the 2010s, which weren't even consistent across modes of transport (destination specific "one way / return from x to y" single use tickets for trains, zoned "travel ten" tickets for buses, etc), and which often had to be paid for with exact change in coins (and which often couldn't be purchased in advance). Opal only soft launched in 2012, it wasn't actually available on all modes of transport, for all ticket types, etc, until end of 2014.
Not to mention the massive cost increase to those who previously bought yearly Zone 3 passes. I saw my transit costs increase overnight from $2200 per year to over $3500 with the introduction of Opal.
Over the years my coder colleagues have been about 95% male and 5% female. Of them, I rate about 80% of the males as producers of quality code, and about 95% of the females as such. That's just my experience and my subjective scores.
The minimum number of colleagues you could have had to arrive at those ratios is 400. Assuming you've had 400 colleagues, we can break down your ratios into:
- 380 men
- 19 women producing good code
- 1 woman producing bad code
I think the error bars on that one woman would be quite large, too large to draw any conclusions.
Now if I guessed wrong and you've actually had not 400, but tens of thousands of colleagues who you've been secretly tracking and ranking in your spare time, maybe you'd have enough data to draw a conclusion.
Setting aside the questionable methodology, I expect a lot of gigs are far more accepting of mediocrity from a man than a woman, so women doing software development are much more likely to self-select out if they're not up for it— whether in actuality or due to imposter syndrome.
In any case, I would generally agree with your take but express it a bit differently— the group of programmers who really blow me away with their ingenuity and commitment to excellence has significantly more women in it than the larger population ratio suggests should be expected.
It's sad if "lost cities" are becoming so common, that they're losing their romantic-exotic-intrepid charm. If lost cities ain't got it no more, what in this world does?
You mean like the Aztecs (and other civs) before them? Humans gonna human. I think we have to always look at the whole story and not just what’s currently popular to demonize.
Their actions were still unique in many ways. And the Spanish’s action were an order of magnitude more consequential. The Aztecs warred and pillage other groups but were not in the business of wiping centuries of knowledge off the face of the earth nor did they ever manage or desire to kill 90% of all peoples of central Mexico.
We could start by at least processing our own steel (we still process some, but not nearly as much as we used to). Newcastle Steelworks, just north of Sydney, was back in the day one of the biggest in the world, but it closed down in the 90s. Nowadays, we ship iron ore (our number 1 export) to China, and literally ship that same material back to Australia as steel. Insane!
Thanks for that nugget of advice! I probably already know it deep down inside, but seldom remember it, and seldom act with that mindset. But yeah, so true. Don't try to make someone give a shit about something that they have no reason to give a shit about. Instead, tell them what's in it for them, then negotiate so there's still something in it for you.
Can / does asterisk-BSD share many hardware drivers with Linux? IMHO that's the only way asterisk-BSD is to have any hope of catching up in the laptop space.
reply