paulus_magnus2

There is ~5-10 ways I want to comment / react. Hard to choose the first one..

There is a nonzero aim to cause outrage by the distribution chart & even more by the explanatory video. Perhaps we should defuse this as first angle of response.

Not all inequality is good/bad and not all is undeserved. And not all inequality is correctly described by net wealth alone with no additional measures or dimensions.

We don't have enough tags to distinguish a 28-year old NYC lawyer earning (or soon-to-be) $200k with $200k in student loan and negative equity RIGHT NOW from a 55y old working 2 minimum wage jobs at Amazon, sleeping in a trailer park.

In 10-15y one of them will be a millionaire and the other will be a poverty line retire without a pension.

And does the wealth include the pension pot? If you don't do anything silly, by the time you're nearing retirement you're sitting on a 500k home equity (split with the wife) + 500k each in retirement plans. So if you + the mrs both work a median job you end up with $1-2m family wealth.

Capitalism in EU works with different constraints and frictions so that we get less millionaires and also less people with negative wealth but the median family wealth (near retirement) in US is much higher than in EU.

IANAL nor ICJ nor ICC to officially name genxxide but This looks much (MUCH) worse than the worst thing Putin did to Ukraine

Indeed SpaceX is boiling multiple oceans at the same time and betting the timing will align.

-- SpaceX is building a starship factory, not just starship. The market won't deliver enough demand, they need to create their own

-- V3 Starlink constellation targets 100k sats. With 50 sats per flight (100t to orbit) you need 2000 flights to build constellation and then 400 flights per year to replace sats after 5y lifespan.

-- There was that idea of ballistic human travel but this is unlikely to materialize

-- There also was solarsat/powersat where solar power is beamed from space and if you massaged your math the right way the numbers were ~promising

-- AI saves the day. We "need" 1mln AI sats. That solves the demand and justifies the spending. for now

Starship is not yet reusable but they have the MVP and a fantastic position to iterate forward.

-- they have an orbital launcher with the largest diameter cargo bay

-- larger sats have bigger antennas and bigger PV area and more bus power. this scales as diam^2

-- 26 x Starlink v3 ~40-65 tons to LEO

-- every launch generates revenue, locks out the orbit for competitors.

-- they can launch more volume, more mass and cheaper than anyone else by a large margin

-- the design is validated - things will work

-- there is technical debt, issues but the rocket did the job

Caveats

-- timelines for full reusability are optimistic etc

-- there will be other issues in scaling to launching gigawats into orbit

-- cooling will have to be

-- Musk might go Full Villan mode before the thing works

[meta] I really didn't like that other negative comment getting voted to the top. Looks like it's made by someone who never worked in a bigco. For every bigco I worked, at any time there were hundreds if not thousands of open issues. You could list them and try arguing the company is about to fail and you'd scare people who don't know better.

It's the judgement of the severity of the issue that matters not #no_of_issues. And if there were 0 issues would our job exist?

[edit] getting the formatting right is very hard, maybe we could get a preview / TinyMCE ?

(in the comments here) there are some very interesting topics touched that would definitely warrant a discussion of their own.

One of these topics is how (in many countries) the government become the enemy of it's people - the politicians are aligning willingly (or with help of corruption) towards the rich elites (oligarchy). And they are building a failed state, two tier state - a system where the law only applies to the weak and the strong (plus politicians) can roam unchecked.

In theory the government is hired by sofereign to govern the country to the benefit of the people. In practice government can do just about any bad deed and there is noone to stop them. If you ever lived in 2nd or 3rd world country this is nothing new but the 1st world democracies have enjoyed wonderful egalitarian libral state for many decades and many of them are turning into authoritarian states. Or worse.

This doesn't conclude all my observations but I will stop myself here to see what other people think

Wouldn't it be enough to have a "walkman" styled mp3 app? Or even a smatwach-app or even just walkman-buds?

The physical casette /CD is obsolete, most people don't even have music stored on their internal storage and just stream things. And if you don't have the cassette /CD inside you don't need the form factor. You could probably stream via a smartwatch or in the future directly to the buds.

[Invert, always invert] If you're not a homeowner then "you'll own nothing and be happy",

Homes are not #1 best investment asset and they shouldn't be but the world works better if people own homes they live in. It's a matter of not having the most significant part of your life being exposed to the market volatility. Plus it nicely aligns incentives of the neighbourhood.

Go and check areas that are mostly rental and see how maintenance (of both homes and infrastructure) is forgotten on the altair of rentmaxxing.

Of course if you're at $400k at FAANG, your best investment isn't realestate but for majority of middle class and working class buying your own home, taking a good care of it and passing it to your grandchildren is a very good investment. Also the society benefits.

The easiest way to solve the unafordability without putting everyone into negative equity is WFH. Land is only expensive near where traditionally the good jobs are. Just allow people to move to a low cost area, build there and WFH

Haha. True, CI success was not part of PR accept criteria at any point.

If you view the PRs, they bundle multiple fixes together, at least according to the commit messages. The next hurdle will be to guardrail agents so that they only implement one task and don't cheat by modifying the CI piepeline

Why are we always blaming the lowest developer for things? How about we target the Jira overlords who know exactly what they are doing?

I was once in a team developing a billing system that was counting how many times NSA invokated APIS to snoop on ATnT subscribers. The whole thing was very decoupled and dynamicly set up it took us developer very long time to figure out what this is used for. But the PM knew exactly what they did from the start.

No need to ban it. Just automaticly award full salary for 2x the noncompete period they put in your contract, payable in full a week after contract termination.

How does this look outside coding? Do we know of any other professions where there are whiteboard / leetcode style interviews?

The single biggest opportunity equalizer for the young generations come from 2 unlikely sources: COVID (mandatory WFH) and Musk (ubiquitous internet access). This opens doors for anyone who is hard working and can follow though a long term plan. No generation wealth needed. Study hard, get remote work, buy a cheap piece of land in the middle of nowhere, get married, get a mortgate, get kids.

Focus on your own stuff. Avoid politics, avoid social media, avoid HCOL cities, avoid career ladder. Do your 9-5 each day, log off and invest time in a hobby, family, farm etc.