Posts by MachDiamond 8849 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2012
""Network effect" (gaining efficiency and use from being near others in your market) is nothing to do with "networking"."
I don't see it. I've hung out with some famous musicians and it made zero improvements to my own playing and I've been 'near' many more. The same goes for many other situations. Just being near something doesn't transfer anything.
"What I found is that the C-suite has little or no connection with what workers do."
Oh goodness, how true that is. They get their business degree and the profs and colleges have told them with that degree they can competently work at any company. Every industry is different and some knowledge about the products and services the company provides is extremely important.
I did some independent contract work for a medical devices company that was have problems with a new product where the C-level drones didn't understand how the product was used nor exactly the types of procedures it was for. The job came through a roommate that had been a nurse for a number of years and picked up an MBA while she was shacked up with a BF overseas and wasn't allowed to work. She called me since she knew I have lots of experience with adhesives and that was where they were having problems. It took time to get approval for me to do the work, but we solved the problems and I went on to work on a few more products with them.
"The first one should be "why do we need to have people back into offices?"
The second question might be whether it's everybody they need back of just a couple of departments. A third question could be if they are needed back full time in the office. There could be a need for an office staff to send and receive documents, parcels, plans and so forth. While digital signatures are accepted for many things, a 'wet' signature can still be required or preferable. A sales staff can work remotely, but there would still be a need for warehousing, shipping and receiving products if the company sells tangible things. Marketing doesn't need to be in the same building as the product and neither do the people in purchasing.
"because there is a network effect of being in the big city"
That will depend a lot on the sort of job and if you are one that socializes after hours. Most of my networking has been through people I've met online over the years or at conferences that have good opportunities for socializing. When I was working for outside companies, I made connections with my colleagues that have lasted beyond my leaving those jobs, but I would have anyway if I needed to interact with them for work. I didn't need to see them in an office/shop 5 days a week. I can't think of anybody I've networked with that was outside of my department/group. I've never maintained any sort of relationship with anybody from accounting and I would go a long way out of my way to avoid anybody from the legal departments.
It illustrates the problem of privacy being swapped out for convenience and nobody stopping to think if that's wise or even legal. Hey, it can count coughs. Can it determine who coughed? Does it have enough smarts to sort out that it's a group of people coughing because the heating has been turned on for the first time that season and there was a load of dust in the ducts? I expect if lots of people were coughing it would signal the health service of a plague outbreak. Maybe it's better if spying on people was left to the spies, excuse me, agents.
"We had job cards that were supposed to be filled in at the end of the day, but as we were building quite complex A/V racks each job would last several weeks, and as the cards were only collected monthly, we just quickly filled them in just before they were wanted."
I think every company goes through phases of wanting detailed time reports but doesn't stop to make an estimates of how much time it will cost. When I was at a small aerospace company and we had that happen. I tagged one of the interns to follow me for a week to act as my scribe. I was already keeping a journal but manglement wanted finer timing. One of the other engineers and I submitted not only our time on particular tasks, but the time it took to keep track. Since we were a small company and would work on many different things during the course of a day and the problem was compounded by ever changing priorities coming down from on high, the time tracking they thought would be useful added about 30% overhead. If we were spending entire days on one task, it wouldn't be a problem, but those days were rare. There was also confusion about if we needed to clock in and out of things if a process took some time. If I were to set up parts for Oxygen cleaning and did some sweeping up and organizing while the parts were in-process, do I clock out of the project the parts are for and into shop maintenance or do I just stay logged into the other one? More time spent, excuse me, wasted on accounting. We were already keeping track to about the 1/2 hour or hour resolution and sometimes days if a task was most of a day.
"I wasn't too happy about spying on the customer like that, and as I had a customer supplied laptop with email, I just sort of casually put that laptop front of the customer to have a look at....."
While satisfying, not a great move is you want to stay employed with somebody and be able to get a good reference for future work. It could be better to spend a day visiting said plod in their office and very carefully explain to them about that customer supplied laptop, possible NDA's the company signed with that customer and how bad it might look to Corporate to have sales asking contractors/FSR's to spy on customers (more than normal, obviously).
"I'm guessing a lot of us will show as having put in a 120-hour week that week."
That will look great if there is a PR audit and the company is fined for not paying everybody overtime (government knobs will just believe that somebody can work 120 hours in a single week without question). It also means that automated budgeting apps will have to come with a set of 3-ring binders to remind people of all of the manual corrections that have to be made.
"but only after I finish running the backups"
There are some nice animated gifs that look like a backup is running very very slowly with a correspondingly long estimated time of completion. I'm sure there are ones more clever 'novelty' programs that allow for a bit of customization and have more bits on screen doing things, countdowns, multiple bars moving at different speeds, all that.
"My company proudly develops all its apps in-house.
...and it shows,"
I'm so glad I'm self-employed. BTW, if you set yourself up so you own a home and your car is paid off and you have a few quid in the bank, it's much easier to be self-employed. I'm just sayin.....
If I do go back to the Man for a "real" job, having to install and run a company app will eliminate that company from my choices.
"When you burn them, you get the same amount of heat back, so not very practical as an energy-producing process."
In the real world, you don't get back what you put in. Nature is nasty about things like that. If it worked, Hydrogen would be a pretty good storage medium and beat other chemical storage approaches such as batteries.
"and that the government intends to increase this to 70GW."
The government shouldn't be involved. Doing things through any government just tosses in a multiplication factor to the costs. If governments looked for way to get the hell out of the way in most instances it would lead to lower costs and more interest from private industry.
"but that of 'existing science shows there is no (efficient) solution to this problem'."
The science is also very well supported by concepts that have been canon for a few hundred years. The likelihood that there is some way we can "cheat" and massively increase efficiency isn't very high. There is tremendously more low-hanging fruit to be gathered and none of it needs a massive tax-payer funding budget to happen.
"Not crazy, just failing to understand. Renewable power is very variable. Some of the time there is not enough, some of the time there is too much. There higher the capacity installed, there more likely it is that there is enough, and also there will be far more times when there is too much."
What's lacking is something that can take advantage of a variable source. If leccy rates could be transmitted down the line and cars programmed to take advantage of low rates when power is plentiful, there's a good way to make use of that energy. An EV that can go 300mi owned by a person that travels 30mi/day means they only need to charge once a week leaving them with some buffer. This can mean that the car will usually have battery space to soak up energy when rates are low such as at 3am when there is a good blow somewhere in the network. It could also be a weekend with bright sun and a bit of a breeze when major power users are shut. Not only can EV's take advantage of excess supply, so can charging stations that have battery storage on-site so they are able to supply lots of peak power even if the grid supply isn't up to the task. There are peak surcharges for heavy short term usage. Being able to maintain a lower draw can be a big savings for charging station operators. If they can charge a large battery when supply is high, they can dispense that energy during the day when demand is usually high.
"The only people who want a hydrogen economy are the ones who want the strange and outdated "forecourt model" to continue."
Many people I see arguing against EV's have that forecourt model firmly riveted down in their heads. They don't think EV's will work until there are huge numbers of charging forecourts everywhere. Most EV owners right now charge at home. Plenty have never used a public DC fast charger and some of those have never charged their cars away from home. I see never having to stop for charging to meet my day to day needs as a huge bonus. I'd still like a car that charges like stink since there are a couple of solar eclipses rather far away that I'll be going to see in the next couple of years.
"when you can throw 100-150 miles into a vehicle in 30 minutes at any service station or supermarket you have more than enough coverage for almost every real world use."
In the cases where the doesn't work, we look at the problem again in a number of years and see if a solution presents itself. Waiting for the Silver Bullet means doing nothing even when we have a good solution for a majority of cases.
"The question I have is how you are going to get vans, lorries and other LGV and HGV vehicles to do long distances on batteries?"
Why would you? Long distances are better handled by trains. They are more efficient and can be power via overhead lines that take advantage of the most suitable power available along their routes. A battery tender car can let the train bridge short gaps where overhead lines are difficult and a small (relatively) diesel range extender car can be added for routes or sections not yet electrified.
"it's hard to see a world where H2 infrastructure becomes widespread on the roads, outside of specialised long-distance haulage networks. "
That's already solved with trains which can be powered via overhead lines. More overall efficiency of the entire shipping network might yield better returns. If a freight train can be assembled and dispatched very quickly, goods can move from depot to depot where electric trucks take containers to distribution warehouses that break shipments down into loads to go to stores for the bulk of things being moved. If the process continues to take days and days, it won't be viable. Just changing what powers the vehicles won't make significant enough improvements by themselves.
"...not a "green" fuel source."
I was going to write a similar diatribe. A big problem with the push for Hydrogen is the use of the word "fuel". Politicians have to be led around by the nose when it comes to technical topics, so using the F word hand them the wrong image. At best Hydrogen is a storage medium, but it's a poor one. The thinking that electrolyzing water "at-scale" is going to make any difference is malarky. Even with 100% efficiency splitting the molecular bonds is a much more wasteful use of electricity than just stuffing it into a chemical battery. In practice, splitting water is done through brute force and some added chemicals to the water that you wouldn't want to sprinkle on your morning porridge.
I see Hydrogen as a very niche energy storage medium that may only be suited for use on rockets. Everything else works out to be a huge distraction.
"EV arent bad but the charging times are horrific for mass transport."
If by mass transit you mean busses, city busses travel known routes and take a break multiple times per day. They are also big vehicles with room for plenty of batteries of a type that can recharge very quickly in exchange for being less energy dense.
"If entire cities converted all their ICE to EV then the grid would collapse in short order, those cities would brown out."
Most EV owners do their charging at night when both demand and prices are low. The claim of the grid not being able to handle the load is piffle. It's actually a boon for electrical utilities as they have massive amounts of unused capacity at night that they'd love to continue making money with. If the wind is blowing in the wee hours, they have to shut that off since it can unbalance the network. If they could signal EV's that there's a sale on leccy, they'd have a place to stuff all of those magic pixies rather than denying their creation.
" H2 on the otherhand would not, people would go to filling stations, the same as ICE."
Now you need yet another distribution network for a very hard to contain gas. CH4 already leaks all over the place and that infrastructure would be hopeless for H2. A huge benefit of having an EV is never having to visit a filling station and having a full "tank" each morning if you like.
"Modern batteries are a total video nasty that nobody is prepared to address. "
You don't see the companies that are addressing it as EV's have barely been around long enough for their batteries to need recycling. The Tesla Model S was released in 2012 and it's only in the last 5 years that sales have started to increase.
Take a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpe8HalVXFU
You may also want to look through Helen's other episodes as she's the one with the science cred in the group.
"It's unethical to cull humans to fall within that limit, therefore all humans alive have to consume less than 'X', leading automatically to a loss of living standard."
Yeah, that's too bad as well that some humans can't be culled. In point of fact, we are doing the opposite as medical science improves by being able to keep newborns alive that are born with ever more serious deficiencies. It's a first world issue as those heroic procedures aren't available nor applied in the third world. Children with little chance of growing into healthy adults often won't see their first birthday.
The only way for the majority of people to have a high standard of living is for there to be fewer people. It already takes an enormous amount of petroleum to feed the bee-swarm billions there are on the planet. As petroleum diminishes in easy to reach high-quality reserves, the supply will go down and the price will go up. I would find it kinder to encourage people to limit their family sizes and reduce world population that way than to have many more people starving to death every year.
"I recall some stats from years ago showing that it was remarkably consistent across cultures and religions."
The concept of marriage is a construct instituted by people for various reasons which means that adultery is a byproduct of that construct. If a couple isn't matched sexually, one partner may tend to stray from the contract. Even if they are matched, the urge to produce children through different pairings isn't unnatural. Sex is a primal urge and not rational which will mean that whatever rules we try to wrap around it, it will always be what it is.
"but is BORING being stuck on your own all day"
Depends on who you are. I tend to get really focused on projects and only seem to come up when my blood sugar drops or I need to use the restroom. I can recall some very productive days and they were all when there was nobody else around.
"your cats can use Zoom?"
My cat Ogre and my friend's cat, Panther, would talk to each other over the comps from time to time. The first time they started meowing at each other over the link (Hotline, I think) my friend and I lost it. I think the two cats got to be something like friends over time. I miss those cats, and my friend.
"The Prof does care if you skive off all term then work like hell at the end as he will have no chance to steer you in the right direction,"
I never really put it to the test myself. I can't recall any of my profs insisting on certain study habits. They did insist on assignments being handed in on time. One would only allow a late delivery if you could show a hospital chart that had you coding and needing to be shocked back to life. A few would limit the top grade for a late paper to a C if it would have been an A or B if handed in on time. At least one wouldn't even accept death as an excuse according to their syllabus, but I would place a bet that if you talked to them in the case of a real issue, they'd give you a pass.
As far as building code that has to interface with what other people are doing, yes, you can't do all of it the day before the deadline. Whatever management there might be needs to insist on more frequent intermediate goals/submissions. That's a management problem and one that needs to be addressed in many places.
"Now, their eggs are getting scrambled by unstable politics."
Beyond that, it really is a wildly different culture. Both socially and in a business sense. You might be getting parts from a vendor and they never seem to be shut for New Year. One year you can't get anybody to respond to any communication during that time. What that can mean is they had a good year so they are taking two weeks off. In previous years, they weren't doing so well and only took a day or two off. When that happens, they don't check emails, phone messages or even letters. If you didn't know about that, you could be in trouble and that's an easy one. Somewhere I have a book by a guy that acts as a liason in China for US companies. His book is full of examples of the differences in how things are done in China vs the US. Some of the pitfalls are downright scary.
"The Toyota Way is about reducing stockholding to minimum WITHOUT putting production at risk and constantly evaluating the risk/benefit from doing so."
I spent several years at an aerospace company as the safety officer. I think I had a talent for playing the devil's advocate and looking at the downsides of things. Mostly I needed to make sure they everybody was safe even if a rocket had a very bad day. The safety of the rocket being a distant secondary thing.
I was also the head of the avionics department and had a great company engineering manager over me for a while that taught me loads. We did a bunch of work on risk to project progress which usually meant having backups of things on the shelf, alternate vendors identified and what tasks could and couldn't be shuffled in the event of unforeseen issues.
I expect that I should read the Toyota Way. I'm guessing it's something that would have done me great use years ago.
Holy moly. Opening bid for some chairs is $50 and only $25 for the coffee gear. I think if you know somebody, you can get the unsold chairs after the auction if you promise to take a big pile of them so they don't have be be handled or stored. I got a couple of Aeon chairs that way after the dotcom bust.
"All he has to do is keep the servers running and the thought police out of it.
The revenue will pick back up as it does have a couple of people still using it."
All he has to do is that stuff fast enough that he still has a few employees left around to keep the whole machine going.
"Don't forget Neuralink and Hyperloop"
Hyperloop is just Vac-Train rehashed with new CGI. It wasn't viable way back when Robert Goddard took out a patent on it and nothing has changed to make it viable since then.
Neuralink has lost nearly all of it's scientist founders. One of the ones left might still be out on maternity leave with the twins Elon fathered.
"Salon workers don't just cut hair. They do all kinds of hair work, including some with chemicals that have to be handled and used properly to avoid injuries and other issues. Requiring a license is sensible."
It would make more sense to have different levels. I go to a guy's barber shop and they just cut hair. No tinting, no highlights, no frosting. A little styling gel is all the more chemical they get.
In the US at least, there is a requirement that people that just braid hair have to get a cosmetology license in some states. I expect that if you don't like the braids, you could just unwind them. Again, no chemicals.
The name is suggesting that the ore is "high assay" so they don't have to do as much enrichment. I suppose that's good as enriching Uranium is messier than dealing with spent fuel. /sarc It's not good. The Mahattan project has left the US with at least two highly polluted facilities that still haven't been cleaned up.
Enrichment is a right PIA. The process is dividing up two substances that differ by 3 Neutrons to be able to add the lighter fraction back to be a higher proportion of the mix. U235 is rarer than Platinum so using it to boil water is much worse than atomically destroying Platinum. Even the father of the Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR), Alvin Weinberg, was saying that there was a much better way forward until they made him to shut up and go away. I know in my own work that my first go often can be much improved upon. I would usually call that "next year's model".
Why does Mr Bill need to be involved in a nuclear plant? Especially one in the US using Russian fuel? The fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the USSR to the current Russian land grab occurred during my lifetime. The lull in between when things seemed to be getting better and better came to an abrupt end. That, to me, is a warning that stability in big countries is never to be counted on. Let's say Mr. Bill passes all tests and the reactor is switched on. What happens when no fuel if forthcoming when it's due? Yet another reactor that will have a negative ROI and cost ratepayers massive amounts of money to tear down and dispose of. I highly doubt that it will be worthwhile to idle the place for a couple of year in hope more fuel might be coming. Whatever the reactor replaced or if the area grew up around the power source, that previous generation will be long gone and a whole load of people and companies could be left with zero resale value for their properties. It's a beautiful home for a great price, folks. Just bring your own power. Oh yeah, it's all electric so the load can be pretty intense.
"Thorium will work as a fuel in modified CANDU style heavy water reactors, which is what Canada uses"
That would be rather pointless since they'd need to do modifications, get new certs, etc. It also just acts as a sticking plaster over other problems when it makes more sense to move on to Molten Salt reactors, at least. Fusion is still way off as the record now is one in the US generated enough excess power to boil a kg of water. Whoppeee.
"That refining is basically separating identical chemicals by molecular weight, which needs complex centrifuges to work at all well."
By atomic weight, not molecular, so even worse. I again point to the book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", by Richard Rhodes. Centrifuges won't do the trick.
"This is also the nation that forgot how to manufacture key components of their own warheads."
What? You think they'd let that information be recorded in a set of three-ring binders?
We need an icon of a printer connected directly to a shredder that feeds a furnace for government purchase.
"That link has a link to a copy of Fermi's paper on the first pile. Interesting reading, and contains diagrams. No sign of a rope or a guy with an axe, unfortunately."
The rope and guy with an axe are described in Richard Rhodes' book "The making of the atomic bomb"; One of my all-time favorites. The amount of research he did is amazing. The follow up "Dark Sun" describes the making of the Hydrogen bomb and is another highly recommend read/listen.
"The main problem with all the test reactors is that the sodium in the primary loop always ends up leaking, and then you need to SCRAM*."
I'd SCRAM if there were leaking molten Sodium metal nearby. A test reactor in Japan had a crane dropped into the Sodium and killed off that facility right quick.
I'm a fan of using CO2 as the cooling/energy transport medium. A leak isn't as big of a deal and it's easy to get more.
Anything that is truly critical needs to have a backup. The more money the company loses for every hour that thing is down, the more backups it needs. If you've outsourced something that will cause the company to fold up and die, you shouldn't be allowed past the door of the locked ward.
Murphy's law tells you that not having a back guarantees that something bad will happen and it will happen at the worst possible time. There was a time when it was possible to send parts from airport counter to airport counter when early morning overnight shipments weren't good enough. That's gone now unless you have a super duper background check and certification and pay huge money. There are alternative means, but they aren't always easy to find and arrange when you are panicking. Better to have a spare sitting in a box close to hand that can be put in place in minutes.
I dated a woman that worked for GM a long time ago. At the time, she told me a production line being stopped cost the company an estimated $125,000/hour. If 'all' it took was getting parts on a Lear jet for a mere $20,000, they'd do it without needing prior permission from corporate. That would be a lucky case since the parts were somewhere, just not at the plant. Having to hunt down some parts from somewhere with that cost clock ticking would be scary. The big auto plants have airstrips nearby for just such emergencies and they are also handy for the C-Level execs. I heard of one tech that was picked up and flown to a GM plant to sort out a really bad problem.
"I had many call-outs to an FM transmitter that was extremely reliable apart from safety interlocks"
KOTR in Cambria, CA?
Man that was years ago but I got all of midnight to 6am on Thursday mornings to myself and a friend of mine. Might have had all of 2.3 listeners. At least we know we had one person since somebody would call when the transmitter went off.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
