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> fractal layers of ossified cruft

Someone got a thesaurus in their coffee today! (Not a jab)


Manjaro is a very sane distro

Nope!

You can do that anywhere else!

Great money?

Years ago, I was at a Big4; had a co-worker whose spouse was working for MCK; we had more or less the same salary at the Big4, but spose at MCK was getting more or less exactly the double amount.

Then I listened and we started to calculate:

- In the MCK Office from 0900 - 2300 on MO-FR

- In the MCK Office from 1000 - 1600/1700 on SA

- Often in the MCK Office from 1000-1400 on SU

Overall, yes: The amont was the double amount - but in the end working hours were also roughly the double.


Not really when you normalize by hours you are expected to work. You're also surrounded by spineless sycophantic keeners without an original thought in their heads who would throw you off the building for a good review.

It reminds me of Lewis' "National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments"

The health care is amazing, though. $30/mo for a family $900 deductible? Something like that. If you have a sick family member it's a no brainer.


According to levels the pay band caps out around $250k and a principal title. It's good but probably not enough for most to put up with the culture long term.

>[...] the pay band caps out around $250k [...] probably not enough for most [...]

an absolutely wild statement to 99.9+% of the world


99.9% of the world doesn't live in the US with a 4.0 GPA from a top ten university.

They're not very bright, most of them. But they're very hard workers and high achievers. They stay for the resume candy or the health care.


>[...] US with a 4.0 GPA from a top ten university. They're not very bright, most of them.

the top students from the top ten universities in the US produce... mostly not very bright people?

this is getting even stranger to the rest of us plebians. sometimes i am left in awe of how different my world is from some of you here


"US produce... mostly not very bright people?"

The top universities are not setup to mold intellectually rigorous and curious people. It's setup to make hard working, and increasingly sycophant men.

My lab mate is a former drug addict with two years of art school. Easily more intellectually curious than anyone I met at McKinsey.


How different the world is? But your credentials worship fits right in with this community.

Ideologically aligned if nothing else.

Well we can all at least imagine being some 4.0 Ivy League dude who only interacts with 4.0 Ivy League dudes. He’s not going to think that everyone he interacts with range from merely brilliant to the most studious-enlightened hardworking top of the morning fellow (or whatever adjectives to use). He’s gonna think that some of them are idiots. It’s only human.


I was a B/B- student from a foreign top 100 university. I don't know how I got accepted to a top 5 engineering school in the US. I accepted and ended my PhD with a 3.3. Im not very bright or hardworking.

What did I see at the university? Very hard working people. Very interesting research. Very shallow knowledge outside a narrow domain expertise.

These are the folks McKinsey hires... but these shallow thinkers are sent on 6 week projects for companies in industry they hadn't even heard before.

Once, no one in the team knew what product CompanyX sold... CompanyX is a a top tier multinational consumer product brand that routinely sponsors sports events, including TV ads.


In consulting it is "maximum self confidence by having minium knowledge at the same time" :-D

The product that I am referring to that companyX makes was probably used today, in some form, by >80% of the global population this morning.

Everyone would recognize it. Cartoons have made jokes about these product since the dawn of animation.

CompanyX makes is the premier manufacturer of these.

Think as pervasive and obvious as sneakers made by Nike, but it wasn't footwear.

And yet only one person in a team of a dozen consultants had ever heard of the company they'd been hired for.


>But your credentials worship fits right in with this community.

worship is an extremely strong word for a one-sentence casual comment.

but yeah, by default i will file anyone with a 4.0 from a top 10 school in the "brighter than me" category. is that worship?


Often the B+ students are way sharper but have poor incentives to work for the As. This creates bad work habits for them.

The As, then, are better at the game. Once you've become a TA and have to grade the exams, you realize how A grades are quite within reach:

For the professors, being an easy grader has almost no downsides. The contrary is a minefield of trouble. "A" students will "ask for clarifications" for any minor mistake, knowing professors will often throw them a point or two.

The exams are, typically, slight variations of problems from assignments. Often, they are the same.

Exams have no curveballs; problems or situations that you have never seen unless you did extra readings. No problem which to solve you must have read more or fully understood the core material.

The TA is primed to give 40% of a problem's points for free - just restate the problem in math and draw a picture and right out the door you get 2 out of 5 points.

Note that, as far as I can tell, this is not generally true for "hot" topics like CS or bio. These programs have so many eager kids that the material is hard. But then these fields get hard working, bright, kids that don't actually care about the material - they go to McK. Within ten years they've forgotten everything and are just consulting parrots.


Is a formal sentence which uses capital letters more sincere in its beliefs?

You can perfectly well believe that thinking that the echelons of academic success is a frictionless gold sieve is just a milquetoast belief. Believing that your beliefs are milquetoast are most often integral to said beliefs.


...what point are you trying to make? you wrote a bunch of words, but they dont seem to be an attempt at communicating anything. certainly not anything that contributes to a conversation.

I'm not the brightest tool in the shed.

When you get to partner level, you also get profit sharing on top of you salary.

Partners get 300-400k and senior partners get closer to 600-800


Not really relative to broader options in tech. The big money goes to the consulting leaders, but most of these folks look like glorified grifters more and more as time goes on.

Ultimately AI may be a big threat to the sort of “advisory” work McKinsey historically focused on.


For Peter Watts - Echopraxia is just as wonderful as Blindsight, highly recommend.



The Osprey has a reputation, for sure, but it's mid-pack. They called the F-104 the widow maker for a reason, for example. And the F-16 has a fairly high accident rate, too, slightly higher than the Osprey. Though I think the F-16's history is a bit more lopsided, they made some changes after early production airframes proved pretty accident prone.


Maybe the Osprey's reputation is due not only to the accident rate but also to the fatality rate. A fatal accident in a standard F-16 (not the 2 seater), assuming no one outside the plane is killed, means 1 death. A fatal accident in a V-22 with the same assumptions would have a minimum of 2 deaths (pilot and copilot) at a soft maximum of 26 deaths (2 crew + 24 passengers, possibly more if overloaded).


All flying craft that cannot glide by itself should have failsafe parachutes. If one engine goes out the other engine needs to stop too to prevent flipping. Parachute is easily acceseible behind a red lever with glass to break


The osprey has both engines tied together for this exact reason. One engine can turn both props. It's part of the complexity of the thing. It's just too complex.


This is correct.


In Turkey, F-104 was called “flying coffin”.


The Netherlands had problems with it too. The procurement of the Starfighter was also a huge corruption scandal. Lockheed was a very scummy company in the cold war.


> The Starfighter had a poor safety record, especially in Luftwaffe service. The Germans lost 292 of 916 aircraft and 116 pilots from 1961 to 1989, leading the German public to dub it Witwenmacher ("widowmaker").[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-104_Starfighter


That is because the Germans used it as all-weather fighter-bomber with more heavy load, in different airspaces, with different weather and terrain, as opposed to the initial, more air-superiority/interceptor concept. And had a different way of training their pilots. In masses. "Wo gehobelt wird fallen Späne. Ein bisschen Schwund ist immer da."

Other european airforces using them were more lucky, IIRC.

That aside, they could be seen as the exported rests of the bargain-basement of the MIC of the USA, when the USAF/Navy already had better options(seen as a whole weapon-system, not a few speed/climb/altitude records(for the initial, only lightly loaded version) which won't matter in real combat).


L PRGB CHIP BURN

Any time there are planetaries or splines attached to jet engines, it's a really weak spot. This holds for ordinary turboprops too.


The Osprey's accident rate is not that bad, and the US Army have ordered a new smaller tiltrotor, the v280.


They officially named it recently to the 'MV-75'.


The Wikipedia page says this will replace UH-60s, but I just do not see how that airframe is a direct comparable to what’s been a workhorse for decades. Maybe it means only in a long range reconnaissance role? But even then, that mission is primarily owned by UAS platforms now. Confusing.


I imagine UH-60 and variants will continue to serve (who knows, maybe with new airframes) along side the MV-75 for quite a while, in a similar way to how UH-1s continued to be in use well after UH-60s were deployed in large numbers. This Congressional Research Service summary of the FLRAA/MV-75 program states that the Army has plans to continue ordering UH-60s (on the order of 255 between 2027 and 2031) - https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12771

The key requirements that drive MV-75's downsides (size, complexity, cost) is the Army wants to play game in the Pacific. The UH-60 is deeply limited there.

For example, the MV-75's range should let it go (one-way) from Guam to the Philippines, straight from Okinawa to Taiwan (no need to island hop) - potentially as a two way mission. Same as Philippines to Taiwan.

The "comparability" is that the MV-75 and UH-60 can be delivery ~14 troops into an order magnitude similar size clearing.


Thank you! This context really clarifies what the use case is for this. The range difference matters.


What is so unbelievable about that?

Sure, its going to take decades to actually make the transition and the UH-60 will remain in service for decades more after that in less demanding roles. I expect by the time this finishes, the MV-75 will be considered another workhorse, if maybe slightly fuzzier and the UH will be an antiquated platform.

But ultimately they both solve the same problem, moving stuff from A to B in rough terrain fast. But with the ever increasing amount of reconnaissance assets, A needs to be further behind the frontline and so range and speed needs to increase beyond what you can manage with a pure helicopter.


The next generations of accidents are going to be even more looney-tunes in nature.


I was wondering why we’ve already give up on the harrier.


Well, it's a jet from the 60's, can only scrape mach 1 on the downhill, is in a CAS role, primarily. Cool jet, but it's old tech.


The Harrier is obsolete.


It was deafening too many pilots and Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrop needed more money. /s

The F-35B can also do Mach 1.6 and the stealth thing.

Some country should give that Pepsi contest winner a demil Harrier in lieu of Frontier Airline miles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico%2C_Inc.


This has to be performance art



Markov chain?


I thought those would be dead now with LLMs.


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