The situation with the electric grid is pretty crazy. The cost to supply power to houses in sparsely populated communities is orders of magnitude higher than urban apartments. Not just the power infrastructure itself but all sorts of little ongoing things like maintenance visits, as well as losses from transmission and distribution. I worked on smart grid systems and getting apartment buildings online was a piece of cake, with one simple connection handling multiple buildings with hundreds of meters, meanwhile suburban homes required much more expensive equipment that was more difficult for technicians to install and serviced only a handful of homes. Everyone talks about this as if these were humble shacks out in the boonies but the bulk of these service points are suburban McMansions built on cheap land at the margins of the cities. Broadly speaking this results is poorer ratepayers significantly subsidizing services for wealthier ones.
Not sure what you mean exactly. In the jurisdictions I have experience the utility is legally obligated to provide service to any residence within the territory. That resident can then decide to use 100% solar with batteries and pay us nothing, or use solar during the day and rely on the grid at night, or in our case we had net metering so resident were able to treat the utility as a free battery, producing excess kWh during the day and drawing it back at night, paying only the difference in total draw (or receiving a credit even).
I have not worked in water/sewage, but the characteristics are quite different compared to electricity--electricity cannot be stored, it needs to be sent directly from the power plant to the consumer at the exact moment it is consumed, but on the other hand electricity can be produced more or less on demand with the quantity limited only by your willingness to pay. Water is finite, and is simply being managed by the utility rather than created on demand. Someone collecting rainwater is still impacting the local water system and depending on the environment this still needs to be managed by someone.
I worked with a large number of these so called "legitimate" charities and after what I saw I will never give a penny to any non-profit. You will have far, far more impact figuring out something you care about and directly spending $100 to accomplish that than giving $5000 to any of these organizations.
In what respect did you work with them? What is your main complaint? As far as I know, top GiveWell charities give malaria nets and stuff and it saves lives at fairly efficient rates.
Burkina Faso was one of Bill Gates biggest donation spots and it's had an endless series of unstable leaderships, insurgencies and coups in the last decade. This scares away both foreign investment and foreign aid. Countries like that have made lots of economic progress but seem to be stuck in this endless cycle of instability which is the bigger issue if the solution is to develop proper industry and proper modern housing sealed from insects.
Just because Bill Gates didn't solve all issues in Burkina Faso doesn't mean the donations were meaningless. Burkina Faso's GDP per capita has quadrupled since Bill Gates started donating, in addition to a lot of lifestyle indicators like child health and child mortality and so on. You certainly can't say his intervention made things worse.
I basically agree here, but I would add that the framing here can sometimes sometimes be better described as “extortion”. Politicians have tremendous power and influence over many industries, I’ve seen the inside of a few situations where the politicians framed themselves as “taking on big business” where behind closed doors they were 100% calling the shots and handing executives directives on what they could or could not say publicly. The companies had no choice but to play along. When I see a big company take exactly the same public position as the current regulatory regime or administration in power, I don’t assume that they necessarily have any choice in the matter.
This is not a cynical take, it is blindingly obvious. Right now, governments around the world are watching, salivating over what is effectively remote control over the literal thoughts of and total surveillance over their entire population. They are itching insatiably to get control over these systems.
In my state, I caught a circuit court judge shilling on a certain well known "social media" site for the establishment of a lottery in our state. He framed it as a "We the People vs the corrupt politicians" issue--with him being firmly on the side of We the People of course.
When I challenged him on his rhetoric, my comment INSTANTLY disappeared. I thought maybe it was a fluke, so I tried again, and the next comment insta-disappeared also.
Soon thereafter I was locked out of the account and asked to provide a "selfie" to confirm my identity. (I declined.)
There were stories floating around at the time of people who were interested in buying it, having no idea what it was, not owning a computer and not realizing you needed one to use it.
> the size of the US economy relative to the global economy is shrinking
This is not true, not at all, it dipped as China grew initially, but looking at the past few years this trend had reversed and the US was again growing as a percentage of the global economy, going from a low of about 21% in 2011 to nearly 27% today. It seems certain now that Trump has put a bullet in this growth, but it was hardly inevitable. In 2024 the US was in an incredibly strong position relative to the rest of the world.
> In 2024 the US was in an incredibly strong position relative to the rest of the world.
The GOP did a fantastic job of blaming all the shockwaves from Covid on Biden. Don’t get me wrong, his admin made some pretty poor choices, but he did inherit the Covid economy and basically got blamed for it. Whereas Obama inherited the recession and wasn’t blamed for it in the same way.
They also did a good job of making it look like all of these problems were only happening here and hiding the fact that other countries were actually in far worse shape. Relatively speaking, as bad as it all was, we did better than most economically speaking.
You can watch the screen and see what it can detect, and it is impressive. On a dark road at night in Santa Monica it was able to identify that there were two pedestrians at the end of the next block on the sidewalk obscured by a row of parked cars and covered by a canopy of overgrown vegetation. There is absolutely no way any human would have been able to spot them at this distance in these conditions. You really can "feel" it paying 100% attention at all times in all directions.
Yep I've often noticed this as well - it has many many times detected humans that I can't even see (and I like to sit in the front), especially at night.
Sometimes it would detect something and I think "huh? Must be a false positive?" but sure enough it turns out that there really was someone standing behind a tree or just barely visible around a corner etc.
Sure none of those have run out in front of us, but the fact it is spotting them and tracking their movement before I am even aware they're there is impressive and reassuring.
Every government in the world right now wants to get their hands on the controls and put their thumb on the scales here. Modern social media has proven to be effectively remote control for their citizens, nothing like this kind of power has never existed before and is absolutely irresistible to politicians. Expect them all to be laser focused on this until they're able to seize complete control, no matter how long it takes or how roundabout the path to this is.
Yes and no - you need to check whether each individual politician, not just party, is taking money from said global corporates, because they have a lot of money and UK politicians are cheap.
Not to mention the opaque mess that's Reform UK financing.
Many of these governments are directly funded and directed by said corporate fascists. The opposition is hardly much better. There’s no good guys at the state level here.
The "coordinated corporate fascists" (your words not mine) are providing a platform where I can challenge the the state and be seen by potentially millions of people.
Some time ago I had my 10 year anniversary forgotten once in a company (where I had written almost the entire codebase for their core product myself) and I did feel slighted. I had felt invested in the company, to me this day was a big deal and my company was completely unaware. It felt like a disorienting mismatch of unreciprocated commitment and made me feel a bit sick in the pit of my stomach. I started looking for a new job the next day.
My company gave out nice plaques for ten year anniversaries. As my anniversary neared I frankly got really excited to receive mine.
My manager started a couple months before myself, and a colleague started a couple months later. We still work together all our anniversaries in a line.
My manager got his plaque and showed it off. I patiently awaited mine.
When my 10 year anniversary came around we were in the middle of being acquired. It seemingly got lost in the fuss. My anniversary came and went. Zero acknowledgement beyond an automated email and some points towards the company store. No plaque.
When my colleague's 10 year anniversary came around a few months later and he got an even nicer plaque than my manager AND a small celebration...
I'm not one to usually express anger or disappointment, but I got salty and maybe said some things I shouldn't have. I'm frankly still salty and it's five years later.
I feel a little childish but I just wanted a plaque. I waited ten years for my plaque. My wife had offered to make me one.
My fifteen year anniversary is coming in a few months. We'll see if anything comes of it.
The little things are more important than they seem.
I was the second person to not get a plaque after they stopped the 10-years at work. Instead I got an email.
I knew one of the last people to get one, so was expecting mine two weeks later.
And I knew Sarah, who started a week before me, and had printed out her 10-year email and a picture of the clock. I found mine at a thrift store. When I left I set it on her desk on the way out. Hope she liked it.
Sounds like you are extremely valuable in the product you built.
In your experience it’s not just the manager direct report relationship that’s adversarial, it’s you against the whole company for the mismatched value they place in you.
You should use that as leverage. This comes with an mindset of looking out for yourself and not any loyalty to the company (I really wish that we could all find companies loyal and nice to their employees, in reality they are few and far between).
Something along the lines of “Hey I built our product. We’re making X in profit. I deserve Y in comp. I’ll give you a week to decide. If you reject I quit and build my own product or join another company.” Obviously add some fluff to reduce harshness.
The basic problem there was that salespeople were viewed as the ones who actually made things happen, engineering and building the actual product was just an inconvenient necessity.
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