Fuck them. Starting a private company and then selling it to some tool doesn’t make these guys great people. They exploited their employees and sold the company to some guy to exploit some more. I’m not sympathizing with capitalists because of other capitalists.
yeah fair enough. that still implies that there’s something great about founding Tesla. Which could be great, if the founders had sold the company to its employees and made it a co-op!
No government can exist without surpluses generated by the population. There have never been surpluses, except maybe in a few golden areas of abundant rain, without some form of trade and profit i.e. capitalism
Yeah people like to save money and that’s what banks invest and offer interest on. They then hand out loans with higher interest than they pay to savers. I’m pretty sure that’s already how banks work.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to get the worker-owned cooperative model to take over for the capitalist model for a long time. It just seems to be a better outcome for everyone. You can’t squeeze the worker to extract wealth for the shareholders if the only shareholders are the workers. No need to squeeze the customers if there’s no hedge fund bros expecting a 20% return on their capital. But how often are workers going to have the money lying around to buy their company?
The workers may not have been interested in buying and as much as we may hate exploitation by capitalist pigs, it’s unrealistic to expect entrepreneurs to just give it all away. I think we’re still a ways off from the appetite for revolution is large enough to just take it from them. And I’m not sure that would be the right thing to do anyway. We do need people with the skill set to organize businesses and envision products and services. We just don’t need to keep treating such people as demigods. That would be enough revolution for me and they could still be the rich people, just not so grotesquely wealthy while people who make it all possible are struggling.
What I’m thinking of is like an investment fund that provides low-cost financing for groups of employees who are looking to buy their boss’s business, or for start-ups that are looking to organize their business as a worker-owned cooperative. Of course by definition this fund would earn less than market rates. Providing low cost financing is just providing low return investment opportunity from the other side. So investing in it would be more of a charitable contribution than an investment. But I don’t think the system is in place to facilitate financing of worker-owned cooperatives at present. I think a better use of our energies would be to figure out how to make such a framework than just screaming at capitalists. Just my take.
It may not describe financiers. I’d say it’s a fair description of entrepreneurs. Just because some people do it poorly doesn’t mean it’s not a skill. Kind of argues that it is, actually. I wholeheartedly agree that having the most money is a horrible qualification for the job. But I maintain that it does need to be done. Myself I would prefer more of the decision making to be collectivized but I don’t think the concept of having business leaders is entirely outmoded.
Edit: plus I was on a bit of a tangent when I wrote that sentence anyway. I need to get better at self-censoring. The point was about how best to be able to serve society’s needs without relying upon rentiers to furnish the means.
People often imagine things they don’t do can’t be that hard. Marketing is important because no one will be interested in your product if no one knows about it. Being able to envision products that the average person will want is another one that good business leaders often do.
Steve Jobs, for example, was very good at envisioning what people would be interested in. From the Apple to Macs to the iPod to the iPhone, he hit a lot of winners. This isn’t an endorsement for him owning the company, or even as a person, but he undeniably had a skillet that others around him often lacked.
I dunno man, I’m really skeptical of Steve Jobs as a big “ideas guy” and I’d probably attribute most of Apple’s success to Steve Wozniak. I’d also wager that the pocket computer + phone revolution was probably inevitable at the point where the iPod and iPhone were coming out, and more long term, Apple’s success in that domain has done a lot of damage to the market with their “trend setting” behaviors.
Steve Wozniak was an amazing computer geek, and designed an incredibly useful computer for the time. Steve Jobs popularized and marketed the idea. He didn’t do a lot on the technical side. There was the Blackberry and resistive touch phones before the iPhone, and they had serious problems. Anyone could have made the first smartphone - Windows Mobile was released in 2003 and certainly had the money to take on this project - but Apple did. And yes, Apple did a lot to make it painful for their customers to stray from the Apple ecology to the company’s benefit, and the detriment to the market as a whole, which is pretty on-brand for Jobs.
yeah turns out I was misinformed. my bad. But point still stands, they made a private company designed to exploit workers, and some asshole took it over.
Starting a private company and then selling it to some tool doesn’t make these guys great people.
Where are you coming up with your narrative about him selling?
“The Tesla cofounder lost his role as CEO of Tesla about three years after Elon Musk began investing in the electric-car maker. Eberhard previously told Insider that Musk and Tesla’s board had met behind his back and voted to replace him as CEO.”
Elon is a jackass who runs over all normal senses of decency while repeatedly getting away with it. And he will continue to do so as long as his legion of asshole internet followers continue to worship him on a wide scale, giving him large benefits in our cultural zeitgeist.
I am happy that people are finally understanding how much of an asshole Elon is today. But he’s been pulling this shit since the dawn of Tesla, as the Tesla takeover court cases proved in the 00s.
Elon threw money at the problem and it worked, as it so often does. Conversely, the tactic failed in the Twitter scenario. That’s his entire game plan for everything, a trait he shares with nearly every other person born with a silver spoon in their mouth.
Starting a private company and then selling it to some tool doesn’t make these guys great people.
Engineering a practical prototype for an electric sports car in the year 2003 makes you pretty cool, if nothing else.
Lacking the easy access to low-interest credit and being hedged out of the SUV-heavy American car market doesn’t make them bad people.
They exploited their employees and sold the company to some guy to exploit some more
The company had exactly three people in it when Elon Musk arrived with $6.5M in Series A investment cash. They were both forced out of the company in 2008, as the Series B funding was exhausted and Elon was leveraging his fundraising clout to monopolize control of the board. This was long before the Gigafactory and the big labor abuses we’re familiar with today.
I wouldn’t call them geniuses or pretend they were irreplaceable. These were a couple of car hobbyists who stumbled into a cut-throat industry and got their work snatched out from under them.
But then I wouldn’t call the Tesla a particularly amazing piece of technology. Just something a couple of car hobbyists realized was possible with existing technology and made a (small) fortune scaling up.
The real genius in the end was scamming the Department of Energy out of billions of dollars and helping gas guzzlers fake their EV quota.
For what it’s worth, it’s been suggested that Musk’s takeover of Tesla was opportunistic, and against the desire of Tarpenning and Eberhard.
From my research, Tarpenning was pressured into quitting, and Eberhard was fired by the board of directors for lying to the board. Since Elon was chairman of the board at the time, it’s plausible (and even hinted at) that Elon played dirty to push through this firing.
I cannot say for sure if they would have handled the company more ethically then Musk, but I am personally uncomfortable hanging them out to dry simply on what could have been.
That said, I agree that employee co-ops are a top tier business organization structure.
I wonder what they’ll do if someone actually texts them using that language. Do they have a teenager on staff for the express purpose of translating it?
Since no one else has said it, this isn’t a design flaw of the truck. The operator didn’t let air out of their tires. Before driving on sand you really want to let your tire PSI down to like 15 to be safe. I used to pull hummers out of the beach with my old four cylinder Nissan pickup because their drivers were often overconfident they didn’t need to deflate their tires (or just completely unaware). I don’t like Tesla but this is an operator error, not a fatal flaw of the truck.
I used to race cars, and would over/ under inflate my tires based on the weather and track conditions. Never thought about driving on sand, but that’s a super useful tip that I would wager most people have never heard.
Yeah it made me a lot of extra cash when I was in high school. I would park over the on-ramp for beach access and wait for a tourist to inevitably get stuck. Most of the time I wouldn’t ask for money but they’d give me a nice tip since they knew the only other option was to call a tow truck. The park service requires a permit to off road now, and that info is on the permit so fortunately for visitors it happens less often now.
It’s not just sand, rock crawlers will deflate tires down to single digits (that’s why they use beadlocks) so that the tires actually wrap around the rocks.
That is an excellent point. Yeah, PSI would totally read as pounds times square inches which would be something else entirely. Adding in the extra P would fix it, too. PPSI. Suppose it’s another thing that people just have to get used to, haha.
Eh, it’s pretty unambiguous. kW/hour is a pretty useless unit. Power surges may be measured in kW/s or something, but they don’t really have any impact over a span of more than a couple seconds.
Likewise, pounds times square inches is equivalent go kg*m^3/s^2 in SI units - which also seems pretty meaningless. Maybe there is a use for it?
What really grinds my gears is that pounds are a unit of mass, not force. The “pounds” in “pounds per square inch” is short for “pounds-force“. It’s the force of one pound of mass accelerating at 1g. Preposterous.
Wait wait Wait, can you give me more on this kWh thing? I thought I understood this already.
A single kW is a unit of power, literally 1000 watts.
A kWh is a unit of energy, as in stored or delivered. Draw 500 watts for 2 hours? That’s a kWh. Or have a battery that can hold 1 kWh, then assuming 100% efficiency you could draw 1000 watts from it for an hour before it was empty.
All of this is kW times hour, I would say? But in my mind I would interchangeably say per hour as well, they feel the same.
If you use exactly 20 kW for an hour, it will translate to 20 kWh. But if your power usage varies over time, you can’t keep track of it so simple. It’s just how it is.
The unit is really watt [W] and the Greek prefix kilo (k) for 1000. This way it’s fast and easy to convert to different scales (like Mega, Giga etc) for comparing numbers
A watt is a derived unit for a rate of change, an amount of energy used in a unit of time, so P = E / t. A kW per hour would be a rate divided by time, or E / t^2, resulting in another rate.
More colloquially, think of watts/power by analogy to another rate, that of speed. Moving at a speed of 100kph for 3 hours results in 300 speed-hours of distance. Saying 100 kilometers per hour per 3 hours sounds awkward, but is actually a weird way to say acceleration, a rate of change of speed. (And probably a hint to get your car serviced.)
Anyway, the key is to think of a kilowatt as a rate, not a quantity.
I see now that watts and therefore kW are rates. So it’s silly to add another rate to the end by appending “per hour”. But what is the time component of the watt calculation? To me it’s essentially instantaneous, even if that’s wrong. Even if that breaks the math, it’s still essentially true on a macro scale. And if it’s instantaneous, or even just close like microseconds, then it doesn’t hurt to apend another rate to the end, does it?
So why not use it? Batteries come with capacities rated in Wh and kWh, and it weirdly still makes sense to me because of my usage rate per hour example in my last comment.
And if we shouldn’t use it, then what should we use?
Is this problem we’re discussing, one that only occurs if you try to get really accurate with the numbers and times? Because for my uses it’s always seemed to work well enough.
Not being argumentative, just trying to learn, thanks
Oh, hey, Jerboa is not so good about updating the Inbox tally…
I was responding to your question about kW per hour, and I was going for the intuitive sense of why that’s not right. The more “it’s just so” reason is that the math just doesn’t work, since the word “per” signifies division. So if we discharge a battery at a rate of 100 watts for 3 hours, that’s 100W * 3 hours, or 300 Wh used. If we say 100 watts per hour for three hours, that’s 100W / 1 hour * 3 hours. The hours cancel, and the result is 300 watts, which is a rate.
It’s totally confusing, I know, because people often use “watts” and “watt-hours” interchangeably, but they’re as different as speed and position.
Anyway, the watt is a derived unit in SI, and it’s equivalent to kg·m^2^ / s^3^. The per-unit-time is hidden when you write it as a watt, but clearly there when you write it in terms of base units. Of course, the joule is kg·m^2^ / s^2^, so energy also has time in the denominator, and I guess could technically also be a rate, but understanding that is way above my pay grade. 😀
Sorry, yeah I meant psi. And yeah, pressure units annoy the hell out of me too. There’s psi, kPa, Barr, Torr, atm, mmH20, in. Hg, and so on. It’s dumb.
bar is just the sensible scale for Pascal (1mbar = 1hPa), where 1 bar is about exactly standard atmospheric pressure. Beware though if you see bar scales it’s often not an absolute but overpressure scale, if the tyre pressure gauge says “1 bar” it means 1 bar over atmospheric pressure, that is, about 2 bar. 1 bar is also about the pressure of 10m of water.
atm is metric, too, with 1atm being exactly standard atmospheric pressure, toss it for bar. mmHg is only used in medicine, not used for actual calculations back in the days where blood pressure was first measured they did it with mercury scales and there was never any reason to change, on the contrary, changing would only introduce confusion. Torr is the same as mmHg, forget about it. The rest is colonial nonsense.
As an Aussie I’ve used metric for everything my whole life, but I’ve just realised that everything I’ve ever used to inflate stuff has been metered in PSI. I just know that ~30PSI is good for tyres, ~15PSI is good for soccer balls.
I wouldn’t know the conversions because there’s no use for it because that’s not what the pumps use. Weird.
Generally speaking you can hold in the valve for 60 seconds to let out enough air from your street pressure for off-road. It’s better to measure and you really want a 12v compressor to reinflate for the ride home but in a pinch…
That’s handy to know, but I believe the implication is that the owner of the car in the photo is dumb for buying the car and then dumb for getting it stuck in sand.
It’s really getting to me how many people are memeing Paul turning into a worm.
It feels like it’s a fact that was misinterpreted from one of those “7 CRAZY Things that Happen in the DUNE Novels - You’ll never believe number 6!” Videos. But because they haven’t read the books, they assume it must be Paul that worms out because he’s the Main Character, right?
I haven’t seen any of the movies or YT videos, but read the series years ago. Honestly, I forgot until reading this thread that it wasn’t Paul. Are you sure it wasn’t Paul…? I might have to re read. I do remember stopping at that book because I felt like the worming out thing was jumping the shark.
Or maybe people aren’t all stupid, and just make vaguely related dune memes that still are a bit humorous? It’s not like there are movie adaptations of god emperor of dune.
Also, even disregarding God Emperor, the joke still works, the fremen literally worship sandworms
Well, technically the meme does not say he’ll actually do it. And as Paul had to option to go down that road, but choose not to, it’s not truly incorrect.
Leto II mentioned that Paul also saw the Golden Path, but was too weak to implement it and instead went into the desert as the Preacher. It wasn’t mentioned that worm transformation was required for the Golden Path to succeed, but it gave Leto longevity to oversee it.
What I’m trying to say is that Paul likely thought about transforming into the worm.
My interpretation agrees with you. I suppose it’s possible he only saw the thousands of years of being a tyrant and was rejecting that. But I still think he saw the worm transformation.
Isn’t that pretty explicit in Children? Leto II frequently chastises his genetic memory father/actual father for being a coward to afraid to commit to the golden path. Paul saw where the golden path led and couldn’t do it so he becomes the Preacher whereas Leto saw what was needed to guide humanity and thus sacrificed his to become The Tyrant
When the preacher saw leto fused with the sand worms he said something to the effect of “so you’ve chosen that path”. Which more than slightly implies he did see the worm part
So really this should one of those distribution graph memes where most people in the middle are crying saying it was Leto II while the extreme ends (very dumb and very smart) are saying it’s Paul
It was a joke about how people that don’t read the books still argue with ppl that know, but yeah, to long e crazy for me to read, but the movie is cool
I agree. Small, non-intrusive banner ads with an easy close button are fine. They get the message across without getting in anyone’s way.
The problem is the ads that stop you from doing anything for the best part of a minute. I don’t see how anyone has ever been convinced to buy whatever product is being advertised by these, but somehow, they’re the ones that are everywhere.
Tell that to every Mexican joint nearby that stuffs their burritos so full the moment you fork into it they explode in a overly soapy mess from all the cilantro.
Well, if you were eating it with a fork anyway the I don’t see the problem… A lot of Mexican places (as opposed to Tex Mex) will also pou salsa or queso or something over the burrito, which then obviously requires a fork, but it’s also different from the burrito pictured.
And you know you can just ask them not to put any cilantro on? It’s a garnish that typically isn’t added until the very end and a lot of people can’t stand the stuff, they probably won’t mind leaving it off
It’s more a problem of the quality of the tortilla in my experience. With a halfway decent tortilla, I have no problems. Some grocery store tortillas are too stiff and don’t stick to themselves in the slightest. You can masterfully roll them, but the moment your grip loosens, it all turns to chaos.
Neither? The whole point of a burrito, at least one of these style of burrito that isn’t swimming in some kind of sauce, is that it holds together well enough that you can eat it while holding it in your hand without making a mess. If it’s poorly wrapped then yeah it’ll come apart and you might want a plate and flatware to finish the job.
I’m an engineer. I’m on my phone looking at memes until someone asks me a question, then I do a thing in 5 minutes that they expected to take 5 days because people don’t understand computers, then I go back to the memes.
I have been downvoted to hell for what I’m about to say, but I’m going to say it again anyway.
IT support people are now called engineers. No, I don’t like it. No it’s not proper “engineering”. Yes, language evolves and there’s nothing we can do about it. If that’s a problem for people, I recommend screaming into the void. It doesn’t help, but you feel better after a while.
That’s kind of my point. No one at subway is calling themselves artists, it’s insulting and they don’t like it. You answered your own question, the answer is: they don’t.
In instances where they use their given title it’s probably for convenience. I’m an EMT, when I was doing interfacility runs for a private ambulance company (aka not doing the expected work of an EMT) I didn’t call myself an ambulance driver or professional insurance fraud fall guy, I called myself an EMT because it was easier to use in day to day conversation. If someone wanted to talk about it I would explain the nuances but I’m not gonna do that every time someone asks me what I do for work in polite conversation
And my point is that support and service desk IT people DO call themselves engineers. The guy above us did so. So if it were insulting, they sure they wouldn’t identify that way.
I know plently of helpdesk guys that do engineering, if engineering is “identify an issue, find and implement a fix.” Its varying degrees of rudimentary, but the same could be said about anyone in conputer science.
The truth is no one in computer science, programmers, SREs or otherwise, are licensed engineers. Why does a programmer have more of a claim to an unearned title than anyone else in the field?
It’s exactly this. No one complains when IT infrastructure engineers design and build systems and call themselves engineers, even though they don’t have a PE certification. So if they can do it, why not support staff?
Programming grew up in an environment where failure is cheap (relatively speaking). You might make a mistake that costs five, six, or even seven figures (I’m sure I’ve made at least one seven figure mistake), but nobody will die from it. When people could die, such as flight control software, different development techniques for formal methods are used. Those tend to cost at least ten times more than other methods, so they aren’t used much otherwise.
If anything, we should lean into this as an advantage. Iterate even faster, catch failures faster, and fix it faster.
I mean, that is fine and all about the historical reasons we dont have engineer titles, but the OP comment was gatekeeping one part of IT from another like there was an actual legal distinction between a dev, someone in infrastructure or someone in support.
IMO no engineering degree, no engineer. There’s some exceptions for incredible self taught folks but they’re drowned out by so many others that just use the title without the skill
I think most engineers have an understanding amongst each other, regardless of their specialty, we can all teach ourselves to problem solve. So many math and physics classes as an EE just to get to my core classes. It definitely a certain type of person to get through the thick of it.
Major engineering organizations, like the IEEE or the ASME, often require degrees, but do have exceptions built into the rules for on the job experience. So this does happen, and regularly enough that there’s consideration for it.
You can arbitrarily gatekeep the title all you want, but the reality is that engineering is a group of concepts and ideologies that can be applied to many disciplines in many ways.
Just because the person doing the engineering doesn’t meet your personal standards doesn’t mean engineering isn’t being accomplished.
All that being said. A professional engineer is an actual controlled title. (You can’t sign documents as a PE without getting the license, just like an attorney (JD) or doctor (MD)) but far and away most engineers, do not have this title, because most engineering jobs and tasks don’t require it.
Finally, (in most states) you can work with no degree under a PE for four years, pass the FE and PE, get your title and build a bridge. So as far as the most stringent title goes, it still doesn’t actually require a degree.
Yeah I’m like older gen z and was huge into blues clues. Tons of people my age hate being identified with gen z tho because we grew up with DS lites not iPads lol.
No shame in being gen z. The political activism of that gen is truly impressive. They’re doing the best they can with what they’ve been given, and I think they’re doing great. I’m really proud of them as a generation :) I can’t wait to see Gen Alpha come into their own, too.
Um, no? I was born in late 94 and was the prime audience for blue’s clues. I had so much blue’s clues merch as a tot. It was that and teletubbies. I would say the youngest millenials were probably a bit too young to have caught much of Mr Rogers (I didn’t) but that may be a case by case thing.
That said, I do feel a lil disconnected from the rest of the millenial generation in what I remember from the 90s—as it’s basically nothing—and I often have to teach my '91 spouse and his similarly-aged friends about tech and current slang, but I’m still slightly to old to roll with gen z lol. Being a cusp gen baby is weird.
Millennials are 1981 to 1996; you’re a very late millennial so it makes sense your experiences are more similar to Gen Z. I doubt many people only a couple years older than you watched Blue’s Clues.
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