> One mistake doesn’t mean they are completely incompetent.
They are completely incompetent because for something as critical as crowdstrike code, you must build so many layers of validation that one, two or three mistakes don't matter because they will be caught before the code ends up in a customer system.
Looks like they have so little validation that one mistake (which is by itself totally normal) can end up bricking large parts of the economy without ever being caught. Which is neither normal nor competent.
Except this isn’t one mistake. Writing buggy code is a mistake. Not catching it in testing, QA, dogfooding or incremental rollouts is a complete institutional failure
I don’t think healthcare for employees comes anywhere close to the list of top expenses for a company as large as Boeing.
Based on the article, it sounds like the expertise of more experienced workers was preventing the reckless management from shipping poorly tested products earlier, and this was the actual reason for terminating them.
I used to like Naomi, but like a lot of intelligent people online recently, she has caught the politics mind virus and began using her platform to spread even more hate and division.
These days I find myself desperately craving an online community that just focuses on building cool projects and learning about new stuff, rather than pointless political debates that have extremely little relevance in anyone’s lives.
That's a very presumptuous thing to say. I'm not any different from anyone else.
The greatest lie that politicians ever told was that they have power over how you live your life. The sooner people stop believing this, the sooner we can all move on from politics and start building stuff again.
Naomi has taken to an extreme view on COVID, claiming that policies that are any less authoritarian than the (now provably failed) “zero COVID” policy are attempts by the state to purposefully kill elderly and sick people so that survivors can apparently enjoy greater tax revenue.
I don't know, in the context of my own country (Brazil) there seems to be some (probably small) amount of intentionality [0] of government officials in measures that are obviously malicious, like rejecting vaccines [1] and other actions that aided the spread of the virus. We shouldn't live in a world where the incentives of government officials coincide with excess deaths of elderly or any other population group.
But the trouble with conspiracies is that they ascribe a level of competency that's unrealistic. So it's unlikely there is a government program specifically targeted to kill the elderly, not because governments are above this, but just because this kind of thing can't be made secret for too long (just like this specific remark from some specific government official in Brazil quickly became public).
> The problem we have as a species is that we’ve been so effective at optimisation that we have eliminated the need for anyone to exist. A few farmers can feed the country. A few automated production lines could produce the goods.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Human labor is still desperately needed throughout the world in order to keep things running. It’s not just farmers. You also need drivers, clerks, mechanics, accountants, etc. And that’s just to get food into your local grocery store.
Nothing in modern life is free, even though it may seem easy for most of us living in the developed world. All of this stuff exists only because people are working really hard to keep it that way.
About 2% of people in the US work in agriculture/forestry/animal handling/etc. If you include transportation workers, that's still about 5% of US workers. And if you include wholesale workers and utilities workers -- that's still < 10% of the US population.
All of this work is critical and necessary (to your point). But I think the BLS data is evidence toward OP's point that we've automated and optimized a lot of the work necessary for subsistence.
Using the USA as an example of labor distribution in this regard is disingenuous. Like most leading countries, we are supported by an external labor class operating extremely cheaply and exporting critical goods into our system. Agriculture work in the USA would be much more prevalent if 13% of the Mexican population wasn't directly involved in agriculture. In fact ~78% of Mexico's exports go to the USA. Its a vassal state, supplying the USA with cheap and largely unregulated human labor critical for our subsistence. You say we optimized our work, I say we imported $40 Billion in food from China last year.
I think you have to include a lot of "Retail Trade" and/or "Leisure and Hospitality" in those numbers, though I'm not sure where grocery and food service workers fall exactly. Meat packing, prepared foods, etc are a lot more manual than agriculture itself. Most people do not want to eat raw field corn/wheat/soybeans.
It's not some magical automation though. The farmers, in order to be that efficient, need constant input of fuel and fertilizers and pesticides and machines (as they break down and wear out). Digging deeper, they also need financial and physical infrastructure and basically very many components of our advanced civilization, or they wouldn't achieve anywhere near the efficiency they have now.
>It’s not just farmers. You also need drivers, clerks, mechanics, accountants, etc.
Also the regulatory apparatus which does a pretty good job of ensuring that food doesn't have dangerous chemicals or pathogens in it, and the law enforcement without which the regulatory apparatus would be toothless, and the people who maintain the communications infrastructure that the regulatory apparatus and the law enforcement rely on to be effective, and so on.
As with most things, the truth is in the middle. This is obvious hyperbole but for the purpose of making a point. There are a __lot__ of useless jobs out there.
I like to think of it as similar to talking to the smartest person you know. You can constantly learn something new from this person, but they make mistakes just like anyone else does. Trust, but verify.
