xoaArs Tribunus Angusticlaviuset Subscriptorreply2 days agoReader Favignore user
Wheels Of Confusion wrote:
Break Up Google.

No, this is stupid. The antitrust sledgehammer is a very bad choice vs actual decent consumer protection regulation. Merely having companies be smaller doesn't actually solve anything, lots of small companies are plenty nasty and that somebody can go elsewhere in theory doesn't necessarily make it any easier. In fact the "break them up so easy lol" meme is so dumb that it honestly has had me wondering if it got started as a false-flag by those opposed to any regulation at all, since it short circuits everything else. There are a lot of scalpels to try first that would be really valuable. Amongst them in no particular order (and not apply at all just to Google either):
Require read-only data access/export for a period of time. Services need to and should be able to refuse to do further business with somebody (and at scale given abuse, this necessarily requires some level of automation). But banning someone should not mean they lose any of their data, and it shouldn't require them to do any work in advance either. Unless it's due to a court order wrt illegal material, companies should be required to have a 6 month window say following a ban to allow someone to get everything. Making sure someone can get everything out would go a long way towards fixing effects and incentives.
Require paid access to a person with review powers. Human review is expensive, but if someone is willing to pay for it they should be able to get it.
Require purchase-time choice for hardware buyers to add their own certs to hardware and/or software roots. There are good reasons for App Stores and certified hardware chains and people should be able to roll with those if they want. But there are real risks too, and a legal requirement for an opt-out would be an easy requirement as a release valve.
Enshrine the notion of software ownership. Account bans and DRM should never result in the loss of purchased software, simple as that. Ongoing use of services sure, but only going forward.
No tying free OS/security updates to accounts. Doesn't need any explanation, no account should be required to receive free updates that are required for continuing functionality.
Basic warranties that match buyer expectations. The "lol 1 year but you can buy more" thing is bad. People have a rough expectation of "how long something should last" in proportion to its cost, and the price should internalize the failure rate and repair cost rather than externalize it onto an unlucky few. Maybe 1 month warranty per $20 retail up to 5 years, maybe some other formula, but while it should be up to manufacturers to figure out how to meet the goal of basic reliability, meet it they should. Lots of other issues are covered by this ("right to repair" which is a bad way). Extended warranties should only be for things like premium turnaround, enterprise level beyond EOL coverage, etc.
Spell out SLAs in standardized way, even for consumer level. Maybe the paid pro version has a 99.9% uptime guarantee and 12-hour response time etc, while in practice the consumer version only promises 95% and "here's our FAQ, or you can pay $200 per incident to talk to someone", but the latter should still be something people can understand upfront before committing.
And more, but these would be good starts. Big Companies and Big Tech in particular provide major, major benefits. They are also convenient, concentrated targets for careful, focused experiments in regulation. There is no reason we can't try to have the best of both worlds. "Break them up" is not just short sighted but lazy. We should try to make things better for everyone.

Companies, particularly those in the financial and retail sector, are the sinews of capitalism. Corporations lining up to form an ideological test for usership is a counterintuitive way to run a free market. //

We’re talking about digital-era monopolies that, in their market power and influence, rival the Gilded Age trusts and cartels that once exercised exclusive control over vast swaths of American industry. Instead of dithering over whether to tweak Section 230, we need to ask ourselves whether Amazon should be allowed to own AWS?

Should Facebook be allowed to own Instagram and WhatsApp and scores of other digital companies? Should Google be allowed to own YouTube and Android and DoubleClick? At what point do we say that these companies simply have too much power and that they represent combinations and trusts that must, like their 19th-century forebears, be broken up? //

As Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, a member of the Senate’s Antitrust Subcommittee and a brilliant attorney, tweeted recently, “the consumer welfare standard is . . . not a narrow concern with prices. As Judge Bork wrote, it encompasses ‘innovation, choice among differing products’ and quality.” Markets, he noted, must “work for consumers, not just monopolists.” //

It’s time to de-prioritize and end the billions in state, local, and federal subsidies fed to Big Tech companies. Both Google and Amazon enjoy substantial federal contracts with the government – AWS provides cloud computing for the CIA, for example. Those should be leveraged for better behavior.

Section 230, Big Tech’s congressionally granted legal immunity, should be reformed so tech companies are incentivized to address the exploitative and harassing content that proliferates on their platforms, and more accommodating of diverse political speech. Or, absent that, repeal it altogether. //

Our speech and communications in the public square have been fundamentally altered by the digital era, so perhaps a common carrier statutory framework should apply.

In short, stop privileging the companies who threaten pluralism and a free society, and restore the proper hierarchy of America, where the people rule — not the mob, not the corporate barons, not the bureaucrats, and not the tech titans.

American conservatives should not be cheering for concentrating power in the hands of a few, whether those few are politicians or business owners. Big business and big government always collude. //

In either case, economic power is being used to enforce a new cultural and political hierarchy. It is often not the owners of the businesses doing this, but the managerial class, who are, in theory at least, only stewards of other people’s wealth.

Those on the right, such as Kevin Williamson, who sneer at boosters of small businesses, ignore these power dynamics. Perhaps it would help them to think of flourishing small businesses as a sort of economic federalism that prevents the further concentration of economic power. Just as we balance our government because concentrated power encourages tyranny, the power of big business should be balanced by a multitude of small and medium enterprises. //

Better to work for the stereotypical rich owner with a mansion on the edge of his factory town than for mid-level managers in Manhattan — the former might see workers as people, but the latter just sees numbers on a spreadsheet.

This culturally radical but economically neoliberal managerial class is the dominant force in the Democratic Party, which is increasingly comfortable identifying as the party of money. One need not look far to find self-congratulatory commentary from leftists praising themselves as the educated, productive class in society. Reality is more complicated, but it is noteworthy that Democrats want to be the party of the elite rather than of the little guy.

This gives conservatives an opportunity to rediscover our natural identity as defenders of localism. We should champion an ethos that sees small as beautiful — and that recognizes that small makes for better coffee.

Nobody wants to take several hours to simply observe what’s going on at a job site, but doing so could save you a lot of money in the long run. //

The guidance offered above is based on Ohno’s circle. Taiichi Ohno, developer of the Toyota Production System, taught people how to see waste in a process by standing in a circle and observing work activities — sometimes for hours on end. Remember, you cannot fix a problem if you don’t recognize it. So keep on looking for that waste!

Delta Air Lines is thanking its employees for their sacrifices during the COVID-19 pandemic by giving them free travel anywhere the airline flies.

A 2015 study found that CA was DEAD LAST in manufacturing investment. Schiff wants to pretend like it isn’t the state’s progressive policies that drive people out but let’s review one outfits reasons why businesses are leaving.

Number 1 is taxes. Color me shocked. This goes without saying that progressive policies require high taxes. File this under DUH.

Number 2 is wages. California has a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage coming down the pike and many businesses are fleeing before that goes into effect. Progressive fights for higher minimum wages have plagued the state for years.

Number 3 is unions. And who do Unions support? Progressives. Next?

Number 4 is environmental regulations. And who put in all of the environmental regulations? Progressives.

Sorry there Schiff. Progressives killed this state. Progressive policies are definitely incompatible with business.

Before government shut the nation down, Americans ate half their meals outside home. The farmers who served restaurants and cafeterias are dumping meat, veggies, and milk. And it's going to get worse. //

America’s food system is cracking.

People are still eating, farmers are still farming, and grocery stores are still open, but in areas around the country, shoppers looking for meat, milk, and other products find empty shelves and limits on what they can purchase — all while farmers from coast to coast are forced to dump milk, plow up vegetables, and euthanize livestock. So what’s happening, and why?

There isn’t a simple answer: No single issue that can be cured by safety gear and precautions, or “phase 1” reopenings. Yes, sick workers in tight conditions are causing a jam-up in processing plants. And yes, a shortage of access to personal protective equipment (PPE) and the threat of employee lawsuits compounds those risks. But the broader problem appears to lie in an unbelievably rapid shift in Americans’ eating habits, and thereby the American food economy, compounded by a draconian reaction and lack of dependable information from elected government.

“You’ve got to remember, it’s a finely tuned system,” John Rieley, a former Sysco food company sales rep and a current councilman for the nation’s top chicken farming county, Sussex Country, Delaware, told The Federalist. That’s usually a good thing — unless you need to play a different note. //

While in the mid-1980s, Americans still spent the majority of their food budget at retail grocery stores, that number has steadily declined, and in 2010, eating-out spending surpassed at-home for the first time. At the opening of 2020, Rieley estimates, only “40 percent of what farmers produced may have gone into retail.”

“Prior to [coronavirus], the majority of Americans would eat at least half of their meals away from home. A lot of people eating lunch and dinner away from home, or breakfast and lunch, and then you go out to dinner on the weekends, so all that production was geared toward food service, which is generally speaking a different size of animal, a different size of chicken.” //

Fast food does “70 percent of their business out the drive-up window,” Quality Milk Sales group CFO/COO Rance Miles tells The Federalist. “Of course, the drive-up window is still open, but places like McDonald’s, their total sales are down 30 percent; when you take a place like Subway, their sales are down 40 percent. I think it’s a combination that you say, ‘Well, we have this equipment that will do nuggets and strips, but that’s not what people are buying right now — they want chicken in the grocery store and we don’t have enough capacity for that. We have plenty of poultry, we just don’t have enough capacity. And then maybe some of that capacity we do have is shut down because of Covid cases.'”

“If this is going to be the new normal forever, they would go ahead and make the changes and everything would be fine eventually,” Rieley says, “but because the governors keep saying, ‘Two more weeks, just two more weeks, just two more weeks.’ They’re not going to put the investment into retooling the plants and then just have to change it back.”

'There's no one in the U.S. that does what we do. That would leave the option of really going to Asia...and there's no chance that they can deliver.' //

Being made in America is never going to be enough on its own. You’ve got to make sure that you’re delivering on every other aspect.

Delta is predominantly an Airbus customer for wide-body jets. It has 18 Boeing 777s and 55 A330 and A350s. //

Delta Air Lines said it would retire its fleet of Boeing 777 wide-body jets.

But it shouldn’t be, for a simple reason: Delta (ticker: DAL) is predominantly an Airbus (AIR.France) customer for wide-body jets. Out of the roughly 900 aircraft the U.S. airline operates, 18 are 777-model planes. Delta has 42 A330 aircraft and an additional 13 A350 aircraft for a total of 55 Airbus wide-body jets.

Wide bodies are twin-aisle planes. Narrow bodies are single-aisle jets such as the Airbuse A320 and Boeing’s 737-model jets.

Read More
Delta Is Retiring Boeing Jumbo Jets to Save Money
For Delta, the move reduces fleet complexity, which help manage costs. It is a sensible decision, given that airlines need fewer planes these days. Air travel in the U.S. has been down more than 90% year over year for the past couple of months.

The U.S. Postal Service appears to be on its last legs, which means power-hungry CEOs like Jeff Bezos could swoop in a acquire the service.

This letter from Delta's CEO was emailed to more than 20 million customers Sunday.

The best decisions require the best information. //

Delta's CEO, Ed Bastian, sent an email this morning to customers, revealing the company's plans for handling the current outbreak. In it, he gives a great lesson in exactly how to handle this type of situation.

'You don't want to change the priority of something that wasn't a priority." //

The context was an interview Parker did recently with Micheline Maynard at The Points Guy. He talked about what it's to fly on American Airlines himself--he said he usually does a "walk-through," talks with flight attendants, and checks out the TSA line and the break room, for example.

Maynard: If you notice something amiss in a process American can control, do you bring it up?

Parker: I do, but I can't think of a time when the answer wasn't, "Oh, yes, we're working on it." ... Any CEO will tell you that you may see things and question them, but you have to be very careful doing anything about it.

Maynard: Why?

Parker: You don't want to change the priority of something that wasn't a priority. You want to be careful not to have people drop what they are doing so they can take care of something you noticed.

Mikaila Ulmer, an Austin teenager managed to turn a lemonade stand into a million-dollar business.

One brand has a wonderful reputation, the other was just declared the worst of America's major airlines. How big is the difference? //

The Lesson. It's Always The Human Element.
There wasn't so much to choose between the two airlines. Or, at least, not as much as I'd imagined. This wasn't the glorious vs. the grotesque.

The real difference -- other than the painful disparity in food quality -- was that the human element of customer service seemed infused throughout the Delta experience, while on American it was rather confined to one exceptionally, spontaneously thoughtful gesture.

As everything becomes roboticized, personal touches still have an enormous effect. Whether the product experience is going right or wrong -- and with airlines people really dislike the wrong -- how your employees handle it is crucial.

The "bus factor" is the minimum number of team members that have to suddenly disappear from a project before the project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel.

The expression "hit by a bus" describes a person either dying or more generally disappearing suddenly from the project. It is used to describe hypothetical future disappearances in a darkly humorous way. Team members do not literally have to get "hit by a bus" for the "bus factor" to apply—any number of events could occur in which a team member could be suddenly and substantially prevented from working on the project. This could include a person taking a new job, going on parental leave, or changing lifestyle or life status.

For instance, say a team of 30 people produces bread in three necessary steps: mixing ingredients, kneading the dough, and baking. Ten people know how to mix ingredients, all 30 people know how to knead the dough, and 5 people know how to bake. If all 5 people who know how to bake disappear, then the team cannot produce bread, so the team's bus factor is 5.

There is a rare alternative definition for the bus factor, namely: the number of people who are indispensable for the project.[2] In other words, it is the minimum number of people who are a single point of failure. If using this definition, then a high bus factor is considered a bad thing (since the loss of any person included destroys the project), and zero is considered the ideal bus factor.

An early instance of this sort of query was when Michael McLay publicly asked, in 1994, what would happen to the Python language if Guido van Rossum were hit by a bus.[9]

A recent study calculated the bus/truck factor of 133 popular GitHub projects. The results show that most of the systems have a small bus factor (65% have bus factor ≤ 2) and the value is greater than 10 for less than 10% of the systems.[10][11]

More than 40 years ago, Tom Murphy, Warren Buffett's "good friend" and "hero," taught him an invaluable life lesson about the importance of recognizing and controlling your emotions. //

Practicing emotional discipline
More than 40 years ago, Buffett wrote, Murphy taught him an "indispensable" lesson about the importance of recognizing and controlling your emotions. "He said, 'Warren, you can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow,'" Buffett recalled. "It was one of the best pieces of advice I have ever received."

Murphy's point is that, often, in a heated situation, the smartest thing you can do is hold your tongue. If you lose your temper, you're more likely to do something you might regret later on. And once it's out there (especially in today's technological world, where anything you say can go viral), you can't take it back.

"It's such an easy way of putting it," Buffett continued. "You haven't missed the opportunity. Just forget about it for a day. If you feel the same way tomorrow, tell them then — but don't spout off in a moment of anger!" //

It's important to note that Buffett isn't advising people to not be emotional. Rather, he emphasizes the advantages of acknowledging, examining and understanding your emotions. By doing so, you create more time and space for clarity, which will then allow you to make more prudent decisions.

John Carrier leads the MIT Sloan Executive Education program Implementing Industry 4.0: Leading Change in Manufacturing and Operations. He also teaches in the F1 Extreme Innovation series, a collaboration between Formula One and MIT Sloan Executive Education. A native Detroiter who sees the world through a lens of systems thinking, Carrier recently watched the film (twice) with process improvement in mind. Here are three business lessons that “Ford v. Ferrari” demonstrates with historical accuracy and a touch of Hollywood flair.

Lesson 1: Don’t adopt new tech until you know what problem you are trying to solve

To test the aerodynamics of the GT40 prototype, the original Ford engineers put a large, heavy computer with attached sensors into the car. The Shelby team ripped out the computer and instead taped strings over the surface of the car, then observed the exterior of the car to see how air traveled over and around the vehicle. "Often the best model of the system is the system itself," Carrier says.

Another takeaway from this example is that the strings make the issue observable,

Unlike a computer printout, the streamers provided direct and immediate visual measurement of the entire system. Indeed, the very presence of the computer in the car distorted the performance of the system, as it significantly increased the weight of the car.

Lesson 2: Flatten your decision-making.

In the movie, Ford’s decision on the Shelby program went through the classic “15 middle managers,” visualized by a red folder circulating the Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan, headquarters, known as the Glass House. The red folder is the perfect analogy for the “hidden factory” of middle management. (A “hidden factory” is any activity or set of activities that reduce the quality or efficiency of operations but are not initially known to managers or others seeking to improve the process.)

Shelby eventually shortens the feedback loop by insisting he report directly to Henry Ford II.

“Paraphrasing a conversation I once had with Jay Forrester, the father of system dynamics, the purpose of middle management seems to be to turn the message 180 degrees while adding a time delay — the absolutely optimal way to destroy the performance of any system,” Carrier says.

Lesson 3: Learn from others.

In the Daytona race, Shelby bet his company to the Ford Motor Company on his driver, Ken Miles, winning — even against another Ford team in the race. Meanwhile, the Shelby team observed that the second Ford team in the next pit bay was having much faster pit stops. Shelby discovered they were utilizing NASCAR pit crew members.

“The lesson here is simple,” Carrier explains. “Look outside your own team, company, and/or industry for better ways of doing what you’re doing.”

Spoiler alert: In the case of Ford, all their hard work and lessons learned paid off. The GT40 MK II defeated Ferrari at Le Mans in 1966, capturing first, second, and third places. And they won again the following year.

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering. This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer. The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works. It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “fairly bright engineer with low self-confidence and zero practical knowledge of business.” I wouldn’t trust this as the definitive guide, but hopefully it will provide value over what your college Career Center isn’t telling you.

90% of programming jobs are in creating Line of Business software: Economics 101: the price for anything (including you) is a function of the supply of it and demand for it. Let’s talk about the demand side first. Most software is not sold in boxes, available on the Internet, or downloaded from the App Store. Most software is boring one-off applications in corporations, under-girding every imaginable facet of the global economy. It tracks expenses, it optimizes shipping costs, it assists the accounting department in preparing projections, it helps design new widgets, it prices insurance policies, it flags orders for manual review by the fraud department, etc etc. Software solves business problems. Software often solves business problems despite being soul-crushingly boring and of minimal technical complexity.

Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program thing
s: Businesses do things for irrational and political reasons all the time (see below), but in the main they converge on doing things which increase revenue or reduce costs. Status in well-run businesses generally is awarded to people who successfully take credit for doing one of these things. (That can, but does not necessarily, entail actually doing them.) Don’t call yourself a programmer: Instead, describe yourself by what you have accomplished for previously employers vis-a-vis increasing revenues or reducing costs. If you have not had the opportunity to do this yet, describe things which suggest you have the ability to increase revenue or reduce costs, or ideas to do so.

How much money do engineers make?

Wrong question. The right question is “What kind of offers do engineers routinely work for?”, because salary is one of many levers that people can use to motivate you. The answer to this is, less than helpfully, “Offers are all over the map.”

Your most important professional skill is communication: Remember engineers are not hired to create programs and how they are hired to create business value? The dominant quality which gets you jobs is the ability to give people the perception that you will create value. This is not necessarily coextensive with ability to create value.
All business decisions are ultimately made by one or a handful of multi-cellular organisms closely related to chimpanzees, not by rules or by algorithms: People are people. Social grooming is a really important skill. People will often back suggestions by friends because they are friends, even when other suggestions might actually be better. People will often be favoritably disposed to people they have broken bread with.

At the end of the day, your life happiness will not be dominated by your career. Either talk to older people or trust the social scientists who have: family, faith, hobbies, etc etc generally swamp career achievements and money in terms of things which actually produce happiness. Optimize appropriately. Your career is important, and right now it might seem like the most important thing in your life, but odds are that is not what you’ll believe forever. Work to live, don’t live to work.

About Author

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) ran four small software businesses. He writes about software, marketing, sales, and general business topics. Opinions here are his own.

If I told you I would pay you a hundred thousand dollars if you did five minutes of poetry recital while standing on one foot, would you do it? It’s an absurd image, but play it straight. There is no hidden gotcha here. You won’t be videotaped. Your friends will never see you make a fool of yourself. The revolution will not be YouTubed. The offer is exactly as simple as you think it is: poetry, foot, $100,000.

Would you read poetry for me?

Of course you would. You’d be screamingly stupid not to. In fact, not only would you read poetry, you’d probably take a poetry class to make sure you did it right, or go to the gym to verify “Yep, sure enough, I can stand on one foot. Phew. Pass me the Shakespeare.” If you couldn’t stand on one foot, you’d fix that, because you know that is much easier than other things you routinely accomplish and you suddenly have a hundred thousand wonderful reasons to learn it, too.

What if you were talking about this at dinner with your friends, and one of them said “Oh, no, I’d never do that. I just don’t do poetry. I’m an engineer. And besides, my father told me that people who stand on one foot look silly. And what do I need $100,000 for anyhow?” You would not clap them on the back and say “Damn straight! Man, poets, always trying to tempt virtuous engineers into their weird poetry-spouting flamingo-standing ways.” You’d say “Dude, it’s five minutes. Heck, I’ll help you practice.”

This is pretty much how I feel every time I talk to my engineering friends about salary negotiation. We overwhelmingly suck at it. We have turned sucking at it into a perverse badge of virtue. We make no affirmative efforts to un-suck ourselves and, to the extent we read about it at all, we read bad advice and repeat it, pretending that this makes us wise.

Dude, it’s five minutes. Let’s un-suck your negotiation.