I always think of it like Pokemon. I want to collect them all.

But it’s hard to say goodbye!

The CEO said collecting vintage cars.

I know people aren’t going to believe this, but honestly, you don’t need to be a bazillionaire to collect vintage cars. It sure helps (a lot!!), but depending upon what he was collecting, you can buy certain classics for (relatively speaking) cheap.

The director at my old company was into classic cars too and we would shoot-the-shit all the time about his cars and mine.

I heard this years later by my former boss. He used to work for a company that just announced some lay-offs because work was slow. Right as the lay-offs were being announced the head of the company pulled into the lot with his new Porsche lease. It was terrible timing, but the corporate lease was up and the car was ordered months prior. Just made the owner look especially tone-deaf since the car came the same say as the lay-off announcement.

If 1 person has a question, then chances are good most people have that same question but are too afraid to ask it in front of everyone.

Regulations and quality checks on aerospace parts is no joke. More so on stuff that goes out into space and on military hardware, but every single nut and bolt and everything in between can be traced back to a supplier and that supplier will be able to tell you when it was made, by who and even where the raw material came from and show you the certs. Regular airplanes not nearly as strict or as much paperwork, but it isn’t that far behind, quite honestly.

Also, you might be surprised by the testing that ladders go through. Not so much the cheapo Chinesium stuff, but safety in all fields is no joke. It is too costly to skimp on testing.

Yup! That right there. You give a technical person a job that requires some level of “soft skills” and that is what you get.

It is kind of hilarious that airplanes are seen as being safe and reliable, when if they were given the same factor of safety as most other consumer goods, they’d never get off the ground from being too heavy.

I do NOT recommend you do this, but if a ladder says it is designed for 300 lbs, then it should carry 1200 lbs. 4X is a fairly common factor of safety for things like ladders where people’s lives are in jeopardy. Most other items are usually 2X. (I want to point out that there are qualifications to this… static loading and dynamic loading are totally different things. Also a simple point load is not the same as a cantilevered loading condition. A new piece of equipment is not the same as one abused on the job for the last 10 years. All these things will dramatically affect safety ratings for things)

You didn’t talk about how coffins are sold for many thousands of dollars when they are just cheap plywood boxes that shouldn’t cost more than a hundred bucks and that serve no purpose other than to decay as quickly as possible.

Accounting, just like economics, likes to pretend it is a hard science when in reality is it close to reading tea leaves.

A lot of the same things you mention about game development are also apparent in open source software which is why it is usually so terrible. Someone that can program some complicated visuals for a 3D modeling program does not mean that same person actually does 3D modeling, which is why the interface for so many open source programs are abysmal.

This is one of the more fascinating space stories. The modeling for such an object should be (relatively speaking), rather simple. Something isn’t going to speed up or slow down without a force being applied to it. So NASA should be able to model this quite accurately.

Literally ANY hobby can seem boring to most people, but it wouldn’t be a hobby if people that got into it didn’t find it interesting as all hell.

give up

No. That’s not what companies do.

BMW and Mercedes were the “leaders” in milking their customers and thus they got the most bad press. All BMW is doing is waiting until more companies start doing this and the whole idea of subscriptions in the car business becomes normalized to the public.

Unless consumers continue to shun this concept and the press blasts these companies for trying to push this nonsense, it will make a comeback in the years to come. Unfortunately, I simply do not think consumers will look at their long-term interests. Its like telling gamers not to pre-order the hottest upcoming releases because it encourages companies to release buggy software… all the pleading in the world ends up falling on deaf ears. Same too, I believe, will happen in the car market.

That’s a rounding error.

I hate to admit it but Prime actually tastes really good.

You are right. The year before he became CEO, Google “only” had revenue of $66B. Last year, their revenue was $280B.

But if you look at the revenue chart, they were headed in that direction seemingly regardless of who was at the helm. But I think he is really hurting their long-term profits. I know that might sound crazy when they are making over 1/4 of a trillion per year, but there are more and more people who will simply not even consider a Google product these days because they feel in 6 months, Google will just kill it off. Who wants an orphaned phone or watch or VR headset, let alone all the software and services they kill off.

People aren’t going to be honest. The reality is that as an adult, you really don’t.

They need to get rid of that clown Sundar. Under his “leadership” Google has been on an endless downward trend.

Welcome to modern “journalism”.