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The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

techtrenches.dev

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Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#571

Post by mikem170 »

WalterBright wrote: post #555
vishnugupta wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> removing people and organizational slack You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else. I've commented about lack of slack on several times here…

> optimised immediate profitability over everything else Which is the usual complaint that businesses are focused on short term results, sacrificing long term results. If that would be generally true, the stock market would be going down steeply, not up, as stock prices are based on expectations of future profits.

Are stock market profit expectations mostly long term? Stock markets have been wrong before.

Besides that, the U.S. stock market went up over several decades while manufacturing capabilities were transferred overseas. That has had, and will continue to have, domestic ramifications that might not be captured by investor profits.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#572

Post by don_esteban »

mopsi wrote: post #479
don_esteban wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many western authoritative sources documenting that. Have a look at William Burn's 'Nyet means nyet' depeshe. Or Merkel's memoirs. Or George Kennan's statement's in the 90's on the wisdom of expanding NATO. But, ultimately, one believes what he/she wants to believe.... Do you think it is better to not carefully tiptoe around Russia? Do you consider full-on sanctions, total refusal (except Trump) to diplomat…

You listed joke sources. Merkel, in particular, has been utterly discredited for her naivety toward Russia. Her sucking on Russian gas left Germany lagging in the transition to renewables and EVs, and the German economy is now paying a double price by also having to bear a part of the economic burden of the war. As to Russia, virtually no-one in Russian academic foreign policy circles, nor in the influential semi-for…

Sigh, joke sources. Burns and Kennan also, right? Anybody who actually understood Russians is a joke. Study a bit, and not only neocon think tank sources, but from the people who actually understood Russians (there are practically none left in recent administrations).

Russians are paranoid, among other things, about nuclear decapitation strikes. For the same reasons, they have repeatedly explicitly strongly opposed missile sites in Poland and Romania.

I am really curious, what do you think the west should have done? Bomb Russians directly? I mean, what else is left?

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#574

Post by mancerayder »

sph wrote: post #361
throwaw12 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This shows Western government system is broken. In ideal world (where we don't live): * Corporation - optimizes for mid-to-short term profits (remove slack, run everything thin) * Government - optimizes for long term profits (introduce regulations to keep the slack time, keep and attract the talent so state gets better) * Individual - optimizes for their life time (career, family and tries to leverage market conditio…

> In the west, government is optimizing for "loads and loads of moooney" More appropriately, government is optimizing for 4 year electoral terms. No one cares about longer timescales necessary to tackle hard problems. This is where autocracies like China, or monarchies for example, win over democracies.

Counter-examples are France and Japan. Democracies, electoral terms. High-speed rail that the world looks up to, investment in infrastructure everywhere. In France you have Grand Paris, a programme to transform the suburbs into denser housing and commercial space, a calculation and planning that INCLUDES public transport.

And the green initiatives in France. These, transit, Grand Paris, and much more are initiatives that take many years to realize.

Now let's move over to New Jersey and New York City. The most densely populated state (NJ) has some of the worst transit despite being in the NYC greater metropolitan area. An old tunnel between the two needs to be replaced, but politicians with four year mental horizons canned it until recently (ARC project). Infrastructure is a fight between Federal, two states and a city politically and partially from a funding perspective.

We could go on, but I just wanted to point out that the United States is a poor example of good governance. And that we don't need to live in a totalitarian nightmare just because we acknowledge the US fails to produce innovation and investment for the public good.

And let's not talk about debt, as if it is a unique problem to France or anything new.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#575

Post by lotsofpulp »

999900000999 wrote: post #561
lotsofpulp wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>College should have never been presented as the only way to the middle class. In high school they shutdown my advanced trades class, maybe I could have been ready to hop into a decent job after graduation. Not unless you were willing to compete on price against people in China learning the same advanced trades.

So I assume every time you need a leak plugged you ship your whole house to Guangzhou ?

No, I search a few YouTube videos, and buy less than $100 of tools and supplies that were made in China from Home Depot, and fix the issue. Or a plumber uses tools and supplies made in China to fix the issue.

“Advanced trades” would be making and fixing the machines used to make the tools and supplies to fix the leak.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#576

Post by mancerayder »

gnz11 wrote: post #420
throwaw12 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is a management pattern .... Short-term cost cutting Absolutely agree with this. Most MBAs are taught to optimize and reduce the slack. It works fine with machinery and materials, but not with humans. When machinery is optimized and run thin, when one of them breaks, you can get exact same in couple days (you usually prepare for it earlier), but with humans, they train their brain and next person is dif…

Perhaps US companies should invest more in their employees then? Advancement, promotions beyond %1-3% COLAs, career paths, etc would go along way to keep employees interested in seeing their employers succeed instead of jumping ship every couple of years. The would require some effort from the C-suite however and since they jump ship every few years as well, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Unfortunately the Wall Street accountants who run our companies don't mind if you jump ship after your 2% 'reward' raise. Because when someone new comes and costs 10 % more plus recruiting costs, that latter person has 'proven' their worth in the market, similar to when a house goes up in value due to scarcity.

If you were to explain the costs of knowledge lost, of training, of taking a risk on a new unknown person, of relationships, there's no answer because it doesn't show up in any operating expense worksheet.

What you're supposed to do is find another job, and explain that you love this job so much, but the other offer is really good, can they come up close to it and you'll stay. Repeat this every few years or find a new job and move to it.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#577

Post by recury »

NateEag wrote: post #537
flymasterv wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have my “Get fucked, employee! Love, Jeff” puzzle pieces.

What are these? I'm extremely curious.

It’s a puzzle piece shape cut out of polycarbonate with some meaningless “great work!” platitude printed on it:

https://postimg.cc/v1v5VP2f

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#578

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

ekidd wrote: post #330
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also took out all the quality , though in pure business terms one can argue that's a kind of "slack" by itself. The beancounters have cut all the corners on physical products that they could find. Now even design and manufacturing is outsourced to the lowest bidder, a bunch of monkeys paid peanuts to do a job they're woefully unqualified for. And the end result is just a market for lemons. Nobody trusts products…

> E.g. Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke. It hasn't gotten better, the problems are all still there. Desktop Linux has gotten better, though much of the improvement happened decades ago. I believe the first person to prematurely declare "the year of Linux on the desktop" was Dirk Hohndel in 1999: https://www.linux.com/news/23-years-terrible-linux-predictio... And speaking as someone who was running desktop…

> Desktop Linux has gotten better

This is on me for being a bit too snarky.

So yes, Desktop Linux has "gotten better". What it hasn't done is solved any of the systemic problems.

The Open Source development quirks that created the shitshow of the 1999 is still here. Gnome is better but still suffers massively from mainstream features being declared stupid by the maintainers. (A power button that turns off the machine? Heretical.)

Valve's recent successes are pretty illustrative here. They used their money to directly hijack the projects their products rely on.

For what it pertains the comparison, Windows is not without this "slow" improvement either. 95 and 98 are lightyears behind contemporary Windows in so many ways. Until quite recently it still made about as much sense to use Linux as it did back then; Not much.

Take your Linux Laptop example. Sure, Linux finally kind of worked on some specific models that were tested for it. Meanwhile, Windows had moved from "it'll work with some mucking about with drivers" to "It works universally, on practically all hardware". Really, by the mid 2010s Windows would finally be quite tolerant of you changing the hardware.

Hence my original point; Desktop Linux hasn't really caught up with Windows in any meaningful sense. Windows is just nose-diving into the ground in the last few years.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#579

Post by spiorf »

WalterBright wrote: post #557
aleqs wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, in the minds of these people 'firing at 100% all the time' generally means doing busywork and/or thinking of ways to cheat/manipulate their customers and the market for maximum gain whole delivering minimum value. I would have loved to be 100% engaged working on solving real problems in honest ways at some of my past jobs, but alas MBA/marketing leadership, which has taken over much of tech has very l…

Profit maximization is a continuous process that has generated our high standard of living. P.S. I welcome all attempts to prove me wrong!

No, the process has impeded even higher standard of living, because it misallocates resources from value generation to value appropriation. It's the extreme short term profit maximization that makes the economy a zero sum game. Otherwise it is not.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#580

Post by don_esteban »

Supermancho wrote: post #521
don_esteban wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You started well, but then the train got derailed... Russia has no need for Eastern Europe (they have enough land and resources, why saddle yourself with hostile population?), as long as the said Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles (US has repeatedly shown that they do not hesitate to use their muscle if they think they can get away with it, so Russia's paranoia is not entirely unfounded).…

> Russia has no need for Eastern Europe They sure do like to sell to them. > Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles This never made much sense. Attacking a NATO buffer pre-emptively, brining your forces out and closer to existing NATO weapons, is basically putting you in the same situation with less resources. The issue is not about weapons "threatening". ICBMs can reach anywhere and smaller m…

You are applying western thinking (acquiring captive markets, NATO is a force of good, surely not threatening) to Russia. Big fail, they think differently.

It is obviously clear that Ukraine is not about securing resources: Given the costs of war (Russia knew the sanctions will be coming, just did not think their funds will be frozen), the cost-benefit is simply not there. Given the obvious economic drawbacks of attacking Ukraine, the only explanation that makes sense is the national security one. You go to war to 'test capabilities' only if it is a minor thing without serious consequences, which Ukraine war definitively does not fit.

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