netjiro

delay is easy

jitter kills

Recordings are a great utility:

Having a record allows all kinds of automated followup, post analysis, etc. This level of business intelligence and actual understanding is helpful in improving organisation function and individual training long term.

Asynchronous is _a_ great next step beyond that:

Moving discussions and decisions async has been a massive improvement in the organisations I have helped. Goes against dogma and habit (with all the huge obstacles that come with it) but pays off quickly.

Discussions are more factual and evidence based.

Decisions are thought through and transparent.

Collective (and individual) memory of what has been discussed, decided, and why is much better.

Training people to be clear, succinct, transparent also help them not get bogged down in gut feeling, habit, dogma, ego, posturing, pestering, politics, etc.

And of course the immediate bonus of individually flexible scheduling and not killing efficiency by slicing everything to administration/manager-mode-time.

I wish we could solve zoning and permitting ...

Perhaps we should learn from other places that have better solutions already? E.g: Japan? Singapore? etc.

Somehow many western countries have gotten stuck in red tape and the inability to learn from other cultures.

It is an uncomfortable risk for many, to back a likely long term winner over a sure current cash cow. Even if their own estimates say they should go for it. See it all the time.

And to make it even more short sighted, the idea won't go away, it will just take a little longer and then pop up in competing colours.

a group of aligned people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart

Hard numbers from 20+ projects over 20+ years say the exact opposite. Hard core tech R&D projects, small and large.

When I compare the distributed all remote projects to those run in house, it is night and day difference.

iirc: we are changing atmospheric CO2 many times faster than the PT Extinction!

... quick search [1]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22298-7

I think it is a joke that

Standards change greatly with time and it is a joke to believe that applying the same standards to everyone will get a good outcome.

Anecdata: I would have loved to get the possibility to study higher math at high school level, at school. I had to dig it out on my own since the local school topped out after basic calculus, linalg, statistics. I was not alone.

Today I would estimate that top 5% could easily and happily handle multivariate, ode/pde, etc in high school given proper support and encouragement.

Top few percent learn several times faster than average. What is the point, other than ancient ideology, to slow them down and hinder their learning progress?

Somehow we collectively forget/ignore that coal power releases many times the radioactivity of nuclear power, and that is just dumped directly into the air. The numbers are not directly apples to apples but absolutely lead to more life/health loss from fossil nuclear radiation contamination than fission nuclear radiation contamination.

E.g:

https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...

https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/do-coal-fired-power-sta...

As long as the checklist catches more costly errors than the time to use it and the (very likely) negative secondary effects to critical thinking and innovation.

Love tools that help, eg checklists, when used right.

But over time they have a very strong tendency to become set-in-stone dogma, at which time they will create a priesthood and a very large dead zone where thinking and flexibility is no longer allowed.

I wonder about the actual numbers here, and how they vary between cultures, regions, age groups, etc. From what I see from my single female friends 20% is waaay too high. Not trying to be a jerk here, just observation.

does not pencil out to replace the original windows

Depends on the cost of energy and the interior comfort level you want.

I prototype in python or whatever, then, if the project survives into market and has legs I either buy more hardware or rewrite the expensive parts in C++.

Reduces calendar time, risk, cost. And I'm likely to make better decisions once the code and market is better understood after the prototype is tested under real world conditions and the requirements have changed (like they always seem to do).

Offload to local device with, yes. Offload to server farm elsewhere ... naaah. You have at most a few ms to compress - stream - decompress - refresh. Any latency, jitter, stutter, etc has a very negative impact in vr. Much more so than on a regular monitor.

Do you have numbers of the percentage of people who do get motion sickness from vr? Perhaps 50% of the population not going vomity is a large enough market? Perhaps 10%? As devices get better the market will grow. I can definitely feel off at 60Hz, but no problem so far at 120 if the latency is kept to a minimum.

Plenty of people get seasick, but there are still quite a few of us who enjoy sailing a day through a proper October Storm.

Even in super socialized Sweden the first child costs around 180 000 USD (2021) [1] for the median example family. Second child is probably less expensive.

[1] https://seb.se/privat/livet/att-skaffa-barn/sa-paverkar-ett-...

potential bullshit warning [1]:

Parents who take time for themselves and don't _just_ live for their kids tend to end up happier and with better relationships with their children as they grow up.

[1] I don't have children of my own, so wtf do I know. But: My lifestyle, spending a lot of time practically living with my friends and their families, allows me to get a fairly deep insight into a large set of varied families over the last 20y.

Example of how much you'd have to "overbuild". Look at example temperature and incoming solar radiation around january - february. Graphs 1 and 3 [1]. And that's for Vantaa in the far south of Finland :)

[1] https://research.tuni.fi/uploads/2019/05/0a103135-p086568.pn...

I know zero about twitter,

but I have inspected plenty of organisations where strong engineering teams are drowned by management bullshit. even found places where most of the individuals, engineering and management both, are arguably competent but the overall organisational decreptitude kills any and all effective work, no matter how heroic or skilled the individual and collective effort gets.

for doing nothing

nope. plenty of stress, long hours, tons of work.

just very little product output. often even negative output.

ymmv: if "the cause" has technical or scientific elements and you are a skilled engineer or scientist your contribution of 1000h/y work on target is significantly larger than donating $1M/y.

if the load bearing core is miniscule and light you have plenty of mass and radius available for abrasion resistance, handling properties, etc ...

Profiling code optimisation in joules is a fun and somewhat unusual task. Surprisingly it has come up both for the high end in a supercomputing project and at the very low end embedded. Having an execution budget in handfuls of joules is just weird, and fun.

... double counting ...

Thanks for catching that. Sedentary lifestyle is around 2000kcal/day, ca 100W.

I assumed the ca 20% efficiency was for efficiency of chemical energy extraction from the food (on average, varies a lot between carbohydrate, protein, fats) to storage as glucose/fat before we run it to ... > AMP > ... > ATP & NADH.

But that should probably already be taken into account by the output calculations from the agricultural production. Right? (so my original comment was wrong).

Embarrassing that I don't know this off the top of my head. I used to be good at it. Need to dust off the books. Or probably buy new ones since the field has progressed since last I dug around in it.

The "embodied energy" calculation is always going to be somewhat arbitrary based on what one wants to include. With more or less relevance.

E.g: human rest power is ca 100W at ca 20% efficiency. The agricultural production is at best 2% efficient. That's already 25kW, just to survive. * Edit: partially wrong, see comments below. *

But it is perhaps relevant to exclude all non-CO2 energy sources? Thus putting the agricultural efficiency much higher since the sunlight would be "0".

Or you can “cheat” by insisting used items don’t carry the energy cost because those were already borne by the original owner.

When calculating footprint I generally use the partial cost paid for the item as proxy for the partial footprint to attribute for its total lifecycle. Interested in hearing about degenerate/edge cases.

study done on kids that I wish I had the source for.

There are a lot of them with similar results, going back to 1960s.

Kohn "Punished by Rewards" is a good general start for that stuff. I think there was some generalised study/review published in late 90s. Probably Deci and Ryan (?).

Palmerston North ... always high skill Jobs going and not enough people

? links to good job boards ?

I know several people (stem MSc / PhD)s who are on and off looking into migrating. They would come with around NZD 0.8-2.4M net capital from selling their current houses.

you also have to consider what services are included in the tax

Yes! And a lot more as well. Many are under the impression that income tax is the majority of their major tax burden.

Total taxation from billing to salary net + vat of normal spending. This must include all forms of employment, social fees, and other government imposed costs for the employer. This is higher than income tax for many regions and income brackets. On top of this should be added other taxes for a given lifestyle. E.g. fuel and vehicle taxes, property taxes, etc.

Then the services provided: health care, schooling, child care, child support, pensions, etc.

Things look a lot different when making a complete cost comparison between countries, and varies a lot depending on what is included as a "normal" lifestyle. E.g: couple with 2.2 children at median income looking at retirement at 70 vs a single high income earner looking to retire at 50... and ... so ... on ...

On top of that we can also include other living costs ... but we started somewhere at average house price vs annual family income?

I do mind exclusive clubs for the sake of exclusivity, and especially those that are (supposedly and explicitly) genetically determined entry criteria. It smells bad.

? what is your stance on, e.g., competitive sports teams ?

Yeah, so much is recent ...

For the general public it seems like a new thing. But many of us have been working fully or mostly remote for decades, used to be called distributed. There is a lot of knowledge out there for anyone who want to learn, extensively tested in many organisations. The gitlab stuff, linked above, is one example.

I've been building and running globally distributed asynchronous organisations for 20y, and I've learnt some of my tips/tricks/tools from people doing it very successfully for many years before I started.

My best tips: ditch the traditional management dogma, it's quite inefficient anyway. Trust your people. Make sure they have the information and training they need. Flatten out. Push for transparency. Go async! Especially for decision making.

For me it has been exceptionally rare that people are less productive when they are given control over their own circumstances.