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That’s not necessarily true. A lot of companies are very risk averse and will sit there creaming off profit and not making any investment.

If someone came to you and said - you have two choices:

Work incredibly hard, raise a lot of money, build a bunch of infrastructure. And at some point in the future you will make some more money.

Or - keep taking your very nice high guaranteed salary for the foreseeable future.

What would you pick?


I hear vending machine ppl often have 1-3 very profitable locations and 10-40 locations that only barely make sense often only because they already are in the business.

I imagine hiring someone to fix or restock them makes a lot more sense if you have 100 machine rather than just one.

It really depends what the goal is. Profit with fiber or fiber with profit?

Here public transport is required to cover all routes. Postal service is the same. Fiber doesn't seem that different?


Depends on how much margin there was. Sounds like there's not enough.

Emotional state, tiredness, drunkenness, a goods nights sleep… the number of factors that drive our responses is ridiculous.

A lot of the railway network uses a “third rail” to carry power. You don’t necessarily need overhead lines.

https://www.networkrail.co.uk/our-work/looking-after-the-rai...


There'll be no new third rail electrification, though (apart from some minor infill, or reorganisation around depots).

The conversion of remaining mainlines to 25 kV overhead AC is going slower than anyone wants, but already over 70% of passenger rail journeys use electric traction (and actually more like 80% by passenger kilometers).

There are an awful lot of low-traffic rural lines that it won't be economic to electrify using current technology, so we'll need to rely on battery electric for those.

Either way, it's largely orthogonal to the problem of electrifying road transport.


Oh, right, I completely forgot about those! To be fair, there are reasons everyone else usually sticks to overhead lines outside of subway systems.

I find it all quite entertaining. A lot of developers are discovering what it’s like to manage “people”. And they are realising that it’s not fun.

If you’ve run a team or managed people it’s quite a familiar feeling of “I’m pretty sure we were very clear on what needed to be done. But somehow, what’s been produced is just not quite what I wanted”


Yeah, but humans can learn, remember, and usually don’t hallucinate. They get better over time on a specific codebase, framework, and system.

That is the hope...

I've laid the groundwork to do this locally, but the current crop of LLM agents just can't close the loop. Trying to get them to finish the job inevitably sends me right back into the spiral. Thinking i should do it manually.

Read my other posts too.


Moving to electric is not some optional thing that you can choose not to do. Fossil fuels are a finite resource. They will run out at some point.

We can either make the shift now or we'll have to do it later. Much better to do change early and invest in it early.


Strictly speaking fossil fuels being finite does not mean we have to move to electric vehicles. We could switch to 'green' hydrogen, biofuels, or synthetic fuels. We'd still switch to renewables (or maybe nuclear), just not necessarily to electric.

When I was 12 my school books said we would run out of oil in 20 years

I’m older than 32 now


When you were 12 it probably said the life expectancy was X years. If you reached X+1 years would you conclude that you would live forever?

Do you believe there is an unlimited amount of oil in the world?

At least until the end of our respective lifetimes

Trump on Saturday called for countries affected by Tehran’s de facto closure of the strait — a crucial artery for some 70% of Japanese oil imports — to send military vessels amid the ongoing U.S. and Israeli war against Iran.

Should be re-written as: "countries affected by Trumps complete lack of foresight or planning...".


Set up an API key and use that.


Try the new /simplify command.


It must have been:

Aliens Atlanteans Time travellers A hoax …


That is the exact problem. The people who put up the $2B thought they were safe - after all they were putting up money to buy a successful profitable business.

Problem is they didn’t really understand the business and trusted the PE guys to keep running it well…


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