• 0 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: March 31st, 2025

help-circle




  • They utterly trashed their OS, a globally ~dominant cash cow, at an astonishing pace. By completely, eagerly (forcibly!) jumping the gun on exciting new tech, maybe the single above-all “thing you never do with anything even like a cash cow of any shape or size”.

    As in, that is known - viscerally, below the level of words or even thought, as if that knowledge originates from another realm - by anyone who has ever actually been directly responsible for any valuable piece of technology.

    The depth of ignorance and really just flat-out juvenile naivety (fueled by naked greed) that produced this is something I’ll probably be thinking about for the rest of my life. Truly amazing, just historically, I mean mythically foolish.

    This dude has been locked into this outcome for a long time, and it’s getting increasingly obvious how disastrous it is.

    There are no dances left for him to perform except “it’s really not that bad!”





  • When you’ve visited enough industrial plants and seen the wildly ranging safety standards and practices, the aggregated statistics just aren’t very interesting.

    I’ve been to a plant, a Superfund site that supplies a material strategically necessary to the US, and which will thus never be closed - that released clouds of chlorine gas daily. Staff at the neighboring plant have to literally watch for yellow clouds and fuckin run when they see them.

    Paper mills? Even just their “man lifts” (thankfully going the way of the dinosaur), something like a vertical conveyor belt where you stand on this narrow pad to rapidly ascend floors - hilariously dangerous.

    Any kind of metal extraction and processing with strong acids, incidents do happen. Worst I personally observed (far from the worst I’ve heard of) I got called to remotely help assess a refining plant using lots of gross acids, after an earthquake caused a plant evacuation and an unknown cloud of mixed something started building above it.

    Some of the high tech processes I’ve seen are truly chilling. Like, “no one in a 100 ft radius survives at all if this stuff gets released”.

    I did that work for less than 10 years. Statistics are great, but they also hide nuance like it’s their job. Anyone who has done this kind of work understands the elevated danger, though it does vary a lot from place to place (really more industry to industry).