A primary driver of the 'slowness' is a major focus upon safety in the workplace. Take a look back at the death rates per 1000 workers for some of the historical projects that people often like to point to and then look at a modern project.
The second element is that these safety elements are often enforced by regulation. For example, look at how much extra scaffolding is in use today during construction (which used to be ladders).
To directly look at corruption, this is an issue but not in a direct way. Corruption happens through the 'contractor ladder' where the primary contractor has a subcontractor who has a subcontractor who has a subcontractor. Repeat ad infinitum.
One of the primary reasons for this is the challenges in maintaining a large enough workflow to keep a standing workforce employed. It's difficult to justify paying expensive construction workers and engineers when they're not actually building anything.
Finally, tendering protocols are often quite naive and have been implemented to make something "least cost". This has led to a nightmare scenario of companies underquoting in order to win a tender, secure in the knowledge that a government will not leave a project half finished. To remedy this better contracts are required, for example, you can offer a recurring revenue stream (e.g. 20-30 years) to a company in return for a particular project. On the other hand, this can often lead to poorly build projects that last exactly 30 years.
The construction and infrastructure boom in China over the past few decades suggests major projects can still be completed rapidly, even in spite of widespread corruption.
Political will can be an important driving force for pushing through major projects, but the most impressive feats of engineering are seen when there is substantial pent-up demand in an economy that can suddenly be supplied, usually due to social or technological change.
I think major projects could still be completed quickly in developed economies if the incentives were to align in the right way, but we don't see it often because the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.
India and Africa are probably the places to look to for rapidly completed major projects over the next few decades, and perhaps we could see significant industrial development in space at some point if the economics works out.
This isn't to say this doesn't happen in western countries but it is less common. A large number of deaths was also associated with the Qatar world cup for example.
Look at the public reports of engineering and manufacturing companies. How many of them have a "target zero" approach to safety and report the TIFR as a key KPI? I've known executives in engineering organisations to be fired for persistent safety breaches making them substantially more risk averse.
This all costs more money and takes more time and I would posit that if China/India/Africa become wealthier and more individualistic then their construction rates would also slow.
If you haven't read it pick up a copy of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson which covered the indiscriminate use of pesticides and the effect on the wider ecosystem.
The awareness she helped raise contributed to the founding of the EPA and the banning of DDT.
and you have to balance the effects of reduced DDT use (even if that did cause malaria resurgence) against the overall effects of getting public interest into the consequences of newly invented chemicals, and creating the EPA and general oversight of pesticides.
If you loved it, checkout Ishmeal by Daniel Quinn[1]. It's a fascinating way to further understand what we're doing to the planet and why we are able to so easily justify it.
Local businesses can't shoot your dog or take your kids and say "oops, take it to court if you don't like it" (well they can, it'll just work out very, very badly for them).
There is a huge network cost towards doing this. The centralised platforms by definition will push us closer towards the mean (as the mean is most profitable) at the expense of the outlier.
This means that you'll have a higher quality median (note, not mean) experience at the cost of experiencing any true outliers. The best way it's been put to me is the follows:
* (AI/ML/Algorithmic Recommendation) = 8/10 products you will like, none you'll love or hate
* (Serendipitous Searching) = 5 products you will guaranteed like, 1 you will hate, 1 you will absolutely love
By only having access to the current rotation on Netflix/Amazon/HBO you cannot find the 'diamonds in the rough' that suit your taste.
I guess what I'm saying is I am OK with this and vastly prefer it to collecting things in my home. I could put a ton more effort/money in and clutter my house and get some marginal more enjoyment from movies, but for me that is a losing proposition. I'd rather not buy anything or put in the time and enjoy the content less. I can definitely understand if movies are a passion this would be undesirable, but they're not a passion of mine and I really enjoy being able to outsource the hassle.
I think these friendly disagreements often come down to “how otaku are you about a given area of human expression.”
You and I (but not various other folks on this thread) place a lot of value on not avoiding hassle, and a pleasantly low albeit non-zero price for a reasonable subset of the output of Hollywood.
People who are deeply invested in being able to apply their own personal filter on what media is available seem less satisfied.
I know other people who play out the same disagreement for comedy and music.
For some reason not for dance. Where’s the cheap version of Netflix for the ballet?
Maybe somewhere on YouTube; I refuse to use YouTube so I wouldn’t know.
I think that point of view is fine on an individual level. For people who like to live a minimalist lifestyle and don't want to be tied down to a location or want to be able to pack up and move easily, or just plain hate clutter and don't find enough personal value in owning these things that's fine (although you can store a lot on a single external hard drive nowadays).
But I don't think this is a good idea for the world to become like this as a whole. The more things are centralized (stream from one server as opposed to living in a bunch of locations all over the world), the easier it is for parts of our culture to disappear.
The artifacts we find from thousands of years ago are a super tiny handful of many, many, many more that existed (perhaps not exact copies, but the same types of things), and we have lost who knows how knowledge and cultural artifacts from the past, in particular the ancient past, due to things like libraries and museums getting burned down or destroyed, statues being removed, massive wars fought, etc.
Even in our own lifetimes there have been the Taliban that have destroyed ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan[1], ISIS destroying artifacts in Iraq museums[2], and looters destroying or stealing artifacts from a Cairo museum while the Arab Spring was underway[3]. Along with many, many other examples[4].
We collectively have the capability to have exact or near-exact copies of all sorts of documents, art, video, audio, etc. The more people that hang on to these things, the more future generations benefit from it. And the more we can benefit from the archival actions of others now.
But again, it doesn't require that everyone do it, or even for each person to try to have a copy of literally everything that exists. Just that enough people own copies of the things they love and share them with people as much as they can, helps insure the survival of our cultural heritage.
BTW, I found an interesting site that chronicles all the various types of media that are known to have existed but are now lost. It's called LostMediaWiki, if you're curious. I was surprised how long the list was just for video games, which aren't that old as a medium.
These things aren’t disappearing. It’s just that the non-mainstream gets more expensive.
So I don’t agree it’s worse for society.
I do think it would be nice if game producers would put their code and assets in escrow, so once the platform they were built for goes away, and the producer decides to not invest in a succesor platform, the assets/code could be released to the public.
That is a really good idea. It might be worth developing a platform for that. Convincing companies to trust their code to a third party service (or to even bother) might be a pretty big uphill battle, though. Still tempting, though.
What isn't mentioned in this article is any commentary regarding the falling rates of home ownership in various countries compounded with rapid price increases (driven by low rates and zoning policies). This is particularly acute as it appears to be driven predominately by a generational gap as opposed to a socio-economic gap. Pitting the young against the old is never a good thing.
What is also missed completely is the rise of the professional share house. How many professional people on high incomes are now forced into multi-person rental accommodation due to affordability concerns.
That's assuming that people rent because they cannot afford a house. I rent because I don't want a house. Owning a house is a ton of additional responsibility for what would be very little to no gain for me. I don't have space requirements (no children and don't plan to have any, no spacious hobby that would require a workshop, no car that would need to be parked in a garage). I'm not saying that everyone is like me, but I'm pretty confident there are more people like me than there used to be.
I am in complete agreement with you, I rent for very similar reasons.
What I was attempting to flag was that for many this was no longer about it being a choice. The dramatic rise in house prices has meant that saving a deposit is now a lengthy endeavour in many areas, one that is driving a much larger renter culture. It is to be expected that lifestyle norms will change around this as well.
Not quite, the instantaneous energy output from the system will be at 200GW when the sunshine is at a maximum. The average output of the system would be 60GW (at a 30% capacity factor). In terms of total energy this would equate to around 525TWh worth (60 * 8760 / 1000). Or, 525,000,000 MWh.
That is, for every $1/MWh that the solar station gets paid for it's output it will receive half a billion dollars a year.
Now, a station of this size would massively depress power prices throughout the region unless there was some form of large scale storage unit which could soak it up.
Probably more impactful is the Saudis are currently using oil for their power stations which is heavily subsidized.
If you get 2000 kWh/yr per kWp from PV there and have an installation of 200 GWp you'll end up with 400 TWh per year. If we assume a 25 year lifetime for this installation that's 9600 TWh. At cost of 200 billion dollars, wouldn't a MWh from this system cost close to $21 instead of $1?
Or - taking your numbers - the installation would have to last 400 years without operational costs considered. Isn't that a loss for whoever invests in something like this?
$21/MWh is very cheap energy. Far cheaper than any modern nuclear plant, and significantly cheaper than most fossil-fuelled energy even before you account for carbon/pollution externalities.
I've read that solar panels (I have one for hot water) might lose some efficacy over the decades but even those installed 40 years ago are still working. I guess at some point it will be cost effective to replace them...or if the math works out leave them working at, say, 60% efficiency, and build a new one. It's not like they're running out of sunny places over there.
Agree, and given the standard "liquidity preference", the founders are likely to net $0, except for the Google bonuses for the engineering (Jack Barker-like Rosenthal is not likely to stick there).
It's sad, really. It's one of the really innovative companies, but it's not easy to sell tech ahead of its time. Yet another incident that will encourage to pick copycats over real innovation.
I guess Google is no longer as generous with the acquisitions.
> It's sad, really. It's one of the really innovative companies, but it's not easy to sell tech ahead of its time.
This glorifies failure quite a bit. One major objective of tech companies is to produce products that customers value and like. Lytro failed to do this. Just because the underlying science is complicated doesn't make the tech "ahead of its time" due to the fact that maybe the tech, as implemented, just isn't what people want, now or in the future!
Having complicated science underlying a product certainly doesn't excuse a company from producing products that people want.
> Having complicated science underlying a product certainly doesn't excuse a company from producing products that people want.
That's not the biggest obstacle, actually. The biggest obstacle that the sales strategy has no case studies to work with.
What market does the new tech appeal to? Should it be B2C or B2B? (In their case, they tried both IIRC.)
You may hold the collective entity responsible, if you wish, but in this case, they required both sharp and inventive techies (which they had), and a business leader with a vision (which they didn't have). It's not easy to put together, especially if the investors make the call for the CEO's replacement.
An analogy from a different area, Siri could be another dead curio if Steve Jobs didn't decide to make it a centerpiece of their new iPhone.
>Lytro failed to do this. Just because the underlying science is complicated doesn't make the tech "ahead of its time" due to the fact that maybe the tech, as implemented, just isn't what people want, now or in the future!
As we speaking abstractly? What theoretically could be if we didn't know anything about the tech?
Because otherwise this specific tech is very much an "ahead of its time" technology, whether consumers adopted it or not.
Besides, consumer adoption is a BS test for a technology being ahead of its time.
Failure in the market can simply be because the implementation was not good, or the marketing wasn't, or the support was lacking, or the price too high, or 200 other reasons, that don't depend on the technology not being ahead of its time.
The high price was primary due to them trying to offset the high RD cost vs the actual hardware cost. Google might be able to sell it cheaper if they can get ROI with other applications.
Google never really was generous with its acquisitions: many of its most successful ones like Blogger, KeyHole (Earth), Where2 (Maps), Writely (Docs), Zenter (Presentations), Urchin (Analytics) and Android were for tiny dollar amounts, sub-$100M. And the really big ones - YouTube and DoubleClick, and to a lesser extent Metaweb - turned out to be worth way more than Google paid for them. The only big duds I can think of where Google paid a "generous" amount for something that didn't really make them a whole lot were Motorola, Andy Rubin's robot collection (Boston Dynamics etc.), and Skybox, and in all cases they managed to sell them off for decent amounts.
Yes, it's a shame for the founders in this situation, particularly if the wished to continue whilst their investors wished to exit and recoup any losses they may have had.
I'm reminded every day that the adoption curve can be brutal for those at the sharp end of the stick.
Apologies in advance for the oversimplification. It depends on the actual contract you signed but in general it goes like this:
VC puts in 1 dollar, you sell at 1.2, VC will take the first dollar and MAY take the next 20 cents. That could mean a liquidity preference of 1.2x. If you sold at 1.4, it COULD mean VC takes 1.2 and you split the next 20cents according to your share split with the VC.
It may be easier to think of a VC as a bank that doesn't ask you to pay back a loan every month BUT if a liquidity event occurs (i.e. someone buys your company), they absolutely want all their money back first (i.e. "senior" in debt to equity holders (you)) before you get to dip your hands in.
Not all shares are the same. Corporations have different classes of stock: as a simple example there may be common stock and preferred stock.
In a "liquidity event", and especially in a "down round" where the company is bought at a lower price per share than previous investors paid, those shares are not treated the same. Preferred shares may get something from the new investment round (perhaps less than they invested), while common shares may have their value wiped out to zero.
(Source: I have been a "commoner" in a company that was bought in a down round where my stock was zeroed but the preferred shares were still worth something.)
We currently use a combination of Pandas and Scikit-Learn to run our production models. We're not in the big data space, instead, creating small tightly tuned models for a very specific purpose in a large energy company.
At the moment the general work flow is:
* Internal library based over Pandas which abstracts our mess of internal databases
* Application specific model code that utilises the internal library to pull data in. This is then fed into a trained scikit-learn model and then further processed by Pandas.
* Internal monitoring tools (dashboards based upon Ploty and Flask as well as an alerting system) are built using the internal library and Pandas as the glue.
From a design decision we focused upon Pandas as the root source of all data. Everything is a DataFrame throughout the entire application.
Painpoints:
* Writing to a database is pretty painful (SQL Server here as Windows shop).
* Minor API changes can be irritating.
* Pandas MultiIndexing is both very painful and mind bending at the same time trying to get the slice syntax to work.
Overall though, Pandas is a huge value add and we've gradually rolled out from 2 people to approximately 9-10 people who hadn't used python in anger before.
Almost all reporting functionality is being migrated into Pandas instead of SQL stored procs, excel, tableau etc for the additional flexibility it provides.
A primary driver of the 'slowness' is a major focus upon safety in the workplace. Take a look back at the death rates per 1000 workers for some of the historical projects that people often like to point to and then look at a modern project.
The second element is that these safety elements are often enforced by regulation. For example, look at how much extra scaffolding is in use today during construction (which used to be ladders).
To directly look at corruption, this is an issue but not in a direct way. Corruption happens through the 'contractor ladder' where the primary contractor has a subcontractor who has a subcontractor who has a subcontractor. Repeat ad infinitum.
One of the primary reasons for this is the challenges in maintaining a large enough workflow to keep a standing workforce employed. It's difficult to justify paying expensive construction workers and engineers when they're not actually building anything.
Finally, tendering protocols are often quite naive and have been implemented to make something "least cost". This has led to a nightmare scenario of companies underquoting in order to win a tender, secure in the knowledge that a government will not leave a project half finished. To remedy this better contracts are required, for example, you can offer a recurring revenue stream (e.g. 20-30 years) to a company in return for a particular project. On the other hand, this can often lead to poorly build projects that last exactly 30 years.