All the data centres I worked in had Halon and in recent times its replacements as fire suppression system. Unlike water, these systems suffocate the fire and once vented the equipment is undamaged. Water, computers and high electrical currents are a very bad combination.
After I read the first paragraph, I could guess the rest. It is typical for the legacy enterprise system space.
My diagnosis is that you care too much. The enterprise IT space is kabuki theatre.
So what if it takes 6 months to accomplish what should take 2 weeks? Explain to the customers that their needs are so special and particular that it takes your highly trained and experienced staff 8 months to accomplish the high quality results that you demand. Every line of code is carefully written and rechecked, etc. No AI slop is allowed anywhere near your exacting group. You are delivering Saab fighter jet plane quality software, not some cheap and nasty jeep software from Cuba.
Of course, the real challenge is to say stuff like that with a straight face. If necessary, take improv acting lessons. After all it is all an absurdist theatre production.
> My diagnosis is that you care too much. The enterprise IT space is kabuki theatre.
This was my first reaction as well. But it's relatable. I've held myself to similar expectations and caused a lot of stress in the past.
You think the customer is thinking you'll be done in six months? Only if they've never bought enterprise software before. Their expectations are dramatically lower than what you might be holding yourself to. In fact, the expectations may even be lower than what is in the contract.
Even if you moved heaven and earth and shipped an API tomorrow, they likely aren't going to be able to start integrating it right away. That requires work on their end that needs to be planned into a quarter etc...
Technology and automation have never gotten in the way of people pursuing and enjoying hobbies. Painters still paint, woodworkers still make bespoke furniture, etc, etc.
The money has gone to pay power plants that can supply winter capacity, exactly as the market is designed to do.
The intention of the payments is to increase revenue for that kind of power generation capability to encourage more such plants be constructed.
The argument in the article is dubious to me. Of course the higher price isn’t leading to more generation today, that’s not the point, the point is to reward developers that build and built capacity CA needs in winter. The disagreement then becomes which model is correct about how much capacity is actually needed.. but the fact that a tiny move in demand moves the price so substantially seems to me to undermine the entire premise of the blog post, clearly supply is severely constrained?
But that's why they're arguing that repricing the entire generation fleet is bad compared to having a different auction for new capacity. You don't need the same incentives to keep an existing, profitable plant online as you do to invest in a new plant.
I can assure you the spreadsheets at firms building plants factor in forecasts of revenue for the life of the plant into investment decisions. If they don’t pay past the first few years, that directly translates to lower forecast lifetime plant value for new plants.
I’m not a quant, and I’ve worked energy trading desks long enough to know there is a lot I don’t understand.. but I don’t see how separating auctions by plant age does anything other than move numbers around while keeping the total bill the same. Plants still need the same lifetime revenue to make investment decisions pencil out; whether you front-load payments or spread them evenly, the total in current value needs to be the same.
Even if the total cost is the same, if our payments better align with the behavior we want to incentivize, we may gain greater utility from the spending.
So it can matter how we distribute that revenue as to whether or not the business responds in the desired way, eg, actually investing in new capacity by linking payments directly to new capacity.
What's to say that encouragement works? Does the 12B subsidy stipulate that more plants must be built? If not, keeping supply limited and price per Watt high may be more profitable.
I'm assuming nothing -- the party that burns 12B of taxpayer money on subsidies should show that it works. It is plausible that there are no new potential market participants as building power plants is expensive and the entrenched players don't want to compete with themselves.
1. It does not seem to be “taxpayer money” nor “subsidies”? It’s customers paying money for electricity.
2. If no new or existing market participants are willing to expand capacity, that would indicate that existing prices aren’t worth it for them to do so. Companies are willing to spend far more than the cost of building a new power plant for things like AI - and they’re often even building power generation on top of the AI build outs. So it has to be more than “It’s expensive”.
What you're touching on is an ancient debate :) Should this part of society be top-down planned or should it be market organized?
I know how I feel about this - I much prefer price signals here; it allows any developer that can meet the spec to build energy production - distributed decision making over centralized decree - and it allows the other side of the equation, consumers, to decide they'd rather not pay for this generation: Curtail demand rather than increase supply.
Like - maybe I don't want to pay energy prices this high, I can choose to insulate my house better or get a heat pump and thus reduce my electrical bill. The price signal lets everyone in the market choose how to act, rather than a central authority declaring we must build, say, more gas turbines and share the cost of that across rate payers.
But, there are people much, much smarter than I that completely disagree with this position. In the end I think the answer is how you feel about human nature, the capability and shortfalls of markets and the complexity of deciding how societies' resources should be allocated.
There is an interesting tell, they sent the old presidential plane. But then Trump flew onwards from England on the new one. The two planes are sufficiently different that they can't be mistaken for one another.
Thanks for the suggestions. I did some brief research on those two and DuckDB in particular looks enticing. I'll have to remember to give it a try on my next side project.
I have easily read thousands of personal development books and blog posts. Alex's post is easily the most revealing, inspiring to date. Thank you Alex.
I'm a textbook case introvert. Yet at some (only very few) networking events I comfortably act like an extrovert and have a enjoyable and productive time. Used to confuse me -- pretend extrovert? Now I can see I haven't taking the corners by not reading the road and the mountain. Spent too much time on the gravel pointing the wrong way, wondering what the hell had just happened.
I have worked in environments where as the day wore on, my performance plummeted.
After a lot of investigation, I suspect that air quality, lighting, ergonomics can have adverse effects. Only recently I read an article that said that in a room with several persons and poor ventilation the CO2 levels reach levels which are known to impair brain and other neurological functions.
That is, I suspect that your depression is the symptom of a bad environment and not the root cause of your problems.
This is irresponsible on your part. OP has been diagnosed by professionals and is being treated and clearly sees the difference. While high CO2 levels make a measurable difference in some tasks and its effects can be felt in crowded spaces, it seems like you're taking your pet peeve and dismissing the struggle that the OP is going through. Please try to have more sympathy.
I understand it can be difficult or even frightening to think about problems that don't have a trivially described cause, effect and solution like your proposal, but it would be a good idea to ask questions, even as simply as asking if that OP has noticed an effect, before trivializing their struggles this way
As mentioned by a sibling comment: this is an insensitive take.
It takes a lot of courage to write down one’s struggles for all the world to see. Your analysis denies the OP their self-reflection, and instead reduces it to a thing you happened to find in your own life.
> > That is, I suspect that your depression is the symptom of a bad environment and not the root cause of your problems.
Yeah that's BS.
When you were a kid in class in winter you had 20 kids + the teacher in the same room submerged by co2 , plus you were in a literal prison taken from the comfort of your bed in the dead of the night, had to ask permission to use the restroom and you could be denied , once you managed to get to the restroom you'd be submerged by even more co2 because of all the cigarette smoking going on from the older guys. And I am not even considering bullying as a factor that for the least lucky or strong could be added to the above list.
Still no depression in sight .
The problem comes from within, life was never meant to be taken this seriously, all the improvements and technological prowness that we tout vs. Subsaharan Africa come with the cost of literal self torture.
We have evolved in a scenario in which if you had reason to believe to have >90% chance of being alive 1 week from now (something like 168 hours into the future) then you could literally go out of your hut celebrating with your dick swinging left and right .
We have now reached a point where people would be unhappy with 168 years because 'oh no what happens next OMG I am so scared!'
Mental health and thinking are 2 parallel lines, they can never be reconciled, thinking is much more toxic than CO2, lead, sniffing glue, meth, heroin, fentanyl and all the other so called harmful substances which as toxic as they might be they don't make you want to off yourself.
Paradoxically if we stopped thinking and ran New York City into the ground back to an African hut village it would be the best party in the history of humanity and so much happiness could be extracted from that, much much more than building it up further, even though it would not be visible from the outside
If you want money, status symbols and no life = Amazon. Oh, you might gain some experience that is near useless in a non-FAANG org.
If you value life, freedom, keeping your mind active, living up to your full potential then Cambridge.
In my experience, the hedonic treadmill is the biggest trap. But I only arrived at that conclusion after running furiously for decades and having little to show for it, well except for a burnt out husk.
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