Here's the thing. Spending 72 hours on the clock would physically kill a lot of people. It would be *massively* illegal to do in the U.S., not to mention highly counterproductive because:

• It discriminates against anyone who has or wants children, because there's just no way to make that work realistically.
• It discriminates on age, because by the time you get much past 30 or 40, you're not likely to be able to keep up with such a brutal schedule for more than single-digit weeks in a row without completely collapsing.
• It discriminates on health, because you cannot possibly get enough exercise to maintain proper health while working such long hours, so anyone who doesn't start out highly fit will fall apart very quickly.
• It would likely result in massive increases in heart attacks, causing staggering increases in health and life insurance costs for the companies.
• Most employees will leave, either immediately or after working for a few years and saving up enough to retire.

That last one is the show-stopper. Yes, there are some folks who are so excited to work in a specific area that they'll gladly work themselves to death if you pay them a million or two per year, and that's what these AI firms are counting on. And that works in the very short term. But here's the thing. After a few years, they have enough money to retire, and most of them are burned out. So at that point, suddenly those companies won't have any employees, and brain drain will kill the companies very quickly.

For companies that don't have a crazy amount of institutional knowledge, like the game industry, burning people out actually works, because by the time they burn out, that project is done and the company has moved on to the next one, so it doesn't matter that a quarter of your team leaves, because they're working on something different anyway.

But that approach does NOT work for companies whose products are intended to keep being used long-term, with the possible exception of low-level grunt workers who are just training models based on instructions from someone higher up or reviewing output or doing other menial tasks that will probably be replaced by AI soon anyway. There's simply way too much reliance on institutional knowledge in most of the tech industry for that approach to work for any significant period of time.

That's true; it's more for convenience and wanting to keep teams co-located than anything else. But they do all seem to be ramping up lately at greater than historically typical speeds, which at least suggests to me that they're adjusting to changes in the political landscape.

??? It's in a case... :-D

The reason I didn't have the batons and music stand was because before I dropped off my car for repair, I had to unload all of the following out of my car:

• A flugelhorn and cornet case
• A trumpet and piccolo trumpet case
• A slide trumpet case
• A French horn case
• A trumpet stand bag
• Four music folders plus a folder of extra music for the jazz band
• Some stuff of sentimental value out of the front trunk
• A baton case
• A music stand bag

And didn't know that I was going to need the last one until after I had dropped it off, because I don't usually think about concerts until the week of the concert, and I dropped the car off for a three-day repair that actually took almost two weeks before they even started working on it, and the concert was day 13. So I really only actually forgot to unload one thing out of that giant pile of stuff. All things considered, I think I did pretty well. :-)

On top of this, we had just received an alto clarinet, which I had at my house, which I had do check over for mechanical soundness and then fix anything wrong with it before the next Monday's rehearsal, because we had a new player who could play that, but didn't own one. (I actually bought the instrument without knowing yet who would play it, and then an additional clarinet player magically appeared, which is nice, but I digress. The point of this part of the story is to explain why I had to load an extra instrument into my car that I didn't unload from it, and also give you an idea of how much extra stuff I'm dealing with mentally right now.)

So for those two weeks, on Monday, I had to put the alto clarinet case (second week only), a french horn case, a trumpet case (second week only), a conducting baton case (if I had it), a music notebook, and my camera/laptop bag into the car on Monday, take all of that out Monday when I got home at almost 10:00 at night, put back the camera/laptop bag on Tuesday along with the three trumpet/flugelhorn instrument cases (only one of which overlaps from the day before), the trumpet stand bag, and a different, nearly identical music notebook, take all of that out at 9:00 the next night, put back the camera/laptop bag on Wednesday along with the trumpet case (again) and a third (nearly identical) notebook on Wednesday, take all of that out at 9:00 on Wednesday night, and load up a fourth notebook (a proper choir binder this time) on Thursday morning and unload it at 10:00 the next night. And all that loading is early in the morning, when I'm not awake yet and my mind is mostly on work.

And that second week, we also had a jazz band gig on Thursday, so add all of the Tuesday items to that list plus a music stand. Oh, and FedEx and Amazon conspired to change the delivery location for our music filing cabinet from our music building to my house despite my explicit instructions to *both* of them, which meant on that same day, I also had to lift an insanely heavy box into the back of the loaner car and drive it over there. So if you're surprised that I forgot to think about needing a music stand, you have very seriously unrealistic expectations.

Add to that the fun joys of being in a loaner car that works very differently from my usual car because the dumba** company removed the shifter lever and the turn signal stalk. It's not that this design change causes a huge amount of extra mental overhead, but it really was the straw that breaks the camel's back at times. :-)

To be fair, the first couple of weeks of trying to not use your car for storage are obviously the hardest, and after a couple of weeks, I'd expect to settle into a routine where I was doing it *mostly* correctly, and I would probably at least label the outside of the notebooks by day if I had to do this regularly, but still, it's a lot to keep up with. And all that extra mental bandwidth has to come from somewhere. Right now, I'm spending all of my mental bandwidth on my software engineering career, semi-memorizing choir music, learning music for an orchestra and a jazz band, and keeping track of all the details of conducting four (mostly long, relatively challenging) pieces with the wind ensemble. There's a *lot* of stuff going through my brain right now.

On top of that, during that second week, I had to deal with ordering some mouthpiece adapters, bike chain repair tools (twice because the first one was defective), a replacement shifter cable (destroyed while removing a defective derailleur that wouldn't unscrew) and a replacement derailleur for my bike, and a replacement saddle bag for my bike (the old one tore). I also had to deal with Amazon returns on a defective bike chain repair tool and a replacement tail box that turned out to be smaller than advertised, deal with an Apple cable return because they shipped the cables two weeks before my new watch and the new cables would have gone out of the return period before I got the watch to test it, reach out to Apple to try to find out why the watch had not even shipped on the day it was supposed to arrive, and then eventually give up and cancel the order outright and reorder from Best Buy after it still hadn't shipped two days after it was supposed to arrive, all because Apple apparently is so screwed up in their logistics that when an order never ships, they don't know what's going on.

Also, I had to order oversized drum keys for tuning the timpani (they use a different size square socket than normal drum heads), buy brass polish to fix up the alto clarinet, buy reeds for the alto clarinet because I needed it sooner than expected (new player appeared) and the reeds I originally ordered wouldn't have arrived in time for me to properly test the instrument and fix it if necessary, buy a stand for the alto clarinet because the new player would be switching off between that and a contra, buy a neck strap for the alto clarinet (I didn't even know alto clarinets used neck straps until I got the instrument and saw the hook), buy and filling out luggage tags for the alto clarinet so I can leave it in the orchestra storage room, add owner labels for some speaker hardware that I recently added to the organ, and so on.

And that's just the last two weeks. Over the last few months, I've also had to deal with music shipping companies failing to cancel duplicate orders (canceled and re-ordered with faster shipping) and then double-shipping them, shop around for various percussion instruments (and, occasionally, wind instruments) that we needed but nobody owned, file tickets to get the property manager to fix problems with the music building's only punch-code door lock, help plan and order food for periodic social events for the group, do updated part assignments when we get new members mid-cycle, worry about people who suddenly stop showing up and consider whether we need to figure out how to cover those parts, help figure out ways to recruit new members, help plan for the upcoming concert, do and/or help with concert videography for literally all of those groups plus a fifth group that I sit on the board of but don't perform in, do audio for a jazz band recording session, and somehow do all of that on top of a full-time job, all while still finding time to get adequate exercise on the weekends.

Oh, and if you've never built a chromatic temple block set yourself, or added more bars to a glockenspiel, or designed a 3D-printed flugelhorn (still in progress), or coordinated the delivery of a 5-octave concert marimba over the phone because they decided to deliver it after a month on the one week when you're out on vacation, then you have not walked a mile in my shoes.

There's an absolutely *insane* amount of work that goes into some of the stuff I do. And for all the stuff that our wind ensemble leads team knows about, there's probably another 2x as much little stuff that I mostly just deal with on my own and keep off their plates, like choosing and ordering the actual music. It's hard for any one person to stay fully organized when you're doing that much stuff. If I were *just* playing/singing in three ensembles and conducting a fourth, that could easily be a full-time job for a professional musician. I'm doing that on *top* of my full-time job.

So in response to the GP, I would only say, "Let's see you do all of this for a week, and we'll see how you handle it." Just saying. :-)

On a side note, if anyone knows of a full-time personal assistant who works cheap...

As with most IT boondoggles, there's plenty of blame to spread around from both the management and consultant side of the transaction. Even where seemingly water tight contracts are in place with KPIs, milestones and penalties, sooner or later the sunk cost fallacy will get triggered. The consultants know this, which is why quotes are largely fictitious.

I don't know what the solution is. Having been on both sides of that coin, I've seen how getting customers to come up with a well-defined spec and resisting inevitable feature creep is insanely hard. From the customer side I've seen how eagerly in a competitive procurement process bidders will say whatever the RFQ/RFP requires, and how hard it is to actually verify claims without making the procurement process even longer.

The real problem here is that governments, and indeed many private organizations, have hollowed their IT departments, basically contracting out pretty much everything to outside consultants and service providers. This means there are few people, or in some cases no one, in house that can actually meaningfully assess bids and quotes. You basically have consultants' sales teams both making the pitch and assessing how great it it is, so that they can say almost anything and the elected officials or civil servants, with no direct knowledge of how complex such projects can be, basically swindled by the false economy of the lowest bid.

This. Sharing a car is easy. Sharing a car trunk is much harder.

To give you an idea, my car has been in the shop for two weeks, and I've had a loaner. I realized on day three without my car that my conducting batons were in the back of the car, and I had to borrow one. Strike one.

I kept thinking that I would get my car back soon, so I didn't keep stuff in the car. I realized on day four that I had incorrectly packed my orchestra music instead of my jazz band music and had to make a trip home for it. Strike two.

I realized on day 12 that I had unloaded my car from the jazz band, and had incorrectly loaded up for choir (day 13) the night before instead of orchestra, so I had to go home for my horn. Strike three.

I realized on day 13 that I didn't have my music stand for a jazz band gig that was always with me normally, because I still hadn't gotten my car back, and had to make a trip home for it. Strike FOUR. And because my other music stand doesn't have built-in wind clips, I had to fight to keep the music notebook from literally blowing off the stand, not to mention fighting to keep the pages from turning on their own. Strike FIVE?

In two weeks of driving, I had to make four extra trips home for a total of more than 20 extra miles of driving, all because I was trying to use a loaner car in exactly the way that they're proposing that I should use a ride sharing service like theirs. And that's not even counting the number of times that I went to work without brushing my hair because I forgot that I didn't have one in the car door.

No, this service cannot possibly make cars obsolete. Anyone who thinks it can possibly do so clearly has a much, much simpler life than I do or almost anyone else I know does. :-) Most people don't realize just how hard it is to keep up with all the things you need to have with you until you suddenly find yourself not being able to keep it with you. For me, it would require a bulletin board with a checklist for every day of the week. There's just too much.

Want to get me to take that idea seriously? Design a remote-controlled car that has a detachable trunk that I keep at my house, which docks with the trunk when it comes to pick me up and leaves the trunk at work when it drops be off, etc. Then you're at least starting to be plausible.

But no, a shared vehicle just isn't remotely feasible as an alternative to a personal vehicle — not when you have four different groups requiring four different sets of music and four different combinations of musical instruments on four different nights, plus random concerts that come out of nowhere and require you to have extra stuff like a music stand, on top of bringing your work stuff to work, having to store your work stuff while you're at your evening activities, etc.

It just doesn't work. It isn't even close.

Heck, it doesn't even work well for *shopping* trips, because you need to be able to keep your previous purchases in the car while you shop at other stores.

Yeah, I actually didn't notice that part of the post I replied to, but the assumption is wrong. People do not hire H-1Bs because they can't use remote labor. They hire H-1Bs because they think they can't use remote labor. As soon as the H-1B path dries up, they'll suddenly decide that it's important to figure out how to allow remote work. But they'll still allow remote work only for people in low-wage countries.

Sure, they'll justify it to themselves by creating big offices in India and other countries, and will say that because the employees are in *an* office, they're not really remote. But the fact is, they'll still quite often be doing work that has to be coordinated with other teams 12 time zones away. The remoteness problems will still exist. The execs will just sweep them under the rug and pretend that they don't exist because doing so lets them hire cheap labor.

Rules for thee, but not for me.

How do I know this? Because the tech companies screaming the loudest about being hurt by tightening rules on H-1Bs have been working really hard for the last year to massively build up their overseas offices:

• Amazon
• Microsoft
• Meta and Google
• Apple

Did I miss anybody?

I'm not describing what I think will happen. I'm describing what is already happening. They saw the writing on the wall when Trump got elected, and have been trying to figure out how to deal with the threat of H-1Bs becoming hard to obtain ever since. They're not just ahead of you; they're so far out ahead of you that you can't even see them anymore.

And that's why they should have waited to open dine-in restaurants until they could do so without making unreasonable demands.

The thing is, limits on political speech are really problematic in general. Even if they cared, they wouldn't dare say it.

They did not overreact. The problem was that we weren't prepared for the fallout. If it happened today, given how much better delivery services have gotten, it would not have been a big deal for most businesses. Schools would still have been a problem, but not nearly as much as it was five years ago, because technology has gotten better. And so on.

And the other thing about it is that the blue states also tended to be in a better position in terms of the poor having access to usable home Internet service, so the negative impact was way less than it would have been if a red state had done the same thing. That's why the red states were freaking out — not because it wasn't possible to educate under those circumstances, but rather because they viewed it through the lens of their local reality, where doing that would have been an absolute s**tshow.

Most of the red state deaths weren't because of socioeconomic factors. They were because of COVID. While the blue states correctly attributed excess deaths, the red states tried to bury them, and thus in spite of them saying "All these extra deaths are because of lockdowns and socioeconomic damage", the reality was that the excess deaths were way worse in the red states. Their claims just didn't hold up when put under a microscope.

I'm not saying Cuomo didn't make mistakes. He absolutely did, and some of them cost a lot of lives. And yes, that was absolutely part of it.

That said, the fact was that they got hit before we had credible numbers about how bad it was going to be. China wasn't really speaking honestly, and New York was basically #2. New York got hit earlier in the winter, during a period where most people stayed indoors. New York has areas of much higher density than pretty much anywhere else in the U.S., which makes things spread faster. New York has subways, where people get packed in by sardines, and if one person is sick, everybody gets sick. And so on.

Additionally, it wasn't until several weeks into the New York pandemic when they realized that delayed processing of blood tests for blood oxygen were resulting in artificially low blood oxygen numbers because of high WBC, so they unnecessarily put a *lot* of relatively healthy people on ventilators, and that actually killed them because of secondary infections, lung damage from overpressure. etc.

It wasn't until several *months* in that they concluded that large-cannula oxygen was better in a majority of cases, rather than ventilators.

And while Cuomo's bad decisions definitely cost lives, one could argue that they made sense at the time, given the rate at which people were being hospitalized and the lack of beds, and given how little we actually knew about how the pandemic was going to play out. It's easy to second-guess with the benefit of hindsight. It's far harder to make those sorts of decisions with limited information in the heat of the moment.

Two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese. You're right that it isn't technically healthy in the strictest sense, but it is so prevalent that as soon as you vaccinate everybody who is elderly or has any of the risk factors, you've vaccinated nearly the entire population.

Also a CA resident here, and I was literally watching the numbers, constantly updating a spreadsheet, and doing statistics on the numbers, and calculated exactly when they should have reopened to achieve eradication in Santa Clara County. Cases were in exponential (logarithmic?) decline, but they reopened about one month too soon the first time by my math, and cases immediately began growing exponentially again. Feel free to disagree with me, but be prepared to show your work.

Untrue. If we had kept the spread down enough until everyone was vaccinated, we almost certainly could have achieved eradication. You just have to have low enough spread at the time when you hit full vaccination so that it dies out. We saw it happen with one of the Influenza strains during the pandemic, in fact.

See above.

Again, citation needed.

The dirty little secret is that if you don't let the companies bring them in, they'll just hire them overseas where they can pay them even less, and that erodes rates even more. And the employers might also then apply for an L-1B transfer visa after a year, but transfer them to a new office in some lower-cost state, so that they get the benefits of being in the same time zone or at least a similar time zone without the cost of paying people in an expensive market.

You can't win. Anyone who says otherwise has never had the resources to be able to hire a team of lawyers to figure out how to get around annoying laws.

It can probably replace them at the performance level that they exhibit for the first week. The difference is that the interns learn and get better.

When it comes to reducing your ability to spread COVID to others, epidemiologically speaking, he wasn't wrong.

The problem was that he also had a large gathering at his house at the peak of the pandemic. Rules for thee, but not for me.

And yet those groups tended to practice social distancing, wore masks, etc. Some photographers used perspective to make it look like there were dense crowds, but shots taken from other angles revealed that this was not really the case.

For all the stupidity on both sides, red states had much higher case fatality rate despite their very deliberate undercounting of the death toll by limiting testing. Blue states did not overreact. Red states didn't take it seriously, and a lot of people died as a result.

The only place where blue states did badly was New York, and that's because they got hit first, before anybody knew how to deal with it. When you take New York out of the numbers, the difference in fatality rate between red states and blue states is staggering, and blue states had much, MUCH lower fatality rates.

I knew someone personally who died of COVID. He was overweight, but he was not particularly old. What you call unnecessary, I call common f**king sense.

The biggest mistake the blue states made was that they opened too soon. California was within a few weeks of reaching zero cases when they reopened the first time. Had they been going for eradication instead of merely keeping hospitals from collapsing, the death toll would have been massively lower, and the next surge might not have even happened.

The other big mistake was opening up restaurants. As soon as they did that, cases massively surged. Restaurants could have continued to do takeout, but the state decided that profits were more important than people.

With the sole exception of the impact on kids' education, to the best of my knowledge, red states did not do better by ANY objective metric. Feel free to provide citations, though.

No necessarily. It often took many months for a Fortran IV programmer to adapt to structured programming. Habits can be hard to break.

Sorry, but thermodynamics is real. Entropy is real.

OTOH, some choices are more destructive than others. If you pay attention, you can pick the less destructive ones. (But we probably *are* beyond the carrying capacity of the planet for our species. This isn't a certainty, as there are many different approaches, but I believe we're past the carrying capacity using every approach that's been tried up until now. Including "pastoralist" and "hunter-gatherer".)

You mean the... wait for it... Apollo lunar module?

Didn't say it was't. I just said it was a lunar mission, but not a mission to the moon.

No question about that. Any mission where the astronauts return home in one piece is at least partially successful, because that one ultra-critical part still went right.

I have to disagree with that. Yeah, the shuttle design sucked in a lot of critical ways, but we mostly have the military to blame for that, because of their requirement that satellite retrieval be a critical feature in any future NASA craft. Pretty much all of what doomed both of the failed shuttle missions ultimately stems from that design decision and the compromises that came out of that decision (specifically, the need to put the shuttle on the side of the stack stemmed from the need to use the SSMEs to have enough lift capacity to bring large satellite payloads to orbit).

Challenger failed because of that. Columbia failed because of that.

Sure, there were other causes. Challenger also failed because warnings about the o-rings were dismissed by middle management and not brought to the attention of the people who could do something about it. It failed because nobody saw the leaking plume and thought, "The tank could blow. We need to do an early SRB sep and an RTLS abort or an abort once around (depending on alitude).

Columbia also failed because NASA failed to deal with the foam problem that had plagued numerous previous shuttle missions. Columbia also failed because NASA didn't have any plan in place to repair critical leading edge tiles in orbit. Columbia also failed because NASA didn't have a plan for launching a rescue shuttle if something went wrong. Columbia also likely failed in part because NASA didn't replace the oldest bird in the fleet with one of the newer, much lighter versions, which weighed about four tons less (112.4 pounds per square foot of wing area on Columbia versus 107.5 pounds per square foot for Endeavor, for example). Maybe that small difference wouldn't have made it survivable, or maybe it would have.

Columbia also failed because they deliberately didn't look to see the state of things, believing that nothing could be done, and therefore they did not launch a supply rocket to restock them so that they could extend the mission until they could come up with a solution or launch a rescue shuttle. They did not sacrificially open the landing gear early to cool the wing and allow plasma a path out of the damaged wing during reentry (and increase drag). They did not deploy the drag chute early sacrificially to increase drag. They did not perform all of their turns in a way that would minimize heating on the bad wing or bring the thing down in a continuous curve to increase heat on one side and decrease the heat on the other side. And so on. None of those things were even discussed, because they took it as a foregone conclusion that there was nothing they could do, so they didn't even try.

But at the same time, the number of things they *did* think of, at least during the design stages, is incredible. For example, if they *had* caught the Challenger problem in time to do an early ET and SRB separation, they trained for aborting back to KSC, and the crew could have been saved. Columbia was pretty much screwed without a rescue mission, of course, but the fact that the computer could basically autoland the shuttle (except for the landing gear, which required an umbilical and some new software) meant that *if* they had caught that in time and sent a supply mission and a later rescue mission to bring the crew home, they could have attempted a landing of the shuttle without sacrificing anyone. It meant that if the crew became incapacitated, it could probably mostly bring itself to a landing, albeit a very tile-destroying landing. And so on.

So at least for Columbia, it isn't so much that they believed that they were smarter than they were so much as that they gave up. I don't know which is worse.

I definitely don't think it's worth the expense. They're doing three flights with the design and then throwing it away for a different version in the fourth flight, then throwing it away again in the ninth flight, meanwhile, assuming SpaceX continues on its current trajectory (with Starship block 3 launching in 2026), the Artemis block 2 lift vehicle will be hopelessly out of date years before its first launch (post-2030, with a quarter the payload capacity, and at orders of magnitude higher cost).

It's the best rocket Congress and defense contractor lobbyists could design.

*shrugs*

I *would* argue that Apollo 8 and 13 did not go to the moon, though Apollo 8 is notable for being the first human spacecraft to enter lunar orbit, which means it still a huge milestone. Apollo 13, of course, failed spectacularly in its attempt to reach the moon, and is notable for being one of the most amazing saves in the history of the space program. And clearly they are both lunar missions, in that they are moon-related, whereas when I think of a moon mission, I think of a mission specifically to the moon's surface. Very esoteric linguistic distinction, and I may just be splitting hairs.