I can't speak to the pre-NeXT Steve, but the post-NeXT Steve was known for being extremely demanding, and expecting a high level of competence, and getting angry if you tried to bulls**t him, and even for berating people's work, but not for threatening people or berating the people themselves, to the best of my knowledge.

My ex-GF started watching Faux News during the pandemic because "It was the only place she could find info on getting her small business loan".

Soon, she had it on in her kitchen whenever she was awake. Then she started on the hard stuff -- OANN and NewsMax.

I broke up with her post Jan 6.

Doesn't matter. It's going to be renamed to Urectum in 2620 anywas.

Exactly. It's not an ill-advised attempt to save money, it's an attempt to sweep any pollution problems under the rug.

Really, if that's the way you want to live, I say have at it. Other people having the option to live differently isn't going to stop you. It'll be decades before it starts getting hard to find gas stations, and by then EVs will have more range than you can handle.

It is pretty hard not to respond to the pure BS that anti-EV types spout. I know it rubs you the wrong way, but the alternative is to let people who don't know what they're talking about dominate public perceptions.

I wouldn't claim EVs are for everyone, but for many of us they are extremely convenient and economical to run. The corner cases where ICE is clearly more convenient are not a concern for everyone, and not a concern for a multi-car household considering making one of their cars an EV. We have an EV and a plug-in hybrid that runs as an EV probably 80% of the time. We hit the gas station with the plug-in about once every six weeks.

To be blunt, avoiding a tenth of your team because you don't want to deal with them is a guaranteed way to fail as a manager. Part of being a competent manager is figuring out how to manage each individual, and the way you do that is going to differ depending on who you are managing.

Yeah, there can be a point where individuals simply are unmanageable, and at that point, that's where HR comes in. If they are doing their jobs and are not creating a hostile work environment, you should be able to manage them. As a boss, it's literally your job to manage the people you have working under you. If you can't figure out how to manage 10% of your reports, you should consider a career that doesn't involve managing people. This really isn't a grey area. Some people just aren't good at managing.

And denigrating a big chunk of your workforce with slurs like "SJW" really is exactly what they're talking about when lawyers use the words "creating a hostile workplace" in the context of wrongful termination claims, etc. You cannot adequately manage people if you don't respect them. So it's not just bad from the perspective of the company not doing as well as it otherwise could. It's also bad from the perspective of losing very expensive lawsuits, which is why managers who say things like you just said tend not to be managers for very long.

True, but it also often takes people over them jerking a knot in them when they go too far and cause serious harm to their underlings. Contrast Steve Jobs before he got fired for being a tyrant and Steve Jobs after his return. The best thing that can happen to leaders like that is getting fired and having to try again at a new company, and hopefully learning from their mistakes.

Leadership != bullying, and one of the greatest failures in the modern world is people thinking that the only way to lead people is to scare them into doing what they have to do. Because when you scare people into doing something, they're only going to do just enough to not get fired. They're going to keep their heads down and not rock the boat. And when something genuinely is badly broken, they're not going to say anything out of fear of getting blamed for pointing it out. When you inspire people, that's when they do their best work. That is how you manage people — not by intimidation, but by inspiration and by example.

No, 10% were traumatized enough to seek professional help. In my world, if you traumatize ten people so badly in your professional career that they need therapy, you probably shouldn't be managing anyone, and whoever is managing you should be doing everything possible to limit your interactions with other people.

Just saying.

Well, not that shocked.

Apple is pretty much known for this. Not everybody is cut out to work in that sort of environment, and this is not saying anything bad about the people. Some people handle bullying and tyrannical leadership causing levels of stress that others would completely break under. Does it result in better products faster? Maybe, maybe not. Is it a hostile work environment? You bet.

Of course, not all of Apple is that way. But the biggest problem with Apple is that internal mobility sucks (or at least this used to be the case), so when you realize that you're in that sort of situation, it's hard to get out without leaving the company. If internal mobility weren't so broken — if you could just look for internal jobs, click, have a half-hour call with the hiring manager, a quick team fit meeting, and suddenly be working under somebody else a few days later, then bullies wouldn't be able to hold power, because nobody would continue working for them. The more you restrict internal mobility, the more bad managers damage companies.

And it doesn't surprise me in the least that this story would be about Apple Fitness. Besides that particular team being more likely to attract jock-like folks who are more likely to be bullies in general, statistically speaking, it's also a team whose product seems almost deliberately designed to bully its users. I tried it, and pretty much ignore it now. The point where I lost interest was when they wanted me to pay money for a subscription just so I could tell it whether I'm walking or cycling so that it has some idea of how much exercise I'm getting. When I bike for an hour or more and it says I haven't "closed my move ring", whatever the f*** that means, my reaction is that this product is junk designed to squeeze money out of users, rather than serve their real-world needs.

It doesn't surprise me in the least that a product that is quite obnoxious in its behavior is run by a leader who is accused of toxic leadership by a large number of his employees; the only question in my mind is whether his toxic management style made the product bad or the product being bad made his management style become toxic.

I heard an economist pose this question once. Why do companies have employees at all? Why not use contractors? Then you could hire just as much labor as you need, when you need it, then not pay for labor when you didn't need it.

His reason was the costs involved with finding contractors then negotiating agreements with them. I think there are other reasons, but for sure that's part of it.

But I think technology is pushing us into an intermediate position between the semi-permanent, often lifelong employment of a generation ago, and a world of contracting for everything. I think this is evidenced by a pattern I have seen where companies who are currently successful lay people off. It's not just in the tech world, this is happening in the service industry too.

When technology allows you to monitor the financial performance and cost of every department in an enterprise down to a fare-thee-well, it's easy to identify people you don't need so much in the upcoming quarters and let them go. Then with Internet hiring and automated application screening it's easy to hire those positions back in a year.

Now there's a lot of holes in this rosy (for management) scenario. Automated application screening is dog shit, for example. But you can do it, and you will find people; probably not the *best* people, but then you'll never know, in fact *nobody* will ever know. People will never get to know their jobs well, but again you won't ever know what you're missing. Most of all you will never have anything resembling loyalty from the people you hire; young people these days look at every job as transient. But you can't *measure* loyalty and in most cases, job competence with any precision. But you can track costs down to the penny.

Totally fair. That said, I'm not even sure it's worth mentioning the lifespan of protection in that context. You'd expect a silicone gasket to last at least a decade if not disturbed, and I doubt that even ~0.0000000001% of devices will still be in active use after that long. :-)

Repairs, however, are worth mentioning, because the manufacturer obviously can't guarantee factory sealing after a repair; it depends on whether they do the repair correctly.

In this case this wasn't about AI underperforming what was promised, but AI performance being exaggerated to cover the company's tracks as it offshored jobs to India. The intent was to use AI as an excuse to let Australian workers go, then to quietly replace them with Indian ones.

I don't think AI promises are "empty", but there is a lot of irrational enthusiasm out there getting ahead of the technology. I think for sure there are plenty of technical failures arising from technlogical hubris and naivite. And I think more instances where the technology is blamed for company failures or unpopular policies -- that practice goes back to the very early era of "computerizing" things like invoicing, so I don't see why this round of technological change would be any different.

But for sure, AI is coming for a lot of jobs. Past forms of automation haven't ended employment; they were just ways of increasing worker productivity. Companies still hired workers until the next marginal dollar spent wouldn't bring in a marginal dollar of revenue. But this time may be different. AI is replacing human thinking. It may be mediocre at thinking, but so are most humans. It may be an opportunity for companies to leverage a small number of humans with advanced cognitive skills, but I think for many companies the siren call of mediocre but really cheap will be too hard to resist.

Security? Data centers already have to do that. So in that context, it's almost a no-op.

And per-unit costs are an economy of scale problem. Yeah, the first few units cost a lot. But as you build more of them with the same design, the cost of replicating that design goes down. So this one basically amounts to "SMRs can't be successful because they aren't successful." It's effectively begging the question, just with some layers of abstraction involved.

I assume that smaller plants are probably safer and easier to get approved in places where people actually live. Also probably cheaper to build per megawatt, and certainly cheaper and faster to build in an absolute sense, so able to provide a return on their investment sooner. Whether those were the actual reasons or not, I have no idea.

Every technology is a failure until it isn't. But no, there are a number of SMRs out there that are in operation, just none in the U.S., AFAIK.