When you realise that any Government is ultimately a business, it's revenue is mostly tax, and its costs, are like any other business - salaries, then crappy salaries for Government employees makes more sense.

> So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.

There's also the (implicit) argument that the (UK) Government is also not having to pay up a (Civil Service) pension scheme, private health (!!), and the consultancy is picking that up, so that's also 'good'.

After 2004, the numbers dropped noticeably.

This feels apt: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

The comments are questioning what you wrote, which implies without evidence, that a small amount of EU money relative to Poland's own GDP, in just 6 years, is somehow entirely responsible for Poland's growth.

Ghostty might be an open source and free product, but that doesn't mean that Mitchell in particular, that works on it, treats it any differently to how a for-profit company would treat its own software.

If you're using a SAAS that offers a product to both companies and individuals with the same feature set, and it's uptime is anything less three-nines, it's not fit for purpose.

Frankly, I'm amazed companies aren't walking away and giving the same reasons.

It's always seemed to me that the problem is corporate profit and personal profit above all. 'Management' is a subset of this, and so is pretty much everything else, including the current drive for AI.

It's the Western, perhaps American, approach to business and emphasived by MBAs and the media. Lowering costs, driving share price, dividends and corporate profit.

This race over the few decades has hollowed out most Western companies.

Listen to any entrepreneur podcast, or read any website, and it's all about 'how quickly can I get to exit', i.e. personal profit.

Capitalism is the worst form of economic system, apart from all the rest.

And the atmospheric entry is still the same as 1969. Physics doesn’t change.

If you mean assembled then there are lots of very small European companies that make custom build PCs.

Economies of scale in the US, a single language, and cheap transport, mean that the US companies grow very big internally, very easily. And then go international without much effort. The same is not true in Europe, so there's not a huge Dell, HP, or IBM equivalent.

In 2026, the only country on the entire planet that can likely make their own computer with 100% their parts and labour, and is actively trying, is China.

Nanoseconds matter.

Clean code tends to equal simple code, which tends to equal fast code.

The order of items in memory does matter, as does cache locality. 32Kb fits in L1 cache.

If of course you're talking about web apps then that's just always been the Wild West.

In the UK as a kid, when Challenger happened, our children's news programme reported it before the mainstream TV.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/sci_tech/newsid_2701000/27...

And then people complain about C++ for doing it wrong, or its complexity, and show language 'X' that does it better/right, but only because they saw C++ do it first, and 'not quite right'.

I expect contracts to be similar - other languages will watch, learn, and do version two, and then complain about c++, etc.

It took 'quite a while' to get rid of auto_ptr, for example.

If it wasn't for the fact this is a language feature, it would be better off in boost where it can be tested in the wild.

Agreed, and it depends on the language I suppose. I'm a C++ developer and when you start working with templates even at a non-casual level, the compiler errors due to either genuine syntactic errors or 'seems correct but the standard doesn't support' can be infuriatingly obtuse. The LLM 'just knows' the standard (kind of, all 2k pages), and can figure out and fix most of those errors far faster than I can. In fact one of my preferred usages is to point Codex at my compiler output and get it to do nothing more than fix template errors.

Kotlin, for example, is much more in your face, in the IDE which does a correctness pass, before you even invoke the compiler (in the traditional sense) and the language spec is considerably leaner with less (no?) UB, unlike C++.

The price of petrol at the pump is at least 50% Government direct tax - fuel duty, VAT (which multiplies the duty value - very cheeky). Then the other parts - wholesale price, retailer profit, delivery costs, have their tax implicitly priced into that. That probably makes the overall Government take something like 70% of the price you pay.

As for coal, there's apparently about 600 million tons of accessible usable coal left, which at current UK usage is good for quite a few decades if not more.

By their own data, today is about 18GW for wind, and this time last week it was 3GW.

My local highstreet also had several betting shops where none previously existed. It's quite depressing really, and gambling invariably targets the poorest in the community.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub-a-dub-dub

Here's one story about gambling in the UK: the TV advertising is relentless and out of control after 9pm due to legislation passed in the early 00s. Gambling can quite literally lose you your house, friends and family. But apparently it's totally fine to advertise as long as HMRC get ££££. On some TV channels, every second advert, or worse, most adverts, are gambling. Bingo? Slots? Poker? Sports? All of the above.

The biggest UK tax payer for several years was Denise Coates.

Tobacco advertising, on the other hand, is totally banned in the UK, but won't lose you your house or family and friends (unless of course you die).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Coates

A human writing some poor, but working code that is supposed to be a demo, goes to production 9 times out of 10.

Then it becomes critical infrastructure.

Then management cannot understand why something working needs a rewrite because there's no tangible numbers attached to it. The timeless classic developer problem.

We were here ^^^^ up to 2024-2025.

Now, with LLMs, you can at least come up with a vibe coded, likely correct, likely faster, solution in a morning, that management won't moan at you about.

I'm hoping that today's complaints are tomorrow's innovations. Back when 1Mb hard drive was $100,000, or when Gates said 640kb is enough.

Perhaps some 'in the (chip) industry' can comment on what RAM manufacturers are doing at the moment - better, faster, larger? Or is there not much headroom left and it's down to MOBO manufacturers, and volume?

Modern politics by a different name. The parallels are obvious, along with the Peter Principle and so on.

Lots of people on here saying 'that's not me', but probably say 'ping me back' or 'learnings' which is very much one end of the spectrum of corporate bullshit that infects everyone. Some of it is stupidity (the English language has a word: 'lessons'), some of it is natural language evolution, and some of it is 'global' English: 'please revert', and some of it is very intentional management waffle. As the (unviersity) saying goes, 'if you can't blind 'em with science, baffle them with bullshit'.

Guess what a lot of plastic is made from? And how planes fly, and boats move?

And there's lots of countries that aren't at 'Western' living standards. So we have decades of those countries building and emissions to come.

Plus of course there's a lag in CO2 emissions to climate change. The next couple of decades are going to get a lot worse, before they get better, if at all.

https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas...