Everybody's job looks easy until you have to do it yourself.

It occurred to me yesterday that this AI moment is an extreme expression of that for most people, ie managers who don't understand why throwing token spend at everything isn't making the whole thing go 5x faster.

The current head of DoD is basically a manosphere influencer that bumbled into this job.

Now, I'm not an endocrinologist, just an aging guy, but from my current vantage point it appears that over the course of my life, many stupid decisions have been made that I have lived to tell about. I can't help but feel that my "wisdom of age" might just be testosterone getting out of the way.

This is all to say that our current "situation" just kinda looks like one insecure guys roid rage when you take a big step back.

Like I said, it routinely drops to or below 100v. It's most noticeable after an outage is restored when everyone's hot water heaters and fridges kick back on at once.

You see, I live with in a rural area and especially since LED light bulbs have become the thing, it's been clear that we are delivered far less than 120v service a lot of the time. We live about 200 yards from the transformer that we share with several other houses, too many I believe. About two years ago I set up Home Assistant and bought one of those power monitoring rigs that you put on each circuit in your breaker box, mostly I just wanted data about where my power bill money was going. I work in FinOps in case anyone was curious.

Anyhoo, couple years later I'm analyzing several months worth of power bills vs the circuit meter readings to quantify where I can make some upgrades and save some money. After a day or so of this I mention to Claude about the voltage issues and sure enough, it puts together a whole packet for me documenting brownouts down to 95v and routine brownouts below 110v. It helps me fill out the BPU complaint form.

2 days later I get a call from JCP&L (unfortunately to my wife's phone because it's her name as the primary on the account). I want a new, larger transformer for myself and my neighbors, so I need to call them back today.

It charges by the unit and it decides how many units it produces. It decides how much money it makes, therefore it decides "more".

Unlike previous boom/bust cycles, I do not believe that demand that's driving the capacity bring-up that's underway right now is going to level off in the near future.

I am personally witnessing teams at my employer that were previously unable to produce software - non-Eng teams - that are now empowered to do so, and some of them are building some cool stuff. I think this is happening at every company everywhere, and I think when we and everyone else solve the "how do we deliver and govern this stuff?" problem there's going to be an even bigger unlock.

Wild times.