I was an independent contractor for a large bank. My contract kept getting rolled so I ended up there for a few years even if the original piece of work was an 8 month job. A new CIO was appointed during my stint and a huge new IT initiative was launched to replace the decades old core banking system with a "modern" off-the-shelf "bank in a box" product that Oracle had recently purchased. This product was new and had been "successfully" launched by a tiny 8 branch bank in Ghana. The bank I was working for had hundreds of branches in multiple western countries. The product did not fit in any way/shape or form the existing processes in the bank, it's technical infrastructure, the regulatory regime, its retail products nor employment law (employee time is expensive in western countries - so solutions involving throwing bodies at menial repetitive tasks are not viable).

I had been at the coal-face for nearly a month of day long meetings with the vendor to try to get a single niche savings product supported on their system and it was torture. I could see it was never going to work. I had no notions that my lowly opinions would have any sort of impact but I made my opinions clear to my immediate manager - especially over lunch and when we would occasionally go to a nearby bar to watch sports after work. I eventually convinced him of the folly of the entire enterprise.

At some stage, he then spoke up to his manager expressing reservations who then called me in for an aggressive grilling on why I thought the new strategy was bound to fail. I explained - but he seemed unhappy with me and I was sure my contract would not be rolled - not that cared at that stage, I was hating the work at this stage.

I later found out that I must have had some impact because this manager brought up some of the reservations and issues at the next C-level meeting. He was promptly told by the new CIO that either he was either going to be a team player and get fully behind the initiative or else he was out as there was no room for saboteurs and passive blockers.

He got in line. I left of my own volition anyway. Two years later, the project was cancelled, the CIO fired and an $80m lawsuit with Oracle was the result. No real "moral of the story" - just that at some point up the hierarchy "push back" will meet the "owner" of the initiative and the pushback will quickly die.

VAT is based on flows of cash so is trivial to calculate and to collect. Wealth taxes require valuation and are just too easy to minimize and are expensive to calculate, and difficult to extract. (E.g. I own shares in a family member’s small business via a loan I provided. What’s that shareholding worth for the purposes of a wealth tax?)

VAT acts also as a sales tax as well as a tax on “added value” - business profits - so replacing two separate tax regimes with a single trivial-to-calculate, difficult-to-avoid (requiring two parties to conspire together), easy-to-collect (cash-flow based) tax.

Without getting into the politics of taxation, it’s the best designed tax there outs.

I know how to _use_ bazel effectively to do my work. I'm comfortable with its well-designed surface but whenever I've tried to understand the inner machinery I've given up - especially when presented with a bunch of custom skylark rules code.

It's like an anti-git in some regards - the surface of git (the CLI) is an abomination in many ways but the the mechanics of the tool are so ingrained and the model is so clear and simple - I never feel uncomfortable.

I've a need to have some comprehension of the inner machinery or the underlying model of my tools.

Our bazel system is full of custom skylark code so understanding the build means effectively reading a bunch of ad-hoc code written with varying degrees of competence and with confusing dependencies. I’m kinda ashamed I don’t have a deep understanding of a tool I use daily - but every time I try reading the documentation I quickly give up.

Have you ever worked in a factory? I find the people most enthusiastic about manufacturing are the ones least likely to have stood at a station in a factory performing manufacturing "work" - the vast majority of which is mind-numbingly boring and repetitive yet with minimal opportunities for passing the time with idle social interaction or chit-chat. Of all the non-professional work I've done, it was easily the least enjoyable. Even if it paid a bit less and demanded more physically, unskilled construction work was enjoyable in comparison. Even kitchen portering provided more stimulation - at least there was plenty of social interaction. This romanticization of factory work is weird.

https://fortune.com/2025/04/15/americans-want-factory-jobs-r...

> Ireland has very limited horticultural and grain production on account of its topography and climate, and it imports around 80 percent of its animal feed, food, and beverage needs.

Cattle are predominantly grass-fed in Ireland which is largely self-sufficient in grass/silage. Not to minimize the fragility of its economy wrt to food production - but the 80% I imagine is due to the reliance on other EU for fruits, vegetables and grain but these imports are almost exclusively for human consumption.

I was responding to your original claim and I’m well aware of such facilities in both Kotlin and Scala - having used both extensively. I was genuinely curious if the latest Java was in the process of adding support for trait/typeclasses - so I don’t understand why you’d bother to reply with something that completely changes your original claim.

Can you? The beauty of traits/type classes is that you can attach them to any type - in a world where 90% of the functionality of any piece of software is supplied by dependencies - external types which you cannot change - this is a vital feature.

There is of course a large installed base - a coal plant will last 50 years. The fact that developing countries have large installed coal capacity is neither here nor there.

Fusion is that faster horse - promising a cheaper to operate firebox which when attached to a stream engine attached to an alternator can produce electricity.

This approach to generating electricity has been superseded by new technologies - first by gas turbines which removed the steam engine and then by wind turbines which removed heat from the process and now by solar PV which has removed all the mechanics.

I just can’t see any circumstances under which steam engines are “coming back” and becoming competitive for electricity no matter how cheap the firebox fuel is.

Because I don’t know as much mathematics as you.