But it would be trivial for the platform to rate limit traffic.

It still is.

But of course many such transformers are connected to equally old generators and they are a bit more challenging as far as making replacement parts is concerned, huge turbines for instance.

Such clothing, or at least a plausible copy, would be much cheaper now than it was then. I don't do the kingly robe thing but I do wear colourful clothes almost every day and people love it. I was stopped in the street yesterday by a woman who wanted to take my picture.

How far back in time do you have to go for that to be generally true? I'm 70 from South West England and I hardly know anyone who had a tailored suit, almost everyone just bought them off the peg even when I was very young. Even fifty years ago wearing an actual suit to work where I lived was relatively rare too even for people who were more than a generation older; it was something that only people in a few professions did (lawyers, estate agents, some doctors, some academics, etc.).

Just in case you were serious I think they meant clubs like a sewing circle, crown green bowling, tennis, the local brass band, civic action groups, etc. In other words associations of one kind or another, in tech. terms special interest groups.

Which leads to this:

"If you write code at the limit of your intelligence, you won’t be able to understand or troubleshoot it later."

https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/kernighans-law/

US median income is just over 19 k international dollars, Poland is just under 9 k. Still a big difference but just over a factor of 2 instead of over 3.5.

See https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...

I'm not sure my generation thought that (I was born in 1955). Not in the South of England at least. Growing up there in the late fifties, sixties, seventies, I feel that most of us were looking forward most of the time and anticipating good times. At least most people I knew at the time. It was a time of accelerating change and a great deal of it was undeniably positive.

It takes a long time to design and a lot of material to make a big transformer and they last for decades. They are critical infrastructure so when one fails you want it replaced or repaired quickly but they are too expensive (millions of dollars/pounds/euros) to keep a spare unit idle for decades and the lead time for a new large power transformer might be six months or even longer. So repair makes sense, especially if it can be done on site because moving a big metal box full of oil, steel, and copper that weighs hundreds of tonnes is a major logistical exercise.

This isn't something that can be done by a company that 'moves fast and breaks things' and disappears next year.

Then define the version control system and the build process, specifying the dependencies, and so on.

Think about any opaque blobs in the system and try to eliminate them so that you have plain text source code so that no tools are needed to read the code.

Make sure that the build process runs entirely locally and never fetches anything from outside.

Simplify everything, use only tools and languages that are well understood and supported.

The real problems are not strictly technical but social: how do you prevent loss of the code, the tools, the specification, how do you maintain the expertise needed to maintain it. How do you ensure that all those things that are obvious to you now are written down in all their gory detail so that your great grandchildren will not apply their new and different preconceived ideas to the system?

Document all this on paper as well as electronic storage, make sure that version ids are recorded on every page as well as being available to the user of the machine or program.

In the industry in which I worked for the last thirty years of my career it was not uncommon to have things come back for repair after fifty years use and to be able to consult the original drawings and bill of materials so that exact replacement parts could be made.

This is much more important than the fines. But really it should be widened to include not only those who made the decision but also those who implemented it (software developers, designers, project managers) and those who benefited from it (executive officers, shareholders).

Anyone involved with the company who knew what was going on and did nothing to hinder it is culpable to some degree.

Why? She hasn't committed a crime so why should her career be damaged?