I find the scale of some companies hard to understand, they're laying off multiples of the total number of employees of the largest company I've worked at.
Large-scale enterprises are really something to behold. Take one small example. A certain large company has cafeterias in many locations. Each of these cafeterias is like a small enterprise. And it has nothing to do with the core business itself. To order food, you need an app. Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well. There's also a payment component and everything that comes along with that.
The cafeteria itself is a large scale enterprise, wholly enclosed inside the larger scale enterprise.
It's all true but the cafeteria is generally outsourced. Those employees are not on the books of the real enterprise and the software shared between all of the outsourcers customers. Same goes for many non-core functions.
I can confirm for a certain very large enterprise that this is not the case. The employees ARE on the books of the company and considered full time employees with full benefits, and the software is custom built for this enterprise, by this enterprise, and not shared with any other enterprises
I can't find that exact quote, but the US navy had barges (made of concrete!) that made ice cream in World War 2, and those barges were unarmed so needed guarding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge
Historically and generally true. Which makes it a fascinating lesson to witness the major logistics issues happening today. Shows how even an institution like the U.S. Navy can be badly mismanaged by just a handful of the wrong people at the top. When's the next shareholder meeting? Surely there's a way to fire the CEO at this point.
Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well.
...and these days, someone has to justify their continued employment, hence guaranteeing that said app and its related systems will be subjected to constant trendchasing and the inevitable resultant enshittification. It's otherwise perfectly possible to create such an ordering system that will keep working with next to no attention, which is why the most stable and reliable systems I've worked with were created by someone who didn't want to have to work on it more than once.
I worked at S&P Global for 2 years via an acquisition. The scale is insane. It is completely unmanageable. It's impossible to get anything done. Yet, it shits money. It was a miserable place to work.
That's not how it works in many countries. You can have regional governments that raise their own taxes and aren't beholden to the central government organizationally, just legally.
No idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle.
And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend headcount optimizing datacenter spend down. Hire a team to re-write PHP to make it faster literally pays for itself. Or kernel engineers. Or even HW engineers and power generation. And on the product side, you can do lots of experiments where a 1% improvement in ad revenue pays like the entire department's wages for the year. So you do a lot of them, and the winners cover the cost of the losers. And you hire teams to build software to run more experiments faster and more correctly.
The brakes on this "flywheel of success" is the diseconomies of scale outweighing the economies. When the costs of communicating and negotiation are higher internally than those external contracts you previously subsumed. When you have two teams writing their own database engine competing (with suppliers!) for the same hires. When your datacenter plans outpace industrial power generation plans. When your management spins up secret teams to launch virtual reality products with no legs.
There is only one problem with Meta: Facebook itself is like a TV show that has ran its course. He's riding off what he purchased: Instagram and WhatsApp, but being a product thief he cannot create anything new.
I've never been in the military but I'm told they work this way. You often have interactions with people across the org chart (which is a massive tree with >100,000 nodes on it). If there's a dispute over resources or requirements that can't be resolved you need to find the lowest person that is above both of you to settle it. The depth of the org chart is a key similarity here as well. I think I was ~10 degrees from Sundar when I worked for Google. A soldier in the US military is a similar distance from the president. Also the financial numbers that are thrown around are larger than what most governments deal with and on par with even large nations. The US military might get a $100B influx for some war. Google/Amazon/Meta/etc. spend similarly on AI initiatives.
British Gas, Octopus, etc are all prepping kits right now, Ecoflow has already got a certified product line sitting in UK warehouses ready to go. We're talking within a couple of months and it'll be running.
> If you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery?
Yes, some people do this. There's even a startup built around the idea: https://www.axle.energy/
It would be really interesting to know what's so special about these UK units that they can be "damaged" by being fed from the "wrong" side (as per some other article), considering that the only place where these behave like that is an island north of France.
These are not just circuit breakers/MCBs, they are RCBOs which combine an MCB + RCD in a single unit. RCDs traditionally only measure - and protect - current flow is one direction, so if you are using them for solar you need a bi-directional unit for full protection. The device will not be damaged, it just won't protect you.
However in the case of a UK home, where you may have a single ring circuit connecting all the sockets on the whole floor, what's in the breaker panel isn't going to protect you with plug-in solar anyway. Better hope what you are plugging in meets UK standards and isn't just some Chinese rubbish that claims it does.
Outside the UK, neither RCDs nor RCBOs (type A/AC) are generally distinguished by bidirectionality (all search results about this being .co.uk), since the RCD part of these devices is just a current transformer driving a trip solenoid; there is nothing in it that's powered by the line, nor something which could sense net power flow direction. The situation is different for AFDDs or type B RCDs, since those have active, powered electronics in them which need to be fed from the line side.
After some research the main reason seems to be two-fold:
Answer #1: Many UK RCDs/RCBOs are actually single-pole devices and don't disconnect the neutral. In the simplest case, this means pressing the test button might burn out the test resistor when backfed. I don't imagine this to be a problem in practice, since grid-tie inverters shut down very quickly if the grid disappears under them, especially plug-in inverters. RCDs/RCBOs elsewhere are virtually always disconnecting the neutral, so don't care about this.
Answer #2: It looks like some/many one-module wide UK RCBOs _do have_ electronics in them, even if type A, because they're actively driving the trip solenoid of the MCB part, and if you sketch this out and do it in a very cheap way it's easy to see how you could burn that out if backfed (i.e. powering the trip solenoid during a fault is assumed to disconnect in a very short amount of time, but if backfed for longer than the disconnect time that might be enough to toast the solenoid or the driver).
Notably neither of these has anything to do with the direction of power flow.
> Answer #1: Many UK RCDs/RCBOs are actually single-pole devices and don't disconnect the neutral.
This is not correct; all type AC and type A RCDs used in British consumer units disconnect the neutral as well. Some RCBOs do not disconnect the neutral and this is a problem in some circumstances. The datasheet I linked for Wylex NHXS1 RCBOs explains that these ones do disconnect the neutral.
> Answer #2: It looks like some/many one-module wide UK RCBOs _do have_ electronics in them [...] but if backfed for longer than the disconnect time that might be enough to toast the solenoid or the driver
This is correct. For an example of this construction in an RCBO, see [1]. This illustrates that if the supply is connected to the "To Load" part of the schematic (toward the end of the video), as it would be if the supply is a solar PV inverter with battery storage, then it can continue powering the electronics and be shunted out by the thyristor after it has supposed to have tripped, very quickly burning itself out.
Bidirectional RCBOs are not designed in this manner. They have more complicated circuitry that makes them more expensive to manufacture, but are absolutely required in situations like this if you don't want your protective devices to burn and/or explode when they operate.
> Notably neither of these has anything to do with the direction of power flow.
Yes it does, because if the power is flowing backwards to how they designed it, that is backfeeding it, keeping its circuitry powered after it should have been disconnected.
There's no off ramp whatsoever for both Iran, and Israel and the USA. This will trigger a global recession, everything is about to get much more expensive.
Absolute disaster, all to fill up the coffers of American oil companies...
Oil companies in the USA seeing a price hike from ~US$60 to over US$100? It definitely fills their coffers, lots of barely-profitable/non-profitable shale extraction becomes viable.
Of course, there's also the angle with Miriam Adelson who might have sweet talked Trump into going aboard with Israel on this disaster.
Alright, it was my assumption that we'll be left with a totally dysfunctional economy, and in that sense whatever's in you bank account means very little. If I were an oil exec I wouldn't trade that world from what we had before even if money was my only objective.
If the TV show Landman is to believed, its not all rosy for the oil companies when prices go over $100 because it leads to people using less gas:
"Well, you want oil to live above 60 but below 90. And don’t get me wrong, we’re still printing money at 90, but gas gets up over $3.50 a gallon, it starts to pinch. It hits a hundred, every product in America has to readjust its price. $78 a barrel, that’s about perfect. You know, brings enough profit to keep exploring, but it don’t sting as much at the pump."
That show is 100% fiction, bullshit and propaganda, nothing in it should be believed or taken at face value. The examples, stats or stories Billy-Bob tells are contrived, false or otherwise misleading. It is entertainment, a soap opera for adult men.
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