Although the Government (and local Government) can employ 'heads' at market rate. It's just the rank-and-file that have banded salaries.
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'.
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.
I read the post yesterday, and read it again today before commenting, and it's not really self-indulgent waffle.
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.
> The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed.
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.
I have worked for companies in different countries.
I think the striking thing is how US companies tend to have no idea how to be wealthy. Record profits, so the ceos use all of their tricks to get rich quick? They are already rich! Don't fix what isn't broken. Not every company needs to expand into 10 new markets, or have 5% lay offs or double in revenue. Some of this is investor pressure, but often it's not. Some guy who made it to the top is bored, doesn't feel like he is obviously doing enough, so he keeps making decisions to justify his position.
This isn't to insight flames but the European companies I worked for knew how to be wealthy! The market took a down turn from COVID, they ate the cost to keep their people. Some flashy new vertical is trending. They decided it's not for them, they have a brand and customers that they should focus on while everyone else works out the kinks. The company decides, why go public at all, we are successful and don't need anyone else's influence over us.
People say "you cannot project beyond 1 quarter". This is true in terms of catastrophe or gambler success. But its not true, if you act in q1 like there will be a q2 or even 5 years from now or heaven forbid a second or third generation you make different moves. You value different things.
Crossing the Atlantic and the discovery of the Americas? How many deaths were acceptable during that initial period of exploration? That’s where we still are with space.
And the atmospheric entry is still the same as 1969. Physics doesn’t change.
Which are the US made computers? Start by excluding all the ones with Korean LCD panels, and Taiwanese motherboards, and Chinese parts.
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.
The same is not true in Europe, so there's not a huge Dell, HP, or IBM equivalent.
In the 90s and up until the early 00s we used to have quite a few pretty serious contenders, but they are all dead now: ICL, Siemens-Nixdorf, Tulip, Bull, Olivetti, etc.
> Clean code tends to equal simple code, which tends to equal fast code.
Wat? Approximately every algorithm in CS101 has a clean and simple N^2 version, a long menu of complex N*log(N) versions, and an absolute zoo of special cases grafted onto one of the complex versions if you want the fastest code. This pattern generalizes out of the classroom to every corner of industry, but with less clean names+examples. The universal truth is that speed and simplicity are very quick to become opposing priorities. It happens in nanoseconds, one might say.
Cache-aware optimization in particular tends to create unholy code abominations, it's a strange example to pick for clean=simple=fast wishcasting.
I'm not sure if you are considering the patterns actually used in "Clean Code" architectures... which create a lot of, admittedly consistent, levels of interface abstractions in practice. This is not what I would consider simple/kiss or particularly easy to maintain over time and feature bloat.
I tend to prefer feature-oriented structures as an alternative, which I do find simpler and easy enough to refactor over time as complexity is required and not before.
nano seconds matter in some miniscule number of High Frequency and Algorithmic trading use cases. It does not matter in the majority of finance applications. No consumer finance use case cares about nanoseconds. The vast majority of money is moved via ACH, which clears via fixed width text files shared via SFTP, processed once a day. Nanoseconds do not matter here.
Humans are quite capable of bankrupting financial companies with coding issues. Knight Capital Group introduced a bug into their system while using high frequency trading software. 45 minutes later, they were effectively bankrupt.
If we're talking about fitting a quart into a pint pot, it would be remiss not to mention Elite fitting into a BBC Model B, 32kb, and the excellent code archaeology of it, and variants by Mark Moxon here: https://www.bbcelite.com/
Same. I watched last night, UK time, and I couldn't shake the worrying feeling. I was relieved that they got into orbit. Now I can be a little bit excited until re-entry. That worries me for the same reason.
In the UK as a kid, when Challenger happened, our children's news programme reported it before the mainstream TV.
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'.
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