The point of the blog post is that while flying humans across the solar system to Venus so they can float in clouds of opaque sulfuric acid above a hellscape of certain death sounds and objectively is ridiculous, it's still easier and arguably more sensible than trying to send humans to Mars and back.
But, if our airship in the Venusian atmosphere finds nothing interesting (no life signs), then there’s not much more to do at Venus, because atmosphere is all mixed and all the same. Going to the surface, even for a day or two, is hard and very expensive.
OTOH Mars - that can be explored for many years, on the surface and below the surface. We might still find nothing, but it’ll take hundreds of years to be sure.
My gut feel was that you can't be right, but it looks like you are: cutting 8000 employees * $500k/year total cost to company (rough but useful ballpark figure) is "only" $4B.
Cross-checking against actual expenditure, Meta spent $118B total last year, with the second largest component of total spending being stock comp at $42B, of which vast slabs went to the top leadership that's presumably also not getting fired.
Though not all of that capex is cash; there's a whole phantom wampum AI economy where the big players are trading promissory notes for compute that doesn't exist yet (and may never exist) some time in the future and booking it as revenue.
Meta plays that game too; they're on the hook to buy compute that CoreWeave has yet to build (and may never be able to build) which counts as "revenue" for CoreWeave and an "asset" for Meta even though no actual money or compute has changed hands.
Meta promised to buy dc capacity for ai workloads. If I remember it correctly, it created a common company with an investment fund as well that took on debt to build capacity.
You calculate the cutoffs as savings for this years while imagining that the future payments are payments only for this year. At the same time the commitments are for 5-20 years ahead and the laid off people would be off the payroll for the same multiple years ahead.
YMMV, but the fully remote workers I know (I manage a few and am married to one) seem very happy about it, largely because they get to spend a lot more time with their families than they otherwise would. They're anxious mostly because they're afraid they'll have to forcibly RTO.
I and my wife have been fully remote for over a decade, absolutely love it and I can't understand the whole going to office thing or people pushing for it.
Some of us just need a different space to work, I can't wfh - my living space is too small to have a dedicated area and I can't discipline myself without said dedicated area.
The "leaders" forcing people into it though are just petty fiends. Linking bonuses/compensation to in office days is just punitive because you want to see bums on seats, nobody will convince me otherwise.
Anecdotally, my manager is a rabid RTO advocate, he's a gen X man and messages our team sometimes at 1am, is working on the weekends, schedules early morning and late meetings that extend well past 5pm. He has kids that he never mentions. We don't work on anything mission critical whatsoever.
> largely because they get to spend a lot more time with their families than they otherwise would.
This is a big YMMV, but you accidentally hit on something I've observed over my years of working remote: A lot of the successful remote coworkers I've had have been people with families at home.
There is a lot of demand for remote jobs from young, single people who think it's going to be the best thing ever, but then many decline into a funk that they don't really understand. The social isolation starts to wear on most people like that.
There are very obviously ways to theoretically avoid this, like having an active social life during the work week. I know many people who fit this description and love it. However a lot of people think they're going to do that and then just don't really keep up with it. They go from bed to remote job to Netflix on the couch to sleep and repeat, then wonder why they're feeling so blah.
I agree, for many it's wonderful. If you've got family at home I can see that being a real attraction. When my kids were little I'd have liked that as well. I also had wonderful office-mates that are now life-long friends, but I mostly worked non-corporate nearly mom-and-pops so we were a close knit group. I realize I am an outlier. I just wonder if not being in an office is 3% (or whatever %) of the unhappiness problem.
Small sample size, but of the people in my office that really prefer in-office to WFH, the two archetypes I have noticed are those people are either single and have no family, or they wish they were single and had no family.
Yeah, but those people were previously burdened by helping their coworkers be less crazy. Now they remain blissfully isolated as their coworkers spiral into unchecked weirdness.
If your company culture fully supports it it's great. Unfortunately because of all the half-assed RTO the employees still remote often feel both resentment from employees that had to RTO and anxiety about being first in line to get cut.
The US military is prosecuting the war just fine, US losses of materiel and personnel have been minimal (not zero, but close enough). China's takeaway from this is not going to be that the US military is incompetent.
The fundamental problem is that the declared objectives of regime change and securing control of the Strait of Hormuz cannot be achieved through air power alone. And this is the fault of the president, not the military.
How many is the right number of personnel and materiel to lose for this war that isn't war and seems to have been either purchased for a few hundred million by political bribes or is just a distraction from the administrations involvement in a monstrous child sex ring? Also didn't we already win this war last year, last month, and last week? It is really easy to wave away our fellow dead citizens (and Iranians, including a school full of children!) from an internet comment form but damn, real people are dead here and it's an actual tragedy.
For me, zero deaths seems like the right answer for these objectives and anything else is egregious abuse of power.
I'd love it if everyone stopped being happy with people lying to them. When you catch people lying to you, be angry and stop trusting them!
I hate to interrupt a good rant, but we actually agree on this. To spell it out: the abject failure of the war is not a failure of the US military, it's a failure of its executive leadership, meaning Trump and his coterie of yes-men.
> the abject failure of the war is not a failure of the US military, it's a failure of its executive leadership
It's a bit of both. Our lack of mine-clearing and anti-drone technology is a legitimate weakness, as are our defence-production gaps. The damage done to our system of alliances, moreover, directly weakens our military standing.
A place where you can take a break and grab a coffee is called a cafe, not a gas station.
Also, with Chinese manufacturers increasingly pushing out batteries capable of 1000+ km, you'll be able to charge fully at home for increasingly long road trips.
We were clearly talking about the context of energy sources, where he's trying to push something he calls "clean coal". What's the positive outcome there?
> Trump's stated goal of regime change in Iran would (likely) have been a positive outcome if it has actually happened
The number of Americans still believing this is baffling and saya everything about their history education.
"The previous 20 times we forced regime change ended up a net negative for the people in those countries, but surely this time it would've been different!".
> previous 20 times we forced regime change ended up a net negative
Plenty of counter-examples, too. WWII. South Korea. Potentially Venezuela, mostly because we constrained our objectives.
I also don’t think it’s fair to constrain OP’s statement to “the people in those countries.” Regional impacts matter, too. An Iran that isn’t funding terrorist proxies everywhere could still be a net positive even if the average Iranian is no better off afterwards. (To be clear, I’m in no way supporting this stupid war.)
> Plenty of counter-examples, too. WWII. South Korea.
To even hint at those being in the same category of "regime change attempt" as Iran (2x), Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Congo is really desperate. Come on now. Not comparable and irrelevant.
> the same category of "regime change attempt" as Iran (2x), Chile, Iraq
…why are Japan and Germany not comparable to Iraq? We’re talking methods and outcomes, not motivations. All involved a wholesale invasion, occupation and supervised restructuring followed by disarmament.
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