It is insane that the EU hasn't done more to create local tech companies to reduce their reliance on the US. They need their own version of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (among others), just like China does. It's fine to leverage allies for certain parts of your economy, but the tech sector is right up their with military when it comes to industries where the EU shouldn't be depending on external allies so strongly. It's not like the EU has the same religious devotion to free markets that the US has which would make them hesitant to prop up their local tech companies for 10+ years until they could survive on their own.

I found an EU report from 2025 that suggested it would take $5 trillion to do this, which would be about 5% of the government revenue of all EU countries combined if done over a decade. Just like efforts to become less reliant on the US military complex, the EU should really get started.

It's a smart strategy IF you don't mind of your most competent employees leave first. At Facebook with its current strategy they might be ok with that.

Most of their good employees left a while ago anyway.

All that and you still can't help bragging about how many people you've managed.

This is not news that matters. Normally I don't complain, but...

They've had 22 years to figure this out, but now it's a crisis requiring a rush mission because nobody thought it was important enough to do something a year ago, or five, or ten.

The problem isn't the population. Bedrock can handle more than that. London isn't sinking because of all the people (and London is huge!), it's sinking because the ice sheet that pressed the Highlands deep into the crust has been gone for the last 10,000 years, resulting in the entire island tilting back to where it naturally should be. You could move London's population into the Great Glen and it would not make the slightest difference - London would still be sinking. The ice sheets were a whole lot heavier than a few tens of millions of people.

(Ok, it would make a difference. If the rich people actually lived in Scotland, the transit system and public services would see a thousand percent improvement inside a week. If they were also forced to speak Gaelic, English would vanish in a month.)

Aquifers can be deep. The aquifer that supplies the town of Buxton in England is so deep that it takes rainfall 5,000 years to rech it.

Every place? Fascinating.

There are towns in England and Wales that have been occupied for the past 10,000 years. Manchester isn't the greatest place on Earth, but I'm really not convinced it's going to start sinking into the ground any time in the next thousand years. If "short term" is longer than the remaining lifespan of the human race, I am not convinced "short" is really the right word.

"Short term" is only meaningful if it's shorter than the time needed to take meaningful remedial action, and the time it would take to remediate the problem in Mexico City vastly exceeds the time it will take for the city to crumble into oblivion.

The sun will not explode in 4 billion years. It's far too small. It might well run out of hydrogen by then, but that will simply cause it to swell. If, in four billion years, we can't find a way to drift the Earth outwards to remain within the goldilocks zone, then we're a failure as a species. Of course, we might well have built a Dyson Ring by then. Although, to be honest, if we were going to do that, we'd want to find a gas cloud that was about to form a stellar nursary and head there. If we arrive as the proto star fires up, we've maximum resources in the easiest possible form (a dust cloud, so no mining needed and minimal processing required), can build the Dyson Ring or Dyson Sphere by the time the star really gets going, and have another ten to fifteen billion years.

That's why you're not climbing the corporate ladder. Get more people under you ASAP. Learn to fight off your rivals. Or stay down.

Wrong. Managers are always scheming to get as many people below them as possible. Claiming savings is an effective short-term strategy that only works in specific circumstances, and it only works as a strategy when it results in more people below you on the org tree.

There would be some perverse irony if Apple ended up manufacturing cellular baseband hardware with designs from the cellular modem team that they bought from Intel, and did so using Intel's foundries.

So true. Same with programming languages, too. Good engineers solve problems in the constraints they are given.

Why do you think their intent is to move faster?

If managers can slow you down, then they need to hire more people below them. That is a promotion for the manager.

Managers are actively trying to slow you down.

They don't sell to upper level management, they sell to second tier management.

If you're second level, you need to make "positive changes" in the company to climb the ladder, but you aren't smart enough to think of those changes yourself. Gartner sells the plan to second level managers, who sell it to top level in hopes of getting promoted.

Gartner, Forrester, etc are in the "help second tier managers get promoted" business.