Careful - you're getting stuck in bipartisanship as well. Look, I totally think Obama was a far better president than Trump (and a decent human being to boot), but as someone outside of America, what really annoys me about Obama is that he just papered over the cracks from the global financial crisis and refused to burn political capital to actually take on the banks and wealthy elites.

The same thing happened in most other countries, but there was a time when a leader would sacrifice their popularity in order to push through unpopular but necessary change.

In some respects, Trump became possible because at least he is going around smashing things up. Not in a good or coherent way but, like Brexit in the UK, when people keep voting for leaders who make big promises then continue the status quo, they eventually just start voting for anyone who will do anything different.

These people get stuck in a self-fulfilling bubble though. They don't realise that anyone who is a decent grad and comes across well in an interview isn't going to be apply for their minimum wage grad job at their no-name engineering firm. I find, especially with engineering in the UK, many companies haven't figured out that the top engineering grads just go into finance, management consulting or FAANG where they get paid decent starting wages. These candidates are filtering out grad jobs advertised at year 2000 salary levels.

The applicants engineering companies then get are increasingly the bottom of the barrel. They then complain that the quality is so low, so ironically, try to reduce salaries even further.

I know plenty of very good engineers who would return to the traditional industries if the pay was anywhere close to what you can get elsewhere. Meanwhile the lament about lack of talent continues...

That's one take on the situation - and granted I do agree that many people fall into that camp.

But as someone who actually enjoys having kids, and who has been a stay at home parent for the last few years (due to wife out earning me), there are other pressures involved. The biggest one is that, basically, by having kids we went from having ZERO money issues, to suddenly living on the edge. It's almost comically absurd how bad the situation has been.

We went from two very decent incomes and having the world as our oyster, to suddenly having all these insane costs forced upon us. We were quite happy before in a CBD studio flat to reduce our commute time, and because we wanted to save money. But you can't live in a studio flat with kids, so we had to get a bigger flat, which was fine, except that then those became insanely expensive post COVID while our incomes didn't grow. So we had to chase the 'commuting cost vs rent' equation along with the hordes of other workers (hint, you can't really win). Then suddenly you have to think about schools as well, so not only do you need to get another bedroom, you have to get one within the catchment of a decent school.

The whole process is insanity and extremely expensive. I have always thought people who just pissed away money on pointless things to be idiots, but now I'm the idiot who just hands over my credit card to anyone who wants to clip the ticket when Im trying to get my tired kid home to see their grandparents for Christmas, or trying to get a campsite to stay in during a school holiday.

We can barely afford to do anything fun now, we are shoved back into a precipitous housing situation, and the cost of living crisis is squeezing us like never before. I then look at our friends who didn't have kids and for whom the 'cost of living crisis' is having to cut back on premium economy flights so they can continue to eat out four times a week and I feel a bit dumb.

Ultimately we really do enjoy having kids, but it is not compatible with our short term precariate economy where you are expected to bounce around and continually reinvent yourself in pursuit of 'market forces'. What hacks me off with all this as well, is the whole 'shouldn't have had kids if you can't afford them' - well, yeah, we could afford them when we had them, but the COVID stupidity now means we barely can. How am I supposed to know that my situation will be stable for the next 20 years at the point I have kids. It's just idiot ivory tower thinking from the people who, sadly, are in charge of our economic system.

I currently work hybrid. It reduces my effective pay by around 10%, which is a hell of a cut. It gains me nothing, since all meetings - even when we're all in the same room - are via teams, because company policy.

I see no added value from visiting the office.

That might be the end game, but the immediate future is that where you fit in is serving wealthy people. For pretty much the entire time anyone alive now has been working, western countries have had a self-sustaining middle class. You could go work in a job making stuff for people like yourself.

This is disappearing. Businesses that cater to the middle class have had to move to the lower end - it's why you see all the complaints about how quality has suffered in restaurants, clothing etc. What's happening is that the middle class is thinning out so brands that traditionally targeted them have had to try to chase them down the market.

But go look at the businesses that target the wealthy. The money is insane. Even brands that sit at the upper levels of the remaining middle class are completely nuts compared to what we had 20 years ago - I'm talking brands like Supreme, and Balenciaga for example. Or in food, places like the whole Salt Bae absurdity.

The people shopping at these places have no sense of value, but they are not even the worst. There is a class of people who have so much money coming in that they can't spend it fast enough, so they just get their fund manager to hoover up more of the assets out of the hands of everyone lower down the food chain.

I deal in high end electronics and it's just insane the wealth inequality now. You have people who appear quite 'normal' but have lost all sense of value because they have more money than they can spend in a lifetime and no kids to pass it on too. The problem was slowly getting worse but the COVID stimulus jumped us forward about 10 years, which is why everyone appears to be suffering so much now, while there is still insane demand in the economy pushing up inflation.

If you want to survive you have to find stuff for these people to buy. If anything, their problem is there is not enough stuff to buy so their money keeps stacking. The big one coming along is going to be luxury retirement. These people will spend anything to make their last years a little more comfortable.

This was my thought as well. IANAL, but my understanding of basic contract law is that there must be a consideration given for the contract to be enforceable.

But having said that, there are plenty of businesses that will write unenforceable contracts as a bullying tactic. Even if they aren't enforceable, an individual cannot easily repel the endless legal resources of a corporation without incurring some serious financial damage.

Her real mistake though, is that if she is going to take on a mega corp like this, she should have made sure that she didn't own anything. If you have no assets, then none of these threats matter. Her book IP should have been in a separate company owned by a trust or spouse etc.

Ish.

I would not trust C++ for safety-critical work as MISRA can only limit features, it can't add support for contracts.

There have been other dialects of C++ - Aspect-Oriented C++ and Feature-Oriented C++ being the two that I monitored closely. You can't really do either by using subsetting, regardless of mechanism.

IMHO, it might be easier to reverse the problem. Instead of having specific subsets for specific tasks, where you drill down to the subset you want, have specific subsets for specific mechanisms where you build up to the feature set you need.

Oh, absolutely. These days, I spend so much time checking the output from computers, it would normally have been quicker to do searches by hand. This is... not useful.

I can fully understand that.

Look, I'm with everyone that the AI stuff is absolute hype, but when I started my career as an engineer, there were so many mundane jobs that grads did. I remember doing PCB layout for test jigs for quite a while - it was mostly pretty braindead, loading in component pinouts and then laying out tracks. But it's a job that needed to be done and in the process, you learnt a lot about the product development process and became integrated into the company.

Those sorts of jobs are either outsourced or automated (i.e. AI) by much improved tools. There are just not as many braindead jobs that you can throw grads at and still get some kind of return from them anymore.

I don't know what the solution to this is. Companies also used to invest in young people (i.e. give them jobs even if they wouldn't make money from them) because out of this they would get their future useful workers. But now neither employees or employers have any loyalty to each other so businesses don't want to make that investment so that their competitor can nab the trained worker.

It seems like tech is just heading towards unpaid internships (or even where the worker has to pay), which have been standard in many industries for quite a while now.

I do very much understand what you're saying and it certainly adds to the complexity. One cannot put sociological or psychological factors on a box.

That aspect of the problem is indeed going to be much harder to deal with than, say, salt, trans fats, or known carcinogenic compounds.

Honestly, I'm not sure what you can do about those aspects - financial incentives help a little, but honestly I don't believe they make a huge difference - which is why I've concentrated on unsafe levels of ingredients, because although we don't know exactly what those should be, we've at least got a rough idea for some of them. It's going to be a delicate one, though -- you don't want to overly restrict sources of sugar because diabetics can suffer from crashes due to excessively low sugar just as badly as excessively high levels, and some items get unfairly maligned (chocolate, per se, isn't bad for you, it's the additives, and indeed particularly high percentage chocolate can be helpful for the heart).

But, yes, I absolutely agree with your overarching point that the problems are primarily psychological and sociological. I just don't have the faintest idea of how these can be tackled. Jamie Oliver tried (albeit not very well, but he did at least try) and the pushback was borderline nuclear, and that was where there was clear and compelling evidence of significant difference in health and functionality. If you can barely escape with your life for saying eating better reduces sickness and improve concentration, and pushing for changes where these two factors essentially dictate whether a person is functional in life, then I don't hold out hope for change where it's more ambiguous or the economics are much tougher.

There are papers arguing that smoothies aren't as good as eating real fruit because it seems that there's actually a benefit to having to break down cell walls, even at the expense of not getting 100% of the nutrients from it. However, cooking food breaks down cell walls, although obviously not to the same degree. It's not clear that breaking down cell walls is harmful, even if it's not beneficial.

A lot of ultra-processed foods have been accused of having unhealthy levels of certain ingredients (usually sugars or salt) and certain styles of cooking can add harmful compounds.

It would seem reasonable to say that there's a band at which a given ingredient is beneficial (analogous to a therapeutic threshold), with levels above that being increasingly harmful, eventually reaching a recognised toxic threshold. In terms of the harmful compounds from cooking, it seems reasonable to suggest that, below a certain level, the body's mechanisms can handle them without any issue, that it's only above that that there's any kind of problem.

So it would seem that we've got three factors - processing that can decrease benefits, ingredients that follow a curve that reaches a maximum before plunging, and processing that can increase harm.

Nobody wants to be given a complicated code that they need to look up, but it would seem reasonable that you can give a food a score out of three, where it would get 3 if you get maximum benefit and no harm, where you then subtract for reduced benefit and increased harm. That shouldn't be too hard for consumers, most people can count to 3.

Yeah, understood, food is going to vary, since it's all uncontrolled ingredients and processing itself is very uncontrolled. So take two or three examples as a fair "representative sample". Further, most manufacturers can't afford to do the kind of testing needed, and our understanding of harm varies with time. No problem. Give a guidebook, updated maybe once every couple of years, on how to estimate a value, which can be used, but require them to use a measured value if measured, where the value is marked E or M depending on whether it's estimated or measured.

It's not perfect, it's arguably not terribly precise (since there's no way to indicate how much a food item is going to vary), and it's certainly not an indication of any "absolute truth" (as we don't know how beneficial or harmful quite a few things are, food science is horribly inexact), but it has to be better than the current system because - quite honestly - it would be hard to be worse than the current system.

But it's simple enough to be understandable and should be much less prone to really bizarre outcomes.

At the moment they have the same problem that forced Google to develop Chrome and Android - they are beholden to someone else's platform gate keeping them from their users.

Apple's vision of AI wasn't that bad - if they had been able to do the stuff they'd promised it would be a useful product for many people. With Apple foundering, this leaves it as a massive opportunity for someone else. But to get there you need access to people's data. Apple won't give that to Open AI, and Google doesn't need Open AI. So Open AI really have no choice.

They will pretending it isn't a smartphone, but it will just be another smartphone.

Or they will scare Apple enough that Apple is forced to buy them.

As a hardware engineer seems obvious to me, but unfortunately I don't know how one could make money from such knowledge.

I mean, I gave up on believing anything would be done about climate change when the mainstream financial industry started embracing bitcoin. There is nothing dumber during a climate crisis than promoting mainstream adoption of a proof of work cryptocurrency that gobbles up energy and cutting edge compute power.

In 100 years, we will look back on it like the gold rushes - people will be in awe when told how the pinnacle of our technological achievements - a massive electricity supply infrastructure and state of the art microchips - was being used to 'mine' coins. They will ask, 'why didn't they use the energy, human resources and technology to solve their climate problem?'.

Millions of people died digging a shinny gold rock out of the ground. Crypto and AI is our generation doing the same thing, and we are already seeing the same results where so much of our 'work' today is not producing anything particular useful that measurable parts of the economy, like housing supply and infrastructure are collapsing and everyone just sits around scratching their heads as to why while watching their tulip portfolios increase in value.