I recall reading that if you have a meeting with more than seven people, you are probably having an ineffective meeting. I am regularly forced to attend meetings with 20-30 people. It's always the same 3-4 people who speak, everyone else remains silent.

I think about the many thousands of man-hours wasted during these meetings throughout the year, and the salary that costs, when I hear a PHB stating that new hardware, software, training, or personnel just aren't in the budget.

So these guys are another SMR company, making High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactors (HTGRs).

The link below lists some of the main players in the SMR space. Notably, X-Power claimed it had achieved criticality for its HTGR in 2021. So perhaps Valar isn't the first, but this isn't my field.

https://c3newsmag.com/five-of-...

This was the path I pursued when I did not get satisfaction from Hilton or the 3rd party. At first, the credit card company (Discover) did issue a credit. They reversed that decision two weeks later. I had several back and forths with them after that. I sent emails that illustrated the window of cancellation for refund, and when the cancellation was sent. I also sent emails, and phone logs showing my attempts to contact the 3rd party, along with those to Hilton. I asked for an explanation as to why they reversed the decision and not honor my request to decline the charge, but I never got an answer.

In the end, big business sided with big business to the surprise of no one. As a result of that, I also paid off the balance on that card and froze the account. So in the end, two companies lost my business because of a $250 refund that absolutely should have happened. And even though I'd never had an issue in the past, I am also far less inclined to book through 3rd parties now even though they offer a discount. I'd rather pay more and work directly. The amount of time and effort spent fighting this was definitely not worth the savings.

As a retired business owner, I always strove to put my customers first. If I chose a contractor who failed to deliver on their obligations, that's on me. I chose to get in bed with that contractor, not my customer, and I clearly made an honest but poor decision. But my business was not enshittified. I wasn't beholden to shareholders or private equity, who's money is made in the margins of declining levels in service, satisfaction, and quality.

Too bad. I recently stayed at a Sonder. It was a little bumpy at first, but the overall experience was decent. I agree this does not look good for Marriott AT ALL. I ran into an issue a few years ago with Hilton. They contracted booking through a third party for a convention. Despite my cancellation nearly six months in advance (well within the posted cancellation policy), the third party would not refund the reservation holding fee (one night). Hilton accepted no responsibility for the vendor they chose to put between me and room. So exercised the only power I have as a consumer.

I have never booked with Hilton, directly or indirectly, since. I likely never will. The rewards card I chose was with a different hotel chain, with which I stay exclusively now. That's 30-ish nights that could have been booked with Hilton, traded for 1 unclaimed night for which I was fully entitled a refund.

Due to democrats trying to ruin our country with their evil thoughts of democracy and freedom, real and accurate news about our government will now come from our state run, officially recognized, Pravda Sotsial'naya...err Truth Social.

Thank you for your loyalty, komrade.

When it comes to writing code, I'm maybe just shy of intermediate...it's not specifically part of my job and most of my coding experience was either in university or from the occasional side project done for fun. I've used AI a bunch recently for coding, again mostly for fun stuff. Right now, I'm using to code in a language I have zero experience in and I've found I spend an enormous amount of time fixing its mistakes. So much time that it's difficult to say if I'm even saving any time over just learning the language slowly and methodically. But a 5x increase in speed? Hell no. Maybe that only comes into play for upper-tier programming?

Can anyone here attest to gaining anywhere close to that level of improvement?

6 years at two different universities. Never once did I experience anything like indoctrination. Not even a gentle nudge.

I think the right sees a liberal bias among students and incorrectly concludes the colleges and universities must be to blame. I think it's more likely though that kids at that age and going through that process are full of hope. The act of getting a degree is driven by hope for a new and better future, and hope is the foundation of the left so kids will naturally gravitate toward a liberal bias.

Fear is the foundation of the right. As people age, elements that stir or instill fear become more of a concern. This is likely because we have offspring to care for and protect, and we have ever-less time to achieve our goals.

Came to say the same! Here's the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This year is their 40th: End Year - Start Year + 1

You may not be counting the initial occurrence.

Wouldn't the direction of spin depend upon which side of the galaxy you are looking from? How do you establish which side is the galaxy is the "correct" side to view it from in order to ascertain clockwise or counter-clockwise? As we have seen for decades, galaxies are oriented in all possible ways as viewed from a stationary point.

Despite what Fox News, Trump, and his Swallowers are telling you, DEI is not affirmative action. Your personal experience may be different, but very few companies are using box-ticking when making hiring decisions. When a company puts DEI verbiage into its HR documentation, it's just a way of stating that they do not discriminate against minorities that are not explicitly defined as a protected by the government. That's it. It's basically virtue signaling and nothing to get outraged over. Companies that do box-ticking hiring don't last and that problem will fix itself.

This is just another right-wing strawman like child-indoctrinating drag shows, cat-eating Haitians, post-birth abortions, and lib's coming for your guns. It's all boogeyman BS used to scare people into action.

Hmm. I'm not sure we're on the same page. My statement was meant to indicate that bringing people back into the office will often reduce the efficiency of those people within the organization. Personal efficiency wasn't something I was considering, or ever consider, when discussing WFH/RTO. Generally speaking, an employee's comfort or happiness is not typically a consideration for most companies in the US, so those are not considerations I place any weight on.

Of course, not all jobs are the same and perhaps two different people will be able to maximize their efficiency in the same career in different locations. I can only speak from my experience. As an app-dev, I am FAR more efficient working from home than at the office. It's not even close. I probably get 15-25% more accomplished when working from home. The office has far too many distractions and time wasting as a culture. This has been true for my last two employers and true for everyone on my teams. You don't have to walk five minutes and up a flight of stairs to go to the conference room. It's not a 3-minute walk to the bathroom. I don't have to put on my coat walk out to my car and drive somewhere just to get lunch. I'm not surrounded by five different people participating in five different conference calls distracting me from my own call since a few thin layers of cardboard in a the cubicle farm aren't going to stop sound waves from propagating. I don't have water cooler drive-bys asking me if I've seen the latest streaming show or the latest insert-tech-or-car.

This has all been well-studied and is well-understood at this point even by Dimon. RTO is mostly a push-back from middle managers who do not know how to provide utility to their employer when the office is empty...and they fear their days are numbered; rightly so I'm sorry to say. It's also, of course, a way to quietly reduce labor without spooking investors.

I'm not an authority on whether this qualifies as double-talk, but stating the workforce needs to be more efficient while simultaneously making many of them less efficient has to come close. It's at least double-talk adjacent.

To truly protect backers, KS would have to change their business model from a place where vendors can pop up a tent and sell their wares, to more of a business planning partner of some kind. One where creators would have to provide documentation/quotes for maximum production, shipping, and fulfillment costs from the involved vendors. And then KS would have to hold that money in escrow from the campaign so that those obligations could be met. There would almost certainly still be projects that would fall through the cracks, but the number would be greatly reduced.

Creators are very, very often, overly optimistic about the turnout they can expect for their project. They will count on 5000 backers when 1500 is the more likely outcome. This means their cost/unit is way higher than anticipated. Shipping and fulfillment are also often deeply miscalculated, and/or could change dramatically between campaign end and fulfillment to the customer.

Successfully delivering on a campaign isn't difficult, but it's really not for people who lack experience or understanding it what it takes to run a business. It's a lot of very careful planning and knowing how to set reasonable minimal expectations. It's about knowing what can go wrong and how much that will cost when it does...because it will. Projects are often run by the creative types who are very good at coming up with a brilliant idea, but awful at running a business.

The most difficult part though, is building your audience before you even think about launch a project on KS. If you want a successful KS campaign, start a YouTube channel 3-4 years beforehand. If nobody sub's to your channel, no one is backing your project.

I sincerely hope that someone buys whatever assets they can from Canoo and builds a real company.

I really liked what they were doing with the pickup truck, but they appeared to be deeply mismanaged and not terribly sure what kind of company they wanted to be. At first it was a subscription model for fleet sales. Then it was selling delivery vans without a sub...something they got a lot of orders for. Then they also introduced the pickup truck...then another one...then announced they weren't planning on selling them despite all the time, effort, and money spent on designing, developing, and marketing them. All the while, the company is paying for CEO Tony Aquila's private jet.

I mean...WTAF? Talk about a top-down failure of leadership! That guy isn't fit to run a lemonade stand.

Someone buy this company, do the fleet sales of delivery vans and after a few years of success, start looking to make those pickups. And fly commercial in coach if you have to fly at all, but better PR would be to road trip with the van.