It sounds to me like the flight was successful, nothing blew up that they did not intend to. They did intend for it to crash into the ocean as It did.

I'm not sure why they didn't catch the booster however, as they seem to have figured that out and done it many times.

If these hydrocarbons replace other hydrocarbons that are no longer dug out of the ground, this is a net reduction.

Does anybody know if this product could be used to make more plastic? That would reduce the CO2 output. Also making plastic does produce waste CO2, so maybe it would be more like crude > CO2+PVC > petrol > CO2+PVC > ...

Nobody ever suggested trying solar on the surface of the moon (the nights are too long). You are making things up, which is why people get called shills. Also disingenuous attempts to discredit batteries and electric vehicles even though they can be charged by nukes as well as solar, because you think some requirement that hydrocarbons be synthesized will force nukes to be used.

Why is "nuclear energy off the table"?

But anyway it is pretty obvious that solar and wind have a serious overcapacity problem in order to deal with variation in wind/sun, and it is plausible that this excess energy could be used to sequester CO2. A nuke could also provide energy to do this (most likely not because it was built much larger than necessary, but because demand for electricity varies and it has to be built large enough for the maximum).

This isn't "synthesizing hydrocarbon fuels" the plastic was originally created from hydrocarbon fuels and a lot of the chemical bonds are still there.

I agree that actual synthesis is incredibly inefficient and worthless, unless perhaps you are at war and the enemy has sunk all your refueling tankers, or you are stranded on Mars and need to refill your spaceship. That is the only two cases any proponents have ever come up with where it might be worth it.

I'm starting a new venture, all by myself, to design an AI that will assist people in differentiating between Solo entrepreneurs, Han Solo, and Solo drinking cups when they are mentioned online. I'm ready to go, just gimme my VC capital! What, you won't do that? You must be biased against Solo!!!!!

Current management agrees with you. My experience is that mixing the roles can work extremely well in the right situations, and that those situations are fairly common in software companies.

Also one nit: It doesn't make sense to talk about a tech lead or staff or principle engineer above them. Tech lead is a team role, not a level. A tech lead can be any level. Typically they're at least a Senior SWE, though they can be anything up to and including a Fellow, if they're the technical lead for a project team.

That's the appealingly-cynical view, but it's not really correct.

Of course keeping payroll down is important if the business is going to remain profitable, but the other piece of the profitability puzzle is productivity, and in this case that's the more important piece. Raises and promotions are limited because if they weren't there would be no financial motivation for good job performance, because why wouldn't you just give raises and promotions to everyone, or at least everyone you like? Creating that motivation is why raises and promotions exist. The best way to keep payroll as small as possible is not to give any raises or promotions. The best employees will leave and you'll be dealing with a continual treadmill of cheap replacements, of which only the worst would stay, and productivity would be in the toilet, but it would minimize payroll.

No, the reason for giving raises and promotions is the same reason that raises and promotions must be limited: to create an incentive for high performance, and to be very specific, an incentive for outperforming other employees.

In Google, and most large companies, peer feedback is the largest part of the evaluation, so helping everyone else is almost certain to generate lots of good feedback... though if you do it so much that you don't get your own work done and that causes problems for your peers, you will get that negative feed back, too.

As to your question about defending their reports... what alternative approach would you suggest? Let the manager just decide without anyone testing those decisions? Not only would that give managers way too much power, it would result in the corporate equivalent of grade inflation. Why wouldn't I just always rate all of my employees outstanding, except those I dislike and want to fire? There needs to be some pushback, to ensure that the standards are applied as fairly and as accurately as possible. Bonus, raise and promotion budgets are all finite, both because money is finite and because there needs to be some scope for rewarding performance.

A common (perhaps near-universal) strategy is to define a curve and require that curve to be applied at the level of a large-ish organization, say, several hundred employees. Among a large population, you'll have all levels of performers, ranging from those who need to improve or be let go to those who exceed all reasonable expectations. Experience shows what the percentages of each typically are, so, you define a "grading" curve and require that the ratings allocated roughly follow that curve, with any exceptions well-justified.

But, inevitably, because managers generally like their reports and want to reward them, you end up with too many people with top ratings, and this is where the manager has to be able to defend the rating they think their report deserves in a meeting with all the other managers who need to defend the ratings they think their reports deserve. So, the group talks through each case one by one, discussing the details of the individuals' work and the contents of their peer feedback, trying to achieve consensus. Ideally, you want to get consensus rather than decide by voting, because voting tends to produce horse trading (I'll vote for yours if you'll vote for mine, etc.). But either way, the group has to produce a set of decisions that align with the expected curve, or (more often), a set of decisions that mostly aligns with the curve plus documented rationale for the borderline cases.

Promotions require a similar process, except instead of a curve there's a promotion budget; only so many promotions are available.

If this all sounds tedious and time-consuming, it absolutely is. But it's necessary to achieve a semblance of fairness and accuracy in the application of the performance rubric for each job level.

Interesting that they had great efficiencies with PVC wire - presumably, at this stage, just the PVC coating on wire.

One of the big hang-ups for recycling wires for the copper has been seperating the copper from the covering, often PVC. There are all kinds of processes for trying to do that economically, but it's still a challenge. Copper doesn't react with HCL, so if they could run this process on a pile of scrap wiring, they should end up with gasoline and copper; a valuable by-product of the recycling.

I noticed a lot of movement of the Ship flaps during the video, but then I saw this which captured the ship attitude angle-of-attack (attitude) during the flight. This is the kind of testing that they did, even on a flight where they desperately needed success:
https://twitter.com/mcrs987/status/1960724698825707659
No, that's not unintended tumbling - that's the flight profile that they intended to fly.

The fact that it survived that, with intentionally missing tiles and some flap damage, is a true testament to it's resilience....

Neither, really. They didn't eliminate jobs so much as make new rules that mostly eliminated the "Tech Lead / Manager" (TLM) role.

There used to be a lot of software engineers (people on the software engineer job ladder, as opposed to the engineering manager job ladder) who had 2-3 people reporting to them and were considered TLMs. These people divided their time between engineering work and management. Google made a new rule that every manager has to have at least 5 direct reports. This rule has flattened the hierarchy by mostly eliminating TLMs, who all had to decide whether to lose the "TL" part and be a pure manager or lose the "M" part and be a pure SWE. Well, "pure" is too strong. Some SWE managers still keep their hands in the code but they generally don't have time for significant projects.

Is this an improvement? Dunno. There are pros and cons. The TLM role has some significant benefits to a company. It enables the existence of small, close-knit teams where the team's manager is also the pre-eminent expert in the area. Being managed by the expert has a lot of advantages for the reports, especially when it comes time for the manager to defend the team's performance ratings or promotions, because the manager deeply understands their work. It has advantages for the company, too, because in a small team led by the project expert it's impossible for low-performing employees to hide their low performance or blame it on others.

On the other hand, TLMs can end up overwhelmed by the administrative overhead. This can cause them to be less effective as managers because they don't navigate the system on behalf of their employees as effectively. Some of them may not be very good at defending their reports' ratings and promotions because they don't have the skills to do that, even though they deeply understand the team's contributions. It can also definitely make them less effective as SWEs, and these people were generally top-performing ICs (individual contributors) before taking a manager role. Some might argue that any time they spend on management rather than engineering is a waste of their talents.

Pure engineering managers can be and often are better managers. Better at helping their reports develop important non-technical skills and knowledge and better at working the system for their reports. And some top-performing SWEs are such excellent managers that even as good as they are at building stuff, their positive impact as managers is larger yet.

From the upper management perspective, there's another advantage: Fewer managers to train and manage. Managing managers is harder in many ways than managing engineers, because the output of managers is harder to measure and evaluate. Also, managers are officers of the company which attaches greater legal and PR risk to their actions. Having fewer of them to manage is beneficial.

(Saving money isn't really a benefit, at least not the way Google does it. SWEs who also manage people don't get paid any more than SWEs who don't, holding all else constant.)

On balance, I don't think either approach is ideal, and the best strategy is probably a dynamic balance between them that mostly favors managers being managers (though with the rule that all managers must have been highly competent SWEs) and SWEs being SWEs, but with plenty of scope for exceptions where a project needs a small team of 3-4 people and there's a clear leader with deep technical ability and good people skills.

Anyway, Google has pushed the pendulum away from TLMs and as a result there are many fewer managers, and each manager tends to have a larger team.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I used to be a TLM but opted to switch back to an IC role years ago, before the rule change.)

Previous comments have been drawing analogies to Black Mirror, but this "idea" goes back much further...

...This is an episode of Max Headroom (US version).

Specifically, S02E02: "Deities." A company claims to be able to bring past loved ones back to "life" as an AI, for a modest recurring fee. But Bryce (the creator of Max Headroom) opines they can't possibly have the compute power to do it, as it requires a large mainframe just to run Max's highly flawed, glitching bust.

Wouldn't surprise me if the "visionaries" behind this saw that episode, and saw an opportunity to fleece gullible rubes.

Or vice-versa. It is increasingly hard to figure out which way the partisanship will go. IMHO this started with masks for COVID, which initially were a right-wing thing (there were plenty of posts saying you don't have to shut stores if everybody wore masks) and at least to me seemed to be a right-wing thing while "free to live my own life" is more left-wing. Yet it came out exactly reversed, probably because some idiot expressed their own opinion rather than the party line.

I agree that if either party makes any kind of statement on this, the other party will be forced to say the exact opposite, and both will come up with convoluted explanations as to why they are right and why it matches their general logic.