This comment seemed the most reasonable of all of the first line comments so far.
You could event extend it farther by highlighting that many firms have a VP of Engineering AND a CTO.
In that scenario, the CTO tends to do more "strategic" and "big picture" work and the VPE is who runs the day to day work of managing SWEs, setting standards etc.
But even then, there are many different flavors of that too.
Was a pretty tough rock scramble and men were wearing dress pants, button down shirts and formal shoes.
Then again, I went to grad school with someone who was Orthodox and asked him a similar question as the OP and he said "Well, I don't wear this to play basketball".
> Once you’ve convinced a wealthy person to play at your underground poker table, you’ve already won - just play better poker than them,
This is why in the book Molly's Game [0], the author mentions explicitly that she didn't want professionals in her game.
This b/c her game was seen as a game between "regular/amateur" players who just happened to be famous and/or have a lot of money. This was also DESPITE poker professionals both asking her to play AND offering to give her a stake of their winnings.
Granted, certain players (e.g. Tobey Maguire) were MUCH better than the other players but it seems that didn't matter as long as poker wasn't their primary source of income.
Given that the "percentage of stars with planets" part of the Drake equation has recently been determined to be close to 100%, Panspermia is starting to feel more and more likely.
Something to blow your mind with. The early days in the universe there were millions of years were the average temperature in the universe supported liquid water.
We don't really know. Decades ago we would have said yes, the universe was metal poor (metal being any element heavily than hydrogen). But these days the composition of early stars that we can detect have too much metal too early.
On the one hand, (primitive) life appeared on Earth almost as soon as conditions allowed it.
On the other, the early universe — this particular "warm bath" era — had approximately zero oxygen with which to make water. Right temperature, just (IIRC, but I'm not certain) zero stars yet, so nothing to make things heavier than what came out of Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
>Given that the "percentage of stars with planets" part of the Drake equation has recently been determined to be close to 100%
I'm fully with you that the sheer number of planets is one of, if not the most powerful data point we know for sure, that points toward the plausibility of extraterrestrial life. One thing I haven't heard discussed a whole lot though is, what if it's a tug of war, between a preposterously large number of planets, and a correspondingly preposterously small chance of life, that is every bit as impressively small as the number of planets is impressively big?
For whatever reason, it seems like the default attitude is to treat the sheer volume of planets like they more than compensate for the rarity of life. But what it doesn't work like that? There are different versions of this argument that apply to any life at all, and then to intelligent life, so take your pick for the more interesting question.
But in principle it seems like life, and especially multicellular and even more especially intelligent life, very well could be kind of vanishingly rare that's effectively a match in rareness to the universe's vastness.
I kinda like the optimistic perspective that humanity emerged preposterously early. Like the age of the universe is a mere ~14 billion years. It's basically nothing imo. Star formation is predicted to keep going for about 100 trillion years. So from that perspective we are only about 0.1% of the way through the current cosmic era.
When I think about our genomic complexity and how many neat little things are encoded in there, it's mindboggling to me how quickly it evolved. Like there are so many little wonders in the body. Just a few billion years of throwing shit at the wall?!
all of those theories depend on one assumption, that life and our existence are products of a purely random collision of events.
IMHO, "We don't know" is the only answer to the question of how many planets have life on them or the probability of some forms of live existing somewhere. 0 is as valid as 10^128 until more than one other life supporting planet or moon is found to establish some baseline for speculation. otherwise, we're talking sci-fi here, in which case I think stargate's version seems decent.
There is the old theory about how life is entropy accelerating, and therefore in a grand sense the emergence of life is thermodynamically favored. Though, that says nothing about the absolute chance of it occurring.[1] Our observable universe is far from infinite.
[1] Though maybe it does speak to life tending toward evolving more complex, energy consuming systems, and its propensity to spread out into the universe.
The limits of CGI have gotten so good that if you are noticing the CGI, it's b/c someone skimped on the budget for the particular movie where you saw the uncanny valley.
(Of course, excluding the obvious "that guy just knocked down a building!" CGI)
So I once brought down an alerting system using Excel
(btw, this story is more about unintended consequences instead of MSFT)
- I own an alerting system
- For log based alerts, it looks for a keyword e.g. "alert_log"
- I make a spreadsheet to track data about alerts and call one of the sheets "alert_log"
- Alert system starts going crazy: using tons of CPU, number of alerts processed goes through the roof but not a lot of alerts generated
- Turns out that I was using the cloud version of Excel so any text entered transited the firewall
- Firewall logs store the text "alert_log"
- Alert system thinks it's an alert BUT it's not a real alert so triggers an alert processing alert
- That second alert contains the text from the firewall log and so cycle begins
In other words, systems can operate in weird ways and then cause things to happen you didn't anticipate. It's why things like audits, red teaming and defense in depth all matter.
Isn't there a similar mechanism but for the case where you lost ALL of your documents e.g. in a house fire.
IIRC, you need a couple of people to sign affidavits that affirm you are who you say you are. That's the start of the "paper trail" and then you start rebuilding your document pool.
Getting married and changing your last name is similar (although with fewer documents etc).
Consider the case of foreign-born Americans living overseas who have lost all of their documents get new US documents. How does the US government distinguish them from a random person in that country impersonating the same?
It is more involved than just affidavits. The US uses databases on every citizen, some not formally acquired, that can be used to "duck type" individual identity. An affidavit is primarily used to bootstrap the entity resolution process. With only a couple touch points they can reconstruct identity with high probability. It may feel like a "trust me bro" process but it really isn't.
It is related to how the provided information on credit applications is not used to inform the creditor. They already have access to all of this information and are more interested in if your representation matches what they already know.
Walmart executives seem to claim that the pay raise led to those outcomes; specifically, they talked to employees and realized that in order to get those outcomes they had to stop paying people the least they possibly could because why would anyone stay?
From the article:
> Rissa Pittman, then a store manager in Ponca City, Okla., said it was easier to staff her store after 2015 as wages improved and it became easier to train workers for promotions.
Walmart has been building a fairly robust EX program in the last few years, increasing associate engagement to drive CX and hence business outcomes.
It's likely not just pay, but a concerted effort across the board that drives results, but the pay increase is the one that calls WallStreet's attention.
I'd say it's higher, because it makes a lot of sense that if you pay your employees more they are more likely to stay around, put in more effort, not steal merchandise, etc. Not to mention it probably increases the pool of prospective employees you can choose from.
The summer shade makes sense, but a tree without leaves in the winter does not provide more sunlight than no tree at all.
We could also talk about the potential for the roots of the tree crawling under the foundation and wrecking it or the tree itself falling on the roof of the house.
But it is a very nice quote if you don't think too much about it.
Any tree will eventually extend roots beneath your foundation and do damage. They will shift and crack the foundation (unless you use pillar construction), break pipes and structures and will penetrate your sewer lines. If you're lucky you will kill them before they do any severe damage.
Though it sounds absurd, rather than a tree, it might be better to put up a shade (i.e., two poles and a sail cloth between them) to block the lith/heat. It would definitely be cheaper than having a tree although your neighbors might not like it.
A tree must be trimmed annually once it reaches a certain size; eventually it must be removed. But then a new problem arises: the dying tree roots, which extend entirely across and below the land, and which had previously remained placidly underground and invisible, now begin to rot, swell and rise irregularly everywhere. They thrust upward at random ruining the lawn's former level appearance. You can no longer mow your lawn: the lawnmower strikes the rising roots and either breaks the blade or the lawnmower stalls. The surface is no longer level. You can let your lawn lie fallow for 20 more years until the roots rot completely or...
... you pay someone enough to remove all the roots and fill them in with soil, then re-level and re-sod the lawn. That likely triples the cost of removal.
Trees look great - from a distance.
It is a tribute to the old "pier and beam" construction techniques that their use evades these problems somewhat by allowing you to raise/lower the piers in response to tree growth/intrusion, thus maintaining a level house (so your grandkids can play marbles on the wood floor in the living room).
Root barriers may be a reasonable solution too, but they must be maintained. I am unfamiliar with their success rate.
I recently saw an 11-story high-rise whose foundation is endangered by the "nice trees" that were planted at its base to form a park for the building's inhabitants decades ago. The trees are moving everything: the building, the streets around the building, *everything!! Imagine having bought a condo in that buiding! What a disaster.
How long is eventually, because in the Pacific Northwest, there are 100ft+ trees every which way and lots of houses built in between them. I have never heard of this lawn issue, nor any foundations ruined by the trees (not planted directly next to the house).
Lots of houses have decorative maples/plums/cherry/crabapples/fig in their front yard within 30ft of the foundation. I thought the rule of thumb was roots go as far as the circumference of the tree branches.
My experience is mostly in the southeast region of Texas where the land is flat and fertile. This would be considered good farmland by most people. It is in these regions, separated by mostly pine forests, that I have seen considerable housing development.
Pricier homes of the Pacific Northwest are usually well-clear of the larger trees that challenge foundations. And I'm sure they're usually built by people knowledgeable about tree intrusion. By well-clear I mean half a football field away. I don't know about more densely-populated areas.
Smaller decorative trees are not usually a problem but nonetheless are best kept away from structures. It's the "nice old 50-year old oak tree" or the "30-year old pine tree" that is within 20 feet that will ruin your lawn and house.
I have a neighbor who simultaneously removed an oak tree from his back yard and a rather large young pine from his front yard ~12 years ago. The back yard is just starting to settle down. The front still looks bad. He mows his lawn in shifts: part at a time until he tires. During the rainy season you can still easily trace the oak tree's rotting roots as they steer the rainwater through the back yard. He saws and hacks at the roots, trying to keep the general flow toward the front yard and the street (as drainage is supposed to be in these neighborhoods). I know that he would be happier with a simple flat backyard of grass for his grandchildren to play on.
Every old tree near our lovely family home eventually had to be removed. This, despite the classic pier-and-beam construction. The shifting had gone too far to adjust the piers. It was time to adjust the trees: and my father, being an engineer, had to run the operation himself.
What an eye-opener that was: who knew that when an inch-thick braided steel cable holding an oak tree in suspension as it is sawed down could break, whip backward, slash and tear a 3-inch deep by 3-foot wound across the side of an even-larger pecan tree in less than the blink of an eye? Thank God no one was standing in the open area when the cable broke!
> Pricier homes of the Pacific Northwest are usually well-clear of the larger trees that challenge foundations.
That's not an accurate explanation. In the PNW, in many cities, older more expensive neighborhoods tend to have more trees, not less. It's a serious equity issue, given the heat island effect.
The difference in foundation damage is because of soil profiles, not planting behaviors. We don't tend to have expansive soils around here. Take away the clay and you lose the hydrological forces which allow tree root to inhabit previously occupied pores.
Trees get a lot of blame, unfairly, for damage due to clay and expansive soils.
In Texas, the damage due to "roots" is not due to tree growth alone, it's the desiccation and rehydration of clay that's the problem. Very similar to frost jacking of walls in Northern climates
That hasn't been my experience with many trees and homes. Lots of people live with trees around - maybe most people who are in houses. I don't personally know of anyone with these problems, though I've heard of things like it.
Maybe the tree doesn't need to be right next your structure?
> A tree must be trimmed annually once it reaches a certain size; eventually it must be removed.
Trees reach a certain size, grow old and then they die. You either remove them or let their parts fall.
We have a nearly 50-year-old oak in our backyard. It is dying. Limbs are falling off it. We trim it. But it WILL die. We will dismantle it in an orderly manner rather than wait for a hurricane to hurl its parts into neighborhood homes.
There are methods for cultivating otherwise large-growth trees. I've seen them in French literature. Roughly they trim the tree each year and limit its above-ground height to human height. The trunk is allowed to grow significantly thick and branches are limited in length. I do not recall the name of the technique but IIrc it is primarily used in growing fruit.
I see neighborhoods filled with large-growth trees which are not tended at all, generally speaking. The evidence doesn't match the theory.
Yes trees fall, and so does every building and everything else under the Sun, which itself will die. Trees have long lives, centuries for many. That's a pretty minor risk. Buildings need maintenance too.
It is a peculiarity of how houses are built in Texas. A lot of Texas has clay a few feet underground. This clay soil is vulnerable to trees sucking up water which leads to foundation issues. Some homes have root retarders to prevent this. https://www.texasinspector.com/files/Structural-Slabs-FPA-SC...
Another Texas problem is that the sewer gray water line is placed relatively shallow. I had neighbors who to pay a crew of dudes shoveling like mad to unearth the sewer line so the plumber can repair it. The most common reason was roots from a large tree. https://www.metroflowplumbing.com/detecting-and-preventing-t...
A similar tirade can be made about rain, wind, sunshine, heat and cold. Entropy happens. I think the nature of what you're saying isn't universal. Different style foundations, different kinds of ground and different kinds of trees will mean different things. Some issues can be avoided with minimal foresight. Some won't happen for decades at which point the balance of benefit vs cost comes into question. Some issues are really just expectations that many would consider unnecessary, like having a flat lawn.
Where I live in the Midwest, trees around houses is incredibly common. I wouldn't want to live in a neighborhood without them.
Yes! Search for a house without a tree in a neighborhood full of trees. Enjoy!
Having a flat lawn may be unnecessary, but generally, most people want a lawn that a lawnmower can cross w/o self-destructing [or that their oft-drunken uncle can walk across after dark without tripping on a root and passing before his time.]
A lawnmower blade is usually not adequate for a 4-inch root knuckle risen from the depths - that requires a chain saw. But then you're chain-sawing in dirt, mud and root, so neither safe nor easy. This is a contest the homeowner cannot win, merely survive.
And no good reason not to, generally. Our house is elevated on 18 concrete piers, anchored onto the bedrock - because the soil is shallow and not stable. We have trees growing inches from the house.
> Any tree will eventually extend roots beneath your foundation and do damage. They will shift and crack the foundation (unless you use pillar construction), break pipes and structures and will penetrate your sewer lines. If you're lucky you will kill them before they do any severe damage.
And yet this isn't a problem anywhere else in the world.
You could event extend it farther by highlighting that many firms have a VP of Engineering AND a CTO.
In that scenario, the CTO tends to do more "strategic" and "big picture" work and the VPE is who runs the day to day work of managing SWEs, setting standards etc.
But even then, there are many different flavors of that too.
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