~Things people don’t want to know~
Putting a layer of tissue between your butt and the toilet seat doesnt provide enough of a barrier against microorganisms over the time it takes to shit or piss to prevent transmission.
Keeping the air dry reduces both the length of time microorganisms can live outside your body and the length of time that vapor particles can harbor them.
The n95 (and other) rating(s) are over time in free, circulating, open air. Derate safe exposure time sharply for use inside or in spaces with stagnant or unmoving air.
Keeping the air dry reduces both the length of time microorganisms can live outside your body and the length of time that vapor particles can harbor them.
Pretty sure this is only true for some microorganisms. Well, I’m not sure about length of survival time, but I’ve definitely see studies that have shown that lower humidity causes respiratory droplet evaporation, resulting in more airborne virus particles and increasing spread. There is some evidence that this increases infection rates
I mean yes you’re right but also most microorganisms that cause disease die quickly without their little droplets and particles to cling to.
On the other hand, procedure masks rely on those droplets to be the microorganism carriers that they can more easily stop instead of falling back on electrostatic attraction as the lil guys float through em.
In conclusion, infectious disease is a land of contrasts and while hospitals can rely on technologically advanced hvac systems to maintain a narrow range of temperature and humidity that represents a trade off between reduced micro environments, reduced airborne transmission and safely storing all their poultices and potions, normal people need to just do our best and maybe should accept the reduced mold and microorganisms over all in exchange for more chance of airborne transmission when cleaning our homes and workplaces (which are all fucked if there’s airborne transmission anyway because no one has appropriate air cleaners in their home or workplace).
Idiots. The toilet seat tissue layer doesn’t do anything, that’s why I lick the seat clean first. Saliva has antimicrobial properties, use your brain.
How about TWO layers of tissue? Checkmate, scientists.
Signed, the toilet seat nest-builders of the world.
If you’re able to hold it long enough and you’re truly worried, folding a wet paper towel over a couple of times and using the hand soap to clean the seat and then folding it over again to get a “rinse” before you sit down is a better way to go about it.
“I’m worried about germs on the toilet seat”
“Well, they gave you paper towels, soap and running water, why not clean the motherfucker?”
“Nah, imma just put the thinnest material known to man in between my butt and the seat”
Most public bathroom tissue is exactly one molecule thick.
If you’re going to take advice on what to use to protect your butt from a toilet seat, taking advice from bloodfart is the best option.
Try a dozen. Public toilet paper is the thinnest substance known to man.
I like to put shiny things in my nest.
There is no financial motive for software to work well. The people who sign the check for it almost never have to use it.
That is true for outsourcing companies, but not true for product companies usually.
I think it’s equally true for product companies. Do you know how hard it is to get a company to prioritize bug fixing over feature work? Shy of a user revolt, or a friend of the CEO reporting an issue, bugs are almost always second priority or lower.
I’d say this strongly depends on the industry.
In an entertainment or ad sales product, I’d completely agree with you.
In a medical or financial product, the bug will take precedence.
Not in my experience. Unless maybe if it causes loss of funds or other security issues, which usually get a fair response.
You wish it was like that in the medical industry, but it absolutely is not
Medical? Your funny. Healthcare software is the worst. There is a reason the stuff that matters is decades old. Cause the new stuff rarely works. And the rest… tell me again why I have to fill out the same forms year after year, and they never populate with my previous answers? Or why I have to tell them my 2 year old son isn’t menstruating or hasn’t stolen a car yet (on the same form no less). The software is so hard to use the providers have given up.
But not at the software companies that require monthly subscriptions, right? They get money every month, so they have lots of incentive to fix all the bugs. Right? … Right? /s
depends on how bad and widespread the bug is. Also if there are just to many they will do a bug squashing program increment. at least places I have worked have.
No idea what you are talking about. Product companies are exactly what I am referring to. Some director signs off on the purchase, probably has never even seen the software. But he has seen the sales pitch. That is what the C suite of small companies are for, mingling with the decision makers.
I mean that describes most things. For example, if I worked for a dentist to make oral braces for people, that doesn’t mean I myself am going to ever need or use them.
No… the decision maker on the purchase is the user in that case. For software, the decision maker is almost always someone who won’t use it. Like ticket tracking software. The people filing the tickets, and the people responding are not the people who decided which ticket tracking software to buy.
That’s where you need people like me who give a fuck about nothing but customer experience and if my employer manages to make a buck, good for them. My employer is generally just a middle man who siphons money out of both our pockets. And makes me fill out a second, useless timesheet while you’re paying me to work.
Jokes on me though because I’ve been out of work for 3 months, so take my suggestion of fuck your employer with a grain of salt.
Depends on business model. Saas - quality is very important. Non-profit insurance/bureaucratic type - they’ll burn millions to hire plenty of QA then treat them like shit, ignore them, and push trash software all day
Quality is meaningless in SaaS. Only features matter.
False. Have a 70% up time and let me know how many clients you have left.
Uptime isn’t quality. Perf and reliability are easily faked with the right metrics. It’s trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user
Uptime indicates reliability. Reliability is a factor of quality. A quality product has a high uptime. What good is a solution that doesn’t work 20% of the time? That’s exactly how you lose clients. Why do SLAs cover topics like five 9s uptime if they don’t matter and can be faked? This makes no sense.
You said quality doesn’t matter, only features. Ok, what happens when those features only work 10% of the time? It doesn’t matter as long as it has the feature? This is nonsense. I mean why does QA even exist then, what is the point of wasting spend on a team that only worries about quality, they are literally called Quality Assurance. Why do companies have those if quality doesn’t matter, why not just hire more eng to pump out features. Again, this makes no sense. Anyone who works in software would know the role of QA and why it’s important. You claim to work in tech, but seem to not understand the value of QA which makes me suspicious, that or you’ve just been a frontline dev and never had to worry about these aspects of management and the entire SDLC. I mean why is tracking defects a norm in software dev if quality doesn’t matter? Your whole stance just makes no sense.
It’s trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user
No it’s not trival. What if “not working well” means you can’t save or type? Not working well means not working as intended, which means it does not satisfy the need that it was built to fill. You can have the feature to save, but if it only works half the time then according to you that’s fine. You might lose your work, but the feature is there, who cares about the quality of the feature… If it only saves sometimes or corrupts your file, those are just quality issues that no one cares about, they are “trivial?”
See, you just set the bar so low. Being able to save isn’t working well, it’s just working. And I have held the title of QA in the past. It is in part how I know these things. And in the last 5 years or so, companies have been laying off QAs and telling devs to do the job. Real QA is hard. If it really mattered you would have multiple QA people per dev. But the ratio is always the other way. A QA can’t test the new feature and make sure ALL the old ones still work at the rate a dev can turn out code. Even keeping up on features 1 to 1 would be really challenging. We have automation to try and keep up with the old features, but that needs to be maintained as well. QA is always a case of good enough. And just like at Boeing, managment will discourage QAs from reporting everything they find that is wrong. Because they don’t want a paper trail of them closing the ticket as won’t be fixed. I’ve been to QA conferences and listened to plenty of seasoned QAs talk about the art of knowing what to report and what not to. And how to focus effort on what management will actually ok to get fixed. It’s a whole art for a reason. I was encouraged to shift out of that profession because my skills would get much better pay, and more stable jobs, in dev ops. And my job is sufficiently obscure to most management that I can actually care about the users of what I write more. But also I get to see more metrics that show how the software fails it’s users while still selling. I have even been asked to produce metrics that would misrepresent the how well the software works for use in upper level meetings. And I have heard many others say the same. Some have said that is even a requirement to be a principle engineer in bigger companies. Which is why I won’t take those jobs. The “good enough” I am witness/part of is bad enough, I don’t want to increase it anymore.
I’m setting a new low sure, and you’re moving the goal posts. What “well” means is incredibly subjective.
You worked in QA, cool, and I’ve manage the entire R&D org of a nation wide company, including all of QA.
Your saying that since companies don’t invest in it enough it doesn’t matter at all? Why do they even invest at all then, if it truly doesn’t matter.
Yes a QA can test old features and keep up with new ones. WTF, have you never heard of a regression test suite? And you worked in QA? ok. Maybe acknowledging AQA is an entire field might solve that already solved problem.
You did a whole lot of complaining and non relevant stories but never answered any questions I’ve been asking you across multiple comments…
Yeah no. Performance, reliability, uptime are huge.
Uptime isn’t quality. Perf and reliability are easily faked with the right metrics. It’s trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user.
Uptime is quality. It’s why uptime is in SLAs. A quality product isn’t down half the time.
Opinions like that are why software quality sucks. And why using software is so painful for most people. “I have to use a stroller to set my phone number on the UI.” “Sure, but uptime if 5 9’s, so it’s quality software”.
If they do a bad enough job they’ll create a niche for a competitor to fill.
I would love to see exactly how many people dropped Adobe after the latest drama, I would bet it would look exactly like the Netflix micro dip after shutting down password sharing.
No one that works in the industry is going to drop Adobe, because there’s no other functional alternative that offers an even remotely similar feature set. A lot of the files I get from clients are .ai (Illustrator) or .indd (InDesign) files, and I have to use the appropriate programs to open them, and the most up-to-date versions of those programs, or else I end up missing parts of their files.
Users that are 100%, fully independent don’t have to worry about any of that. But those people are rare.
That’s why a lot of us are here after all.
That’s a dream. The googles and such just buy them out and shut them down. There is always a bigger fish that spends more money preserving the status quo than making a product.
True - that’s a big reason I like open source software. Doesn’t help with search though.
I don’t really get this point. Of course there’s a financial motive for a lot of software to work well. There are many niches of software that are competitive, so there’s a very clear incentive to make your product work better than the competition.
Of course there are cases in which there’s a de-facto monopoly or customers are locked in to a particular offering for whatever reason, but it’s not like that applies to all software.
I support accounting professionals using one of perhaps four or five highly complex pieces of software that handles individual, corp, trust, and other misc tax forms
The churn rate is very low YoY, because it’s what they know. They have the freedom to move their data, and we will help them to the extent possible, but at most they’ll get a subset of client data and lose the ability to query agai t prior year datasets, etc.
They’re not locked in, but between 10/15 and, say, 2/15 is a damn short time to implement and learn a new piece of software with that level of complexity.
Interestingly, I’ve never seen a long-standing calculation bug in the program. The overwhelming majority of support is d/t user error or data entry error. From that standpoint, there is of course a financial incentive for it to work well - arithmetic errors would be unacceptable - but in terms of UI/UX, no one cares and if anything were improved folks would just whine about the change anyway - even if it made their life easier
Not a CPA/not your CPA, just a software guy who got lucky enough to be in the right time/place when I decided I didn’t have the energy for the startup world anymore.
Software just has to be good enough that people put up with it. Once you get users on the system, you make it difficult to move your data out which acts as a lock in mechanism. The company that can make a minimally usable product that people are willing to put up with will typically beat one making a really good product that takes longer to get to market.
To wit, WorkDay is universally regarded as trash. But companies keep writing checks, so employees on both sides of the time clock have to keep tolerating it
Another aspect of the problem is that people making the decision of what programs to use don’t actually have to use them.
As long as the reports that the C-suite gets look pretty, that’s all that matters. Have seen that one from both sides.
“I need five developer hours to implement a UI for this manual process that is time sensitive and exposes us to significant risk if we screw it up. Oh, and I’m the only one who knows how to do it in prod, so we have a bus problem.”
“Nah, I want reports…. Wait, why did we write an HO4 policy in Corpus Christie, AFTER the hurricane warning was issued?”
“See above, and prioritise things that matter.”
yup
When the buyer isn’t the user (which is most of the time), no there isn’t. Competitors try to win with great sounding features and other marketing BS because that is all the director will see. The users are then left with the product that has all the bells and whistles, but is terrible at doing what actually needs to be done. And the competition is the same, so they don’t really have much choice. Bell’s and whistles are cheaper than making it work well.
So you’re talking about SaaS / business tooling then? Again though, that’s just one of many segments of software, which was my point.
Also, even in that market it’s just not true to say that there’s no incentive for it to work well. If some new business tool gets deployed and the workforce has problems with it to the point of measurable inefficiency, of course that can lead to a different tool being chosen. It’s even pretty common practice for large companies to reach out to previous users of a given product through consultancy networks or whatever to assess viability before committing to anything.
I mean, no? If you are at a SaaS company the software working well is the most important aspect. Loss of quality leads to loss of subscribers.
Subscribers? 90 some odd % of SaaS is sold to businesses, not individuals.
Yah, clients are subscribers
Okay then the users aren’t subscribers, thier boss or the boss above that are. And that person doesn’t really care how hard it is to use. They care about the presentation they gave to other leadership about all the great features the software has. And if they drop it now, they look like a fool, so deal with it.
They do care, %100 they care. If you take longer to do task X because the SaaS solution crashes or is unavailable, or causes issues in finance, or a dozen other things then the company will very much care. I literally work at a SaaS company and hear complaints from clients. Money is all that matters, if your solution isn’t as good at making/saving them money as another solution, you get dropped. And reliability is a big part of that. A solution that frequently has issues is not a money-making/saving system that can be relied on.
It’s not about looking like a fool; it’s about what your P&L looks like. That’s what actually matters. Say you made a nice slide deck about product X and got buy-in. Walking that back is MUCH easier to do than having to justify a hit to your P&L.
What experience do you have to be making these claims?
I have 30 years of work experience on both sides of the equation with companies of varying size. Once a company gets to somewhere between 500 and 1000 employees, the 2nd level managment starts to attract professionally ambitious people who prioritize thier career over the work to a more a more extreme degree. They never walk anything back. Every few years they will often replace a solution (even a working one) so that they can take credit for a major change. Anyway, you get enough of these and they start to back each other and squeeze out anyone who cares about the work. I have been told in one position that it doesn’t matter if you are right, you don’t say anything negative about person X’s plan. And many other people from other companies and such have echoed that over the years. Now small companies often avoid this. But most software targets the big companies for the big paydays. Of the ones I have worked at, some even openly admitted that financially they couldn’t justify fixing a user issue over a new feature that might sell more product because the user issues don’t often lead to churn, where as new features often seal a deal.
You seem to be basing how the entire industry works on some people you’ve encountered who want to climb the ladder. Again, when you stand in front of a board and have to justify your EBITDA, it doesn’t matter how good your PowerPoint slide was. They don’t have to walk it back, the P&L is numbers, they have to justify those numbers or deal with not hitting budget. A company runs off numbers not initiatives people want to push.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that you have to report metrics to investors. Spend, rev, output, etc. And a poor SaaS solution that has poor quality negatively impacts those numbers. Numbers don’t lie, no matter how much spin you put on them. You say you have 30 years of experience both consuming and delivering SaaS solutions but seem to ignore that you have defended your P&L and your performance, all numbers, not office politics. Investors only care about money, dollars and cents, numbers. So what happens when solution X that Bob pushed and no one can talk bad about tanks your topline, or your EBITDA? Then what? You tell the board not to say anything bad about it? That just doesn’t make sense.
And if the business needs aren’t met, said businesses will go to another SaaS company that promises them a better, brighter future.
The user might not be the subscriber, but the user being less productive because the software is getting in their way, will irritate the subscriber.
I know a SaaS company that put thousands upon thousands of engineering hours into making small (and sometimes large) optimizations over their overall crappy architecture so their enterprise customers (and I’m talking ~6 out of the top 10 largest companies in one industry in the US) wouldn’t leave them for a solution that doesn’t freeze up for all users in a company when one user runs a report. Each company ran in a silo of their own, but for the bigger ones… I’m not going to give exact numbers, but if you give every user a total of half an hour of unnecessary delays per day, that’s like 500 hours of wasted time per day per 1000 employees. Said employees were performing extremely overpriced services, so 500 hours of wasted time per day might be something like 100k income lost per day. Not an insignificant number even for billion dollar companies.
I’ve since left the company for greener pastures and I hear the new management sucks, but the old one for sure knew that they were going to lose their huge ass clients over performance issues and bugs.
The key phrase was work well. You are saying they have a motive for it to work. Like not freeze up. I am saying they have no motive for it to work well. As in be user friendly or efficient or easy to use.
Ok, well really splitting hairs on what “working well” means but ok. Why do UX designers exist? I mean if you have a bad UI that takes a user 10 min to do something that can be done in 10 seconds in another solution, you lose. Time is money. Anyone who has ever been in magament knows it’s all about cost vs output. If a call center employee can handle 2x more cases with another solution due to a better UX, they will move to that.
You are saying efficiency doesn’t matter, which is just %100 false. A more efficient solution makes/saves more money. It saves time, which is also money and improves agility of the team. How can you say with a straight face that a business doesn’t care about efficiency of it’s workers…
Because I have worked with software for 30 years. When the employee is salaried, thier time costs nothing. I will say I have no experience with call centers. So those may be an exception. I believe the majority of computer use jobs are salary though.
Ugh, wrong again. Time is money. People have limited bandwidth and output, you want to get at much output as you can for the salary spend while realizing each person has a finite output. You keep saying things like “time costs nothing” and “quality doesn’t matter” which are just completely wrong and if true would upend the industry.
Also I’ve been in software for just over 20, the last 4 of those as a CTO. Since you seem to keep bringing up your credentials for some reason.
It still worked - you could use the software with occasional hiccups, it’s not like there was data loss or anything. It just didn’t work WELL.
Found the Sonos employee.
Sonos has pissed me off. After the latest update, the app cannot locate the speakers in any of my rooms. The TV speakers still work with a signal from the TV, but the speakers in all other rooms basically cannot be used.
I’ve factory reset them, set them up in the app, and as soon as that is done, they disappear from the app again.
They worked fine for years, then this bullshit. I’m researching a home theater setup that doesn’t use Sonos and am planning on selling it all once I’ve found replacements.
It feels like I don’t own the very expensive hardware that I have bought. I guess since they are software controlled, I really dont.
This is why Dog Fooding is important.
It just sort of sinks down. You have two ways of manipulation, the cable the camera uses for power and data and the attached rope. Between those two you sort of puppeteer/swim it into place. It actually works out pretty good and some people are real pro at it.
With the exception of at large buildings in dense city centers, just about everywhere else, utilities enter a building at just some point on the back, out in the open. This includes utilities that feed alarms and security cameras.
While some places will have systems in place for situations where these outside connections have been severed, like independently operated cameras on an intranet, cellular data backup for alarms, electrical generators, etc., most places don’t, so successfully circumventing their security is just a matter of cutting all the cables on the back of their building at the same time, and then being gone before they notice
The cost of digital advertising cannot be justified by its effectiveness (or rather lack there of). We’ve collectively spent hundreds of billions of dollars creating the infrastructure for invasive hyper targeted ads that do not get better results that simple billboards and terrestrial TV ads even now. We’ve created an economy solely reliant on technofeudalist overlords based who’ve provided very little actual improvement of anything.
A whole bunch of welds in nuclear reactors are visually inspected using cameras duct taped onto the end of incredibly long poles which also get duct taped together. This would be the inside of BWR plants near the fuel and jet pumps. There is also an “art” to moving the cameras and poles around to get the shots you need. And if you get stuck the talented people know how to get you unstuck. There are also cameras just duct taped to ropes that the camera handler “swims” to certain spots.
Don’t get me wrong, we have cool ultrasonic inspecting robots as well, but I was absolutely blown away by what visual inspection looked like in practice.
PS: The high dose fields make the camera look like it is being blasted with colorful confetti because of the high energy particles bombarding the camera module.
Former process engineer in an aluminum factory. Aluminum foil is only shiny on one side and duller on the other for process reasons, not for any “turn this part towards baking, etc” reasons.
It’s just easier to double it on itself and machine it to double thickness than it is to hit single thickness precision, especially given how much more tensile strength it gives it.
Also, our QA lab did all kinds of tests on it to settle arguments. The amount of heat reflected/absorbed between the two sides is trivially small. But if you like one side better you should wrap it that way, for sure!
Update: sorry to be an OP who didn’t deliver. My buddy never made the measurement. I’m hoping he will. Sorry everyone!
Matte side isn’t non stick?
75% of American drinking water needs treatment to reduce particulate and parasites, the source for which is a single chemical plant in severe flood risk. The next Katrina could give us the next brain-worms infestation via tap-water.
I don’t know the details about alum production (assuming that is what you are referring to), but there are many alternative coagulants available now. Sure the supply logistics would be incredibly challenging and many people would have to boil their water or use point-of-use filters, but this take is pretty doomer in my opinion. Most plants use alum because it’s cheap and easy, not because it’s their only option.
Are you saying the chemical plant provides the treatment or that one plant is somehow responsible for polluting 75% of American drinking water?
Nah, lemme reword that. Thanks!
I think the former, based on my limited knowledge of the water treatment industry. There aren’t many manufacturers of low margin commodity chemicals, most people are in specialty chemicals with higher margins.
Systemd was built by a guy who wanted to work at Microsoft with the help of someone berated more than once for an inability to work with others and generate decent kernel code. These are your gods
No wonder systemd is basically implementing all the kernel functionality.
I KNEW IT
I didn’t know that, but I’m not exactly shocked to hear it.
Chocolate production is infested with slave labor, child labor and child slave labor.
So is banana production. And here I am with a bowl of banana-topped chocolate ice cream. Dammit.
So what are you gonna do to stop it? 🍫🍌
I alone cannot stop it if that’s what you mean. In fact, often the reverse course of action seems the best. But I try to think forwardly and would stand up for what’s right even when I’m alone in doing so.
Not trying to be offensive, but could you provide examples of your second point? 😉☝🏻
Chunky Monkey by any means necessary
Hehehe. That’s just plain mean.
If I’m not mistaken Nestlé, the firm that makes various brands of chocolate, are known or at least have been known to include slavery in really poor parts of the world.
When I look at a bottle or a cuddly packaged bit of chocolate, I shudder to think the shit conditions that a person, a child even was forced or on crap pay to produce that from the cocoa farming…
Ne*tle also does this thing where they lie to mothers in ‘third-world countries’ (I hate that term but can’t think of a better one rn) by telling them that their baby formula is better than actual milk, then give them some, which the mothers mix with dirty water, and when they can’t afford the formula, they’ll just give the babies plain dirty water.
An important part of that process that needs mentioning is that when the mothers are convinced by Nestle to feed their babies formula instead of their breast milk, their bodies will stop producing the milk before the baby is weaned from it.
So Nestle literally endangers babies’ lives just to sell more baby formula.
Nestle also fucks up entire cities water supplies.
i don’t think this is a secret anymore though
I used to think that at least the parts that are Fairtrade wouldn’t be affected as much.
Glad i basically dont eat the stuff ever.
Emergency Medical Service/Ambulances are a ridiculously low qualified in a fair shair of industrial nations, especially the US,France, or Austria.
Even in the countries with more training/physician based services (Germany, Belgium, Italy)the actual qualification of the responders varies widely - most of them wouldn’t be allowed to care for a single emergency within a hospital on their own.
I feel like most people have a feeling one way or another on this topic because it has become quite political, but the facts are the facts. Most new electric vehicle plants in the US are only working at most 50% capacity due to lack of customer demand. People can blame lack of parts and lack of workers, but one thing I know about this industry is that if people want them then they are going to keep building them regardless of circumstance.
At least one of the big 3 isn’t meeting production demand due to battery assembly. Long series of management and integrator fuck ups where their solution seems to be just throw more engineers at it. Can’t build EVs if they can’t build batteries.
I would love an electric vehicle.
But we have two gasoline cars completely paid off and I can’t imagine adding a car payment (or two) just to go electric. I’m more concerned with continuing to afford food and shelter.
If I could just magically swap them out I would.
Here’s my perspective, but it might be pretty wrong:
I think the reason for the low demand is due in large part to the pre-existing gas industry, at least in the US. Not just because of marketing advertising gas-powered more, but also because people don’t like to change, and buying a new car is not cheap. Not to mention that the US infrastructure is so heavily solidified in gas. It’s just easier to continue buying gas-powered because it’s already so supported across the country. Then the industry benefits from this because they can say, “oh, huh, looks like people still want gas-powered! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” and so the cycle repeats.
I think a lot of people don’t really understand how much power corporations really have over what the people do or don’t do, like or don’t like, etc… 99% of the time people will take the easy option, and corps take advantage of that by making the easy option the cheapest and best for themselves instead of what’s best for the people. Corporations only do what’s right for them, and are masters of making it out to be that that’s what the people want.
True. And the nepo-babies that lead these corporations are making millions off dollars each year simply by showing up to work.
Switching over to electric vehicles is inevitable. But who’s going to do that work and take that risk? What if they screw up? Ain’t no nepo-baby gonna screw up that cash cow. They’re going to continue showing up to work every day, sucking up the income and when the end of gasoline happens, they’ll throw up their hands and say, “No one could have seen that coming.”(To be fair, it’s not just management. There are tons of people at every level who don’t want to risk losing their job with an uncertain outcome over just showing up to work every day and doing the same job they already know. But it’s the “leadership’s” job to do that anyway for the long-term health of the company.)
Similarly how plastic pollution is 99% made by companies. So we banned plastic straws.
That’s the equivalent of yelling at me to turn the ceiling lights off to save power, but you have the AC running 24/7 and all the windows are open.
I hate it.
Most people can’t afford new cars, let alone new cars priced way above average.
Building HVAC engineering (equipment sizing, ducting design, etc.) has been largely handwavy bullshit for a very long time and only recently has moved towards any sort of precision. Not uncommon to find boiler plants that are 3-4 times the maximum heating load in the winter, or fans running at 100% 24/7 when code only requires half of that.
Costs just get passed on to tenants so there was never much motivation to do better, the only reason building owners are moving now is because of government regulation and incentive programs.
Technology connections did a video on this, it’s actually insane how much wastage there is
nice TC plug. One of my favorite channels and one of few reasons I use YouTube via new pipe and download the video. Let me also recommend Asianometery and Plainy Difficult.
DARN THOSE EVIL REGULATIONS!
Ironically in this case doing the job properly reduces costs significantly.
Everything in the chain from the outlets, ductwork, damper, valves, condensers, pipes, tray, fans, component ratings & switchboards can be reduced to a reasonable size.
Which then has peripheral benefits like reduced transport costs, crane lifts, space in service zones between floors/risers, materials & running costs of the completed building
Talking about energy wastage, next time you’re walking around commercial buildings, pay attention to how many lights are on during the middle of the day.
Drove by a closed car lot the other day. The place has been abandoned for months. Weeds growing up everywhere. The entire lot is fenced off getting ready for demolition.
The only building on the lot is small and completely surrounded by glass walls, so you can see right through it. The red neon around the outside of the building is still on 24 hours.condo had a fire and later I could see lights on every evening. I called it in but nothing happened. Seemed dangerous to me that power was not shutdown from going to it.
I work in building science. It’s obscene how little actual design and quality control goes into residential homes.
The typical design is just one step above being illegal, and people are often scared off of doing anything more than that by the threat of increased cost. However, they don’t realize that they pay for it either way; either on their mortgage, or on utilities. Only one of those you can actually own in the end.
So how does a homeowner fix it? The duct work is already in, so is it just about choosing more wisely when replacing the furnace/ac/heat pump?
It starts early in the design process. But at that stage, it would be best to pause installation, have a mechanical engineer do the mechanical design (including equipment selection) based on an energy model and install the recommended equipment.
I used to work in HVAC. I remember we had a small cold room that was struggling to maintain temperature, as in, design was supposed to be 0°F but it couldn’t get below 36°F. There was a large hole in the box that was undoubtedly the cause of the problem, so I asked the installer how they accounted for that. “Oh, I doubled the infiltration value.” When I tried calculating the actual losses it was way, way higher than the infiltration value. Like, the room needed someting like 3-4 times its total refrigeration capacity to reach target with a giant fucking hole in the box.
No idea who thought putting a giant hole in the box was a good idea.
“Sealed” is also a vague suggestion with HVAC. Every ducting join, every piece of equipment, all of it leaks. I shudder to think how much heating/cooling is wasted that way.
Ugh. Yup.
I learned that after buying my house. My furnace is 3x what my house needs and is expected to be an expensive repair someday.
I loved that Technology Connections video.
Fractional-reserve banking. Most people have no idea what it is, probably a good thing. You could argue that it’s not a “secret”, but most people aren’t aware of it regardless. I don’t think most people would be fond of grinding for $15 an hour if they knew banks could just lend money they don’t actually have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking
Governments don’t pay consultants to do work, but to leave when the work is done.
Sounds like prostitution.
“This is just a consultant, your my full time babe”
/s
What do the consultants do while someone else does the work?
A lot of consultants and contractors do the work for different governments. A reason why governments like this is that private companies find hiring and firing a lot easier. So, if a company performs poorly, it is really easy to fire them. In some cases, governments can also get individuals working for the consultant or contractor to stop working on that governments’ jobs, effectively firing them.
It can be a lot easier to get rid of a poorly performing consultant over a poorly performing government worker.
That’s when the company doesn’t do kicks to the project lead, or when you bring your full extended family. In those cases see how everyone will despair while working double and wondering wtf is “company” still working in our project.
You pay a consultant to take liability. Sure, you could do this in house, but wouldn’t you rather have someone outside of the organization use their liability insurance?
Liability insurance just becomes part of the cost.
