Exactly! You actually CAN have 50 people finish something 50x faster, but it takes a shitload of planning, and that equals time and money no company I have ever worked for, or even known of, would allocate to something that isn’t generating immediate income.
Take the Hoover Dam for example: Dsigned over 3 ish years and built in 5, at a time when nothing that huge had ever been made before, at less than a billion in today money, and 2 years ahead of schedule. It’s 90 years old.
I’m interested in examples. The West loved Gorbachev, is that why he was deposed? Were all the satellite countries that all split off during the collapse of the USSR being manipulated by the West to do so? I agree that Putin is essentially a backlash reaction by the Russian powers that be, and they’ve been pretty open about getting the band back together, but why. I see them looking back to the glory days and wanting them back, but for a while there Russia was looking pretty good on the global stage. They had oil money, business, influence but it wasn’t enough. That’s the part I don’t get: what is enough for Russia, and is it cultural, historical, foreign influence, or something else that drives them. They seem to love shooting themselves in the foot and I don’t understand why.
I don’t know what a great one is but I have an example of a terrible one:
the green/black glue gun has the worst on/off switch I’ve ever encountered.
You can’t see it in the picture, but the actual switch that arrow is pointing to has no text on or around it, so you’re left to pick up or down, plug it in, and wait a few minutes see if you were right.
You can solve this with git:
git gud
Seriously though, writing a monolith of a function and not testing anything until you run it the first time isn’t the way to go. Even with a compiler you’re only going to catch syntactical and type issues. No compiler in the world is going to tell you you forgot to store your data in the correct variable, although it or a a linter may have helped you realize you weren’t using it anywhere else.
They were first because no one else tried. It’s that simple. Companies have been dicking around for decades with the hybrids, electric assist, alternate fuels, etc., and no one went whole hog before Tesla. Then* every auto maker on the planet started rushing to catch up.
Even if you discount Tesla’s early lead and fast forward to 2017 when the Model 3 went on sale and GM was offering what appeared to be real competition in the Bolt, by 2021 Tesla has sold over a million 3’s to GM’s 100,000. And then GM had to recall all the bolts it had ever sold because they kept catching fire.
2019 is the same story with the Ford Mustang EV. Pretty decent, no real problems (other than their glass roof flying off sometimes…) but the model Y out sells it by hundreds of thousands, even beating Toyota one year for most sold globally. It’s the second best selling EV SUV behind the model Y. Ford sold something like 10K of them in Q3 2023. Tesla sold over 400,000 Model Y’s and 3’s that same quarter.
The other car companies in the US at least just aren’t putting in the effort to match those numbers. They don’t want to put their money on the line.
haha no source, just a dumb joke.