I have a little pet theory I’ve been stewing about when it comes to penny wise/pound foolish decisions from business owners of all types. From landlords, to local cafes, and all the way up to Fortune 500 CEOs. It comes down to bad accounting.
I’ve taken to setting aside money into buckets. There’s a bucket that handles some filter replacements for our home furnace (it’s a 5 inch thick HEPA filter, so it’s bit pricey) and under sink RO system, for example. When it comes time to buy one, I just pull from that bucket. It doesn’t feel like I’m losing anything off my usual budget for the month. The money is just there, and it feels nice to be able to pay without worry. It almost feels like a reward for good planning.
Companies do this, as well. In fact, I helped setup a similar system at my local community makerspace (which runs as a 501(c)3). We pay into buckets for things like insurance every month, and then we pay it when the bill comes due each year. Again, it doesn’t feel like we’re stressed for anything.
Not all companies do this, or if they do, they don’t do it for everything. If you’re not setting aside a little bucket for something that you know will come up, then it has to be paid out of your general funds. That’s money you wanted to use for something more fun than furnace filters or insurance or a software package that can process navigation data automatically.
So when you see billionaires or landlords complain about something important being too expensive, it might be because they aren’t tracking their accounting buckets properly. If this keeps happening, that’s a good indication that they are anything but a glorious Captain of Industry.
My son is kinda struggling with his allowance money. I might not be the greatest example or at least, a good financial teati him.
But the other day, my friend told me their kids received a special wallet with envelopes inside. Exactly the kind of buket system you describe.
So I’m going to buy this for both my kids, I think it’s going to be helpful for them.
There were so many things relating to this incident that bewildered me. The titanium end caps were stuck on using glue, by hand. Also, while carbon fiber is great at handling tensile loads at 14 PSI, it’s not so great at handling compressive ones at 5500 PSI. For such a delicate mission, the whole thing seemed unprofessional in so many ways.
Supposedly the glued on titanium is the same thing the US Army does for their small Submarines, though I’m sure they found some way to cheap out/fuck up.
Probably were using expired glue, as Stockton Rush boasted about using discounted carbon fiber from Boeing that was past its shelf life for usage in airplanes.
Recycled parts? That’s simply being too dumb to be alive on this world. And I thought putting a wireless xbox controller for navigating the damn sub was dumb enough.
According to Ross, six days before the Titan submarine imploded, the sub’s pilot and the company’s cofounder, Stockton Rush, crashed the vessel into a launch mechanism bulkhead while the vessel was attempting to resurface from dive 87. […] but Ross said he did not know if an inspection of the sub was carried out afterward.
How does every new detail about the excursion keep getting worse? Next week I’m going to learn they used Saran wrap for the windows.
The sub was totaled. Like you need to change a helmet after a crash even it it looks fine
i wonder if it would have made the trip without that crashing. not that it matters much, but wow. how insanely stupid!
It was always a matter of when, not if.
So do 90% of corporations.
90% of corporations aren’t transcribing positioning data by hand every five minutes to figure out the sub’s position.
I will never get over how much media attention this gets.
Watching some of the hearing, they should be paying attention to how underfunded OSHA is. The agent assigned to one of the whistleblowers had several jobs in front of that case and never got to it before it was dropped. The company was also run on a cult of personality and anyone with any sense either left on their own or were driven out.
It’s the only way the media is allowed to point out how stupid and useless the ultra-wealthy are. For some reason the media owners allow this little bit of dunking, as a treat.
It’s like an oasis in the desert right now. Everyone can look at this crazy spectacle and ignore all the polarized and heart-wrenching crazy bs that the rest of the news is full of.
It’s a good thing that no serious company uses excel spreadsheets to manage their data, right? Right?
There are teams where I work that are basically using Excel as a database and SharePoint as S3 in automated processes… But at least no one is going to DIE when those things fall over!
Look, if Excel is the last mile and everyone is properly plugged into a corporate database to pull numbers, then great.
But way too many companies manage everything from a network share full of xlsx files…
Not us, ours are google sheets
Of course not! We employees of Fortune 500 companies use Google Sheets to manage critical data.
It’s in the cloud, that’s how you know it’s good.
(I’m not even joking…our VP said this)
Excel effectively forces cloud usage now if you want to use autosave. And frankly, Microsoft is doing everything it can to shift users to cloud based Office apps.
They really, really want users and business owners to think of the local data storage and desktop computing as secondary to OneDrive and Webapps. I swear at some point in the future the consumer version of Windows will be little more than the Edge browser in a wig.
Companies now prefer cloud storage because they will still have the data if they fire you as your access will be lost immediately. You could delete all local files and it will take lot of time and effort to recover them.
I just wish the whole ‘cloud’ thing would die in a ditch specifically for people like that.
No, most use-cases don’t need to be in a cloud.
You are 99.9% paying more for that setup than having people who understand servers.
And if you need the cloud, then hooray for you, but it should not need to be subsidized by thousands of small customers who jumped on the wrong train.
Agreed.
This is some of the best writing as to how/why/when cloud sucks.
I’ve shared it with my consulting friends, so they can more easily explain to (SMB) clients why cloud isn’t necessarily a good answer.
Old-man-yelling-at-clouds energy :D
Be me, postal worker. One of our machines uses a csv file to attach zip codes to bins. See fresh engineer decide to change one zip code in notepad really quick. See file’s formatting get wrecked. Spend next 6 hours watching all the mail spit out of the very last bin every time they think they finally fix it as if machine has irritable bowel syndrome. Engineer earns nickname ‘boy wonder’ first week on job
This is why I always save contents as a new file instead of overwriting the original one when I’m using a machine that isn’t mine. I’ve been burned so many times by flimsy newline characters, proper unicode support, legacy encoding and many other stuff you assume it should be already in place.
The more you hear about this sub the worse it gets.
I’m not surprised, of course, given the shortcuts Rush was determined to take.
Also it’s the first time I saw the picture in that article of the other crushed remains. I’m pretty impressed they could get pictures that deep.
Good thing the world didn’t lose anything valuable.
Hey, that was an ok controller they used to navigate
That was a Player 2 controller if ever I saw one.
I’ve owned one of those. It’s a piece of shit.
I’m ready to weep from this.
Every time any problem comes up, my current manager insists we must use Excel to solve it.
Jesus Christ that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. The submarine in the game Iron Lung was safer to drive than this thing.
But Wilby said that for the Titan, the coordinate data was transcribed into a notebook by hand and then entered into Excel before loading the spreadsheet into mapping software to track the sub’s position on a hand-drawn map of the wreckage.
The OceanGate team tried to perform these updates at least every five minutes, but it was a slow, manual process done while communicating with the gamepad-controlled sub via short text messages.
Updates every FIVE MINUTES?! I wouldn’t even trust this thing in a damn swimming pool.
What’s worse is that half the coordinates probably ended up as dates…
There are better ways to do that even in Excel!
Right? I work with plenty of users in non-technical roles who have at best rudimentary Excel skills, and even they could figure out a better way to manage this. The whole thing with Excel is to make basic data work accessible even to a rube, and let them do an incredible amount of things otherwise outside their skillet.
Using Excel like this is like giving someone a microwave and they only use it as a kitchen timer.
I really do wonder why they ended up in this. It can’ be that hard to make even a hacky DIY system to do it automatically. The navigation system just had to have some digital or even analog output, then it would be just the problem of interpreting the signal with some script and writing it into a file.
When Wilby recommended the company use standard software to process ping data and plot the sub’s telemetry automatically, the response was that the company wanted to develop an in-house system, but didn’t have enough time.
I like how the company didn’t consider using standard software to do it, and then switch to the in-house system that they made later, instead of just having it done by hand instead.
To write a script, you need someone who can write scripts.
If all you have is someone who can write VLOOKUPs in Excel, and the CEO is too cheap to hire someone, then that’s what you use.someone who can write VLOOKUPs
I think you’re overestimating the competence on display here…
So basically it’s a project done by MBA geniuses, entrepreneurs and visionaries who optimized by cutting on those mundane and boring nautical engineers and software developers?
God, do I like how evolution works.
I really do wonder why they ended up in this. It can’ be that hard to make even a hacky DIY system to do it automatically.
All-manager team, no devs?
It’s exactly like Fallout lol
That’s why they use, what they know: Excel. I wonder if the UI was done in PowerPoint?
Nah, FrontPage.
I don’t know how these guys didn’t get a Darwin award yet
A Darwin award isn’t given, it is earned. And they earned it when they died.
Those giving out the awards want to wait and see if someone dies over laughter about this event. Then they’ll get the award.
Of course it did!
Wait, I didn’t even realise Williams F1 was involved…
