Declarative programming makes sense for lots of things, React is a great example.
With such a big dependency graph for infra, adding loops and variables and templating to be able to achieve the same thing as Pulumi in a "declarative" way is ultimately just harder and worse than using a familiar powerful language with an SDK.
It's not. Australia calculates fully loaded car costs at $0.72AUD/km. If you add up depreciation, registration, insurance, servicing, fuel, repairs and amortize it the numbers check out.
Surprisingly, ATO is rather generous with this one. Few posts below is my estimate for an oldish car, running the numbers for the "new small car every 3 years" model I still end up significantly below A$0.72. The averages must include luxury cars, which doesn't make much sense.
Just ran the numbers for my 10 year old Honda and my 15,000 km per year.
Accounting for depreciation, interest, insurance, actual service bills and petrol, I ended up with A$0.25 per km and A$4150 per annum, so ATO-sanctioned business travel compensation always rightfully seemed to be a handout to me.
A new BMW can easily cost 6x as much, hence "average body temperature".
In the US, business auto deduction is around 52 cents per mile.
An oldish paid-off relatively inexpensive car will absolutely do better than that on average. But it's actually not unreasonable that the business deduction bases costs on something like a late model leased midrange sedan like a sales rep might use to drive clients around.
"Meanwhile, 90 percent reported they have been trying to negotiate their leases, but their landlords wouldn’t budge."
This is alarming. It may seem like just another statistic lost in a bigger article, but it's symptomatic of a ticking time bomb in NYC, and commercial real estate more broadly.
tl;dr - the loans on these restaurants are all bundled into commercial mortgage backed securities (sound familiar?) and sold to wholesale investors, and the landlords are unable to change the terms of the lease, or the banks will revalue the underlying asset based on a multiple of the rent, and the owner will either essentially get margin called, or end up with negative equity, and default on the loan.
Can someone from Wall Street please add their thoughts?
Very few, and I don't think it's a reasonable parallel.
I don't think 8 hours of cognitively demanding, yet physically sedentary work, is part of our human nature.
If you frame it in the sense that we are just monkeys in shoes, it wouldn't be at all reasonable to expect someone to crouch in the grass and be highly alert for hours at a time.
The corollary would be a job that's physically engaging (read, not demanding) but cognitively basic, e.g. moving boxes in a warehouse, gardening.
The difference is one form of labor has leveraged output (writing code), vs linear output (moving boxes).
You are completely right but that is precisely my point.
Counting hours for a job like programming is pointless. If you also agree that it's not reasonable to expect 8 continuous hours of intellectual labor, it should also not be reasonable on part of employees to be wedded to their 8-hour-workday. No one seems to have a problem chit-chatting at work, or engaging in other forms of recreation, but everyone seems to love counting hours when it comes to reasonable work expected from them.
I notice this in my job working with a team in Europe that my company has acqui-hired (this is relevant because until then they were a purely European company in terms of composition and culture). We are a pretty standard SV startup in terms of culture, we are in the office for ~9 hours a day (that includes lunch etc.) but we trust our employees to manage their work, which includes the self-awareness of knowing when you have not done enough during the day and compensating by working a bit more whenever you see fit.
In contrast, the European team does strict 8 hours a day (including lunch), does NOT have better average productivity than ours, but gets very upset at the occasional expectation that they meet deadlines with similar 'vigor' as their SV counterparts. I'm sure the same people would complain about pay disparity between the bay area and Europe and find it unfair.
Whatever role you're in, don't underestimate the value of relationships, communication, and soft skills in being able to influence the impact and value of the work you can deliver.
If you can persuade a product manager to drop a bad feature you might be able to ship a more valuable feature at a higher quality.
If you can persuade a procurement office to change a supplier you might be able to ship a better design faster.
If you can get involved in the hiring process you might be able to pick the team you work with.
Always make friends with the admin person, accounting that pays you, and stay on the right side of HR.
Not a professional so some of my terminology may be wrong, but here is how I understand it: after your immune system fights off a virus it often develops 'antibodies' to fight off the same virus if it should encounter it again. We can detect these antibodies via a blood test and thereby get an idea of whether you've had that particular virus before.
Yes, but confidence of detecting antigens becomes more difficult for some infections than others. And some viruses stay in your body like CMV. In the case of COVID-19, the virus does not remain, but the antigens do. The question is can the test detect them long after recovery. I'd like to know too for my own curiosity and to see if this means I am immune to it for this strain, this season.
Declarative programming makes sense for lots of things, React is a great example.
With such a big dependency graph for infra, adding loops and variables and templating to be able to achieve the same thing as Pulumi in a "declarative" way is ultimately just harder and worse than using a familiar powerful language with an SDK.