Vacation Restrictions - 27 November 2022

This recollection dates to many years ago, about 1986 or so.  I started work for United Airlines (at the time, later to become Covia and now named something else that escapes me).  UAL had a lot of rules that felt odd in an IT position, but they derived from the union rules that governed most of the employees (pilots, flight attendants, and ground-based staff).  The vacation rules were of particular note.

1. Each employee earned X days per month worked.  In the end, a new employee earned ten days (two weeks) per year, but they accumulated.  since I started in June, I was accumulating a week of vacation in that year.  

2. The vacation accumulated in year Y could be used in year Y+1.  As I was earning vacation in 1986, I could use it in 1987.  

As a result, in the first eighteen months I worked for UAL, I had one week of vacation to use.  After that, it settled into the two-week norm, but that first year and a half was tough.

Jouralists say Amazon Alexa to lose $10 Billion in 2022 - 23 November 2022

Journalists at Business Insider are claiming that the hardware division of Amazon is on track to lose $10 Billion (with a B) in 2022 because of Alexa.  The story has been picked up by other news sources and is being repeated as factual.  Let us look closer at the claims.

The report at Ars Technica says:

The Alexa division is part of the "Worldwide Digital" group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with "the vast majority" of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year.

Engineers are paid a lot of money and they get a lot of benefits, so engineers are expensive.  Engineers at high-tech Internet companies are paid even better than average (e.g., Facebook and Google engineers are better paid than AMD and Intel engineers).  To understand the situation, we need to make some assumptions.

First, although the article blames "the vast majority" of the losses on Alexa, let us just assume all the losses are due to Alexa and stick with the $10B.  Further, let us assume that Alexa makes no money and that $10B represents the entire cost of the Alexa organization.  Other articles claim that hardware products are sold "at cost", so we assign zero to the cost of consumer products sold (the cost will equal the income, therefore having no impact on our estimates).  As a generous guess, let us assume that the annual cost of an engineer is $500000 (half a million bucks), including benefits and overhead (building rent, computer equipment, heat, health benefits, stock grants, and so on).  This is high, but it is an average across engineers and it is based on industry knowledge.  

If we take the claimed loss of $10B and divide by the $500K, we get 20000 engineers.  I am pretty confident that Amazon does not have 20K engineers working in the hardware division.  Elsewhere in the article, it is claimed that Amazon as a whole is eliminating 10K jobs (e.g., CNBC report) out of 1 million or more employees.  But remember that most of those 1 million jobs are at the entry level in the warehouses (fulfillment centers) and are about $15/hour or about $30K annualized.  Converting that to a "loaded salary" is still only about $60K per year, so it would take almost 170K employees to achieve a $10B savings in lay-offs.

So if the number of laid-off employees does not match the headline, it must be the amount of the losses that is wrong.  And I submit the losses are exaggerated.  Significantly exaggerated.  

Because we are talking about sad things like lay-offs, I have attached a picture of a cat as a palate cleanser.

The ABC trifecta of Art, Blockchain, and Crypto - 17 November 2022

Music is not often associated with technology, but this Spotify track offers brilliant treatment of the blockchain and crypto circus that has gripped techbros for the last couple years.

Crypto $oy or Crypto Boy.

I am not sure how to insert the "bitcoin currency" symbol that the artist uses, so I had to insert a dollar sign.  salem ilese has created a nice ballad for your favorite crypto enthusiast.  To be complete, I further acknowledge the songwriting skills of Alma Goodman, Henry Tucker, Marc Sibley, Nathan Cunningham, and salem ilese.

ETA: put the year 2022 in the Title.

The balance on Twitter is shifting, 17 November 2022

Famously, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla fame has purchased Twitter.  As part of his plan to remake the corporation, he announced a plan to lay-off 3/4ths of the staff.  Not a typo, that is 75% of the people to be fired. Oh, that is bad, said public perception.  In a thoughtful moment, Elon backed off and laid off "only" half.  Not a typo, that is 50% were fired within about three (3) weeks.  I am not sure how he expected to keep the company running after that, but Twitter has not fallen over.

Once all the fuss about the lay-offs died down, Elon imposed a sudden work-from-office requirement:  40 hours per week in the office, minimum.  Although I have concerns about the long-term success of unfettered WFH (work-from-home), that was the Twitter policy and the suddeness of Elon's dictate was extreme.  A target date and time for transition plans would have been reasonable (assuming the target date was into 2023).  

Not content, Elon announced a further 5% trim of staff, another lay-off in which the managers were required to identify a further 5% of the staff as low performers.  Yeah, always a popular move.

Finally, Elon send out an email message that required staff to commit to unpaid overtime, a loyalty oath, and (I suspect) consent to absurd delivery schedules.  Failure to commit was essentially volunteering to get laid off.

As a consequence of any layoff, there are collateral resignations.  The targeted population to be laid off may be the low performers and the low revenue groups (a common assertion), but the untargeted resignations are usually the very people who can get another job quickly.  Those would include your top performers.  The remainder are a mix of the true believers, the ones who are "stuck" (e.g., because of health care), and the inertial.  This is not always the employee base that you would want to retain.

In effect, Elon has now laid off 3/4ths of the Twitter staff and achieved his original intent, except for the "retain top talent" objective.

In compensation, I offer you a photograph of a sleeping cat. 

When appliances fail - 15 November 2022

Appliances should last a really long time, but they never do.  They are simple devices, usually made from simple materials, but they seem designed to fail long before their time.  Take the typical American water heater.  It is basically a tank of pressurized water with a gas or electric heater in the body of the tank.  There is a thermostat to control the temperature of the water, and the thermostat controls the heating unit.  In my case, the thermostat controls a gas valve.  Unlike a gas furnace, the pilot light is lit all the time and the "waste" heat from the pilot light goes into the water in the tank.  When the temperature falls below the set-point of the thermostat, the gas valve is actuated and the pilot light ignites the burner.  When the water gets sufficiently hot, the gas valve is closed and the burner goes out.  Insulation keeps the hot water hot while the burner is off. 

No pump in, no pump out, nothing active but the gas valve.  Unfortunately, there is a bit of aging due to the thermal expansion and contraction of the hot water, and more due to the various minerals in the water.  There is simply not much to fail, so why does a water heater last only about a decade?  

Our last water heater was installed in spring of 2005, so it lasted about 17-1/2 years.  It did not fail dramatically, but it was failing, so I replaced it.  I was living on "borrowed time" and I decided to replace it in a controlled manner rather than waiting for a dramatic failure at an inconvenient time.

Manufacturers should design the water heaters to be more robust.  The cost of the water heater would go up, but if a minor increment in cost doubled the expected life of a water, it would be a win for the consumer.  On the other hand, the current system rewards mediocre designs (manufacturers sell more water heaters) and the installation (plumbing) business installs more water heaters.  The consumer does not get the "best product", they get the product that generates the greatest profits for the manufacturers and installers.

The other problem with appliances is that Nothing Is Standardized.  It is just a water heater.  There should be some standard connections at standard locations and the units should come in standard sizes.  Then the installer would just disconnect the old unit, connect in the new unit, and be done.  However, the installer had to spend hours adjusting the installation process so that the water heater would fit into the space.  If you look closely, there are three (3) foam disks under the water heater; one is needed to insulate the heater from the cement floor (saves energy), but this install as three because the water heater was too low.  The gas connection is weird (the new water heater is the same diameter as the old water heater, but it just did not fit).  And the safety valve had to be soldered into exhaust plumbing with a custom fit.  This is really stupid.  If the connecterization were the same on all water heaters, it would save hours of labor at install time.  We faced a similar problem with the furnaces - they all seem to be custom installations.  And do not get me started about kitchen standards.  

The good news is that we have hot water for the next decade or so.

Checking in - 7 November 2022

Winterizing has been the name of the game for the last few weeks.   This comes from three factors.

Due to benign neglect, I have let some shrubs get overgrown over the years.  The resulting blooms have been gorgeous, but we now have a lot of shrubs that are too large for their location.  Several have been blocking windows while others are encroaching over the lawn and some are just too large and tangled to be healthy.  

Then we had a windstorm on Friday or Saturday night.  This storm created yet more lawn and garden waste than the maintenance pruning.  We have a lot of large trees, and the wind came from a direction that pruned the upper parts of the trees, dumping the branches and needles on our house and lawn.

Finally, the decidious trees are dropping their leaves.  The pine needles are coming down, too, to make room for new growth on the evergreens.  

Any one of these could generate a lot of organic waste that we put in the lawn-and-garden bin for pickup.  However, all of them together overwhelm the 96-gallon capacity of the weekly bin, so I get out the chipper-shredder and make mulch. 

The chipper-shredder is an old one and I do not know how much longer I will have it.  I bought it from a catalog company when we lived in Chicago.  That would have been in the 1980s.  I loaned it to a friend for use in the autumn and he kept it for the winter.  Unfortunately, he was not aware of the maintenance requirement to drain the gas tank (or treat the gas), and the chipper would not start after he returned it.  He moved away shortly thereafter, so the chipper followed us to Massachusetts and then to Washington.  I am not much of a mechanic, so I did not really know how to fix this.  The chipper weighs a lot, maybe 75-90 pounds, and it is large, so I could not figure out how to get it to a repair shop.  And so it sat, moved dutifully with us as we bounced around the country.  

A few years ago, I got bold.  I bought some cleaner sprays (e.g., carb cleaner) and started poking at it.  I could get it to run by spraying carb cleaner down the throat of the carburator, so that suggested to me that the problem was rooted in the stale and evaporated fuel rather that some outright mechanical failure.  I carefully disassembled the engine, not really knowing what I was doing.  I sprayed everything I could find with the carburator cleaner and I sprayed all the moving parts with WD-40, then I reassembled it as carefully as I could.  In particular, there was some oddly shaped bit of plastic that I carefully placed back.  I am just guessing here, but I think that was the fuel pump.  Anyway, I got it all back together without any "extra" parts, so I put in fresh fuel and tried to start it up.

It started.

I was amazed.  I ran it for a bit so ensure this was not some start-only magic, and it has been working reliably ever since.  I am careful to run out the fuel in the autumn, and it keeps chugging away.  The only other maintenance is to sharpen the blades and change the oil.  The chipper manufacturer is no longer in business, but the engine is Briggs & Stratton, so I can probably get parts when that becomes necessary.  I hope.  In the meantime, I keep running it so that I can try to keep up with the organic waste that I am generating.