>> Entry tickets, if handled properly, could be a great way to fix the issue.
I disagree.
This seems like a "great way" to damage the tourism industry in Venice. In other words, I think this is a terrible way to deal with tourists who are visiting Venice, yet aren't spending enough money in Venice.
I think it would be better to require every adult tourist to buy, say, €10 worth of "Venice Money" which they could spend at any restaurant or shop in Venice during the day they are visiting. Too many tourists? Then increase it to, say, €15. Too few tourists? Then decrease it to, say, €5.
Part of the goal is to require tourists to spend a minimum amount of money while visiting Venice. Charging an admission fee seems too heavy-handed. Sure, I realize that my suggestion is tantamount to an admission fee, but it's likely to be more palatable to tourists. The goal isn't merely to get tourists to spend a sufficient amount of money in Venice; part of the goal is to make tourists happy to do so.
Tourists are notoriously fickle. Furthermore, they have myriad places in and around Italy, Europe, and, well, the world where they can spend their money. The current problem of too many tourists could very quickly turn into a problem of a dearth of tourists.
"Killing the goose that lays the golden egg" would obviously be foolish. I presume the economy in Venice benefits immensely from tourism. This is precisely the sort of measure that people tend to look back at in hindsight and exclaim, "How could we have committed such a blunder! What were we thinking?!?"
Having opined all of that, sure, I can see why denizens of Venice would welcome a measure that would decrease the number of tourists generally, and particularly the number of skinflint tourists who visit Venice, yet don't spend a single euro in Venice.
Also, frankly, I think it would be perfectly reasonable for Venice to enforce dress codes and behavior codes. For example, nobody wants an endless "parade" of motley dressed drunkards wandering around their neighborhood.
Personally I happily shop at Costco, but haven’t set foot in a Walmart in perhaps 20 years. I detest Walmart. Why? Part of the reason is this: Costco has a “greeter” standing at the enterance. Ostensibly the greeter’s job is to verify that people entering are members. In fact, that greeter is also eyeballing each person who enters and is empowered to deny enterance to people who don’t meet Costco’s minimum standards (which aren’t very high, but are still much, much higher than Walmart’s standards).
Similarly, one of the "secrets" to the success of Las Vegas strip is this: although they allow a lot of rowdy behavior, frankly, they actually keep a tight lid on things: a very, very, tight lid, which I presume you would have noticed if you’ve ever actually been there and paid attention.
It's a delicate balance which requires discretion bordering on sophisticated and subtle diplomacy.
For example, when dealing with "drunk idiots" the Las Vegas police tend to use kid gloves as much as possible. Why? The powers that be in Las Vegas want "visitors" (tourists) to tell their family, friends, and associates they had a great time on the Las Vegas strip. They also want most of the tourists themselves to return over, and over, and over again.
The same is true for a myriad of tourist destinations around the world.
>> fundamental problem is cargo cult developers trying to copy massive companies architectures as a startup. They fail to realize those companies only moved to microservices because they had no other option.
This.
Microservices add complexity; therefore, they should be avoided unless necessary. That's Engineering 101 folks.
Your reasoning is faulty and very probably self-serving. More and more companies can and will outsource their infrastructure. IT guys hate this because it threatens their "paychecks."
The optimal amount of cloud services for an established company like FedEx is 100%, not merely with a "disaster recovery plan" but with live, 99.99% redundancy by which I mean two almost exact systems running nearly simultaneously (within a second or two of one another) on two completely different networks.
FedEx enjoys almost all of its competitive advantage from its physical network. IT is not core to its business.
Here's the problem... almost no company actually does disaster recovery and "parallel redundancy" properly because most C-level executives only pay lip service to it.
Therefore, the whole notion that disaster recovery and "parallel redundancy" don't work is predicated on the false notion that companies actually have proper disaster recovery and "parallel redundancy" in the first place.
Yeah. I agree. I often tend confuse the terms "mirage" and "oasis" in my own mind. After all, they are both things one might perceive in a hot desert, although the first is not real; whereas, the second is real.
> Then one of the big players comes in and adds the feature to their main product. Poof, everything somebody worked long and hard for disappears.
There's a lot of wisdom in the statement above, but you also have a point... which I think you went much too far with.
Basecamp is not a relationship; it's a brand, but it's much weaker than, say, Apple, Ferrari, Nike, etc.
See, Basecamp was what all the kool kidz were using. And the Basecamp founders were soooo koooool! They even wrote a book! Oh yeah, and they used "the hot new technology" red choo-choo trains, er, uh, I mean Ruby on Rails.
Hey, if people can feel passionately about sugar-flavored water with bubbles in it, they can feel passionately about software... I guess.
Buuuuut the inherent problem is this: you can show off your Apple, Ferrari, Nike, etc. to your friends and to the girls/women you want to impress.
Basecamp, not so much. Basecamp seems like a dying brand to me. I don't see why anyone would begin using Basecamp these days because it's waaaaay overpriced.
But for a 40 year old who started using it 18 years ago, sure, he might have enough money, nostalgia, and, well, laziness, to keep using it.
I doubt Basecamp has many users under the age of 30, and probably never will. And I doubt it has many new users. At the end of the day most software doesn't have a social aspect to it; these days I assume Basecamp essentially is seen as a commodity (like a pillow case) by most people, even those who use it. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are outliers which are extremely popular and have network effects.
>> I appreciate your style of acknowledging the points you agree on even as you dispute other statements.
Thanks. Hacker News is full of arrogant, ignorant engineers whom I despise. I’m brash, harsh, and opinionated. I have a take-no-prisoners style of arguing . Nonetheless, I’m neither arrogant nor ignorant. Really. I’m not.
I carefully consider my interlocutor’s arguments, and I readily admit when I have made a mistake or, gasp, actually been w-r-o-n-g. I don’t argue to win; I argue to learn. My goal isn’t to persuade my interlocutor; rather, my goal is to ascertain the truth.
Sure, these seem “simple and obvious”, yet, in reality, relatively few people on Hacker News actually engage their interlocutors in such a fashion.
Ironically, despite being a “non-engineer” I’m generally far more rigorous in applying the scientific method than most of the Hacker News hoi polloi. Furthermore, although I know it seems incredible (by which I mean “lacking credibility”, not “wow, man, that’s incredible”), yet as a non-engineer I’m better at engineering than most engineers I’ve worked with. Nope. That’s not arrogance; that’s an accurate assessment.
Frankly, that was a very depressing observation to me when I first realized it because I don’t enjoy engineering, and because I don’t consider myself to be good at engineering.
Furthermore, I am tired of embarrassing engineers whom I work with. It’s not fun for me; it’s a hassle. And, of course, they hate it. Engineers typically want to be right to satisfy their egos; whereas, I almost invariably want the products they create to work properly for my customers. In other words, they typically engage in self-righteousness; whereas, I’m focused on truth-seeking. Self-righteousness and truth-seeking are generally, although not always, mutually exclusive.
By the way, I’m not claiming to be selfless. I’m not. I like to learn.
I often need to expose many of the “theories” engineers proffer to me as little more than wishful thinking (a house of cards). It’s annoying and time-consuming. They become myopically focused on some bad technological solution; I want a good solution. I am barely interested in technology per se. To me technology (such as software applications) are like a bunch of hammers, screwdrivers, and chisels.
But if I don’t disabuse them of the falsehoods they are clinging to, they will almost invariably provide code to me that proves Weinberg’s Second Law: “If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.”
>> In this spirit:
>> Solar panel lifetime is approx ~20 years.
I've read figures like that too. Therefore, I'll grant you that point.
>> Is the e-waste from solar panels a pollutant?
Sheesh. Please stop nitpicking. From what I’ve read, solar panels can easily be produced to be over 90% "recyclable." Why are their quotes around the word recyclable?
Because recycle means this, "return (material) to a previous stage in a cyclic process." In reality, everything can be recycled. But what is commonly meant by the term is "easily recycled."
No. I'm not nitpicking. I remember complaining to one of the two excellent engineers I've ever had the privilege to work with about plastic going into landfills where it would sit for thousands of years before decomposing. He calmly looked at me… like I was a complete and total idiot. That look is hard for me to forget, although it’s probably been 15 years.
He simply said something like, "You know, one day robots will go down into landfills and retrieve everything that is useful. It's just a matter of time." That hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized instantly he was right, and that I was wrong. It was then that I began to look at landfills like, say, iron mines instead of terrible places which should be minimized and avoided.
In other words, when we toss stuff into a landfill, we are merely creating a new type of mine. Obviously, cases where, say , groundwater is being polluted, would be problematic (and should be avoided). Nonetheless, normally a landfill is just a man-made mine in my mind. (alliteration unintentional).
Soon after that conversation I lost almost all interest in the entire concept of “worrying about recycling everything” because I realized that most of the stuff that is valuable in the landfills will probably be recycled in 100 or 200 or 500 years. As for the stuff that isn’t valuable in landfills, it will simply remain in the ground, like over 99% of the stuff that is sitting in the ground around the world.
>> If not, is the spent fuel from a nuclear reactor a pollutant? If so, how do you reconcile the apparently inconsistent position that solar is non-polluting but nuclear is not?
I don’t intend to answer those questions directly, but I hope I will indirectly. My problem with nuclear power plants used to, say, produce electricity for cities (as opposed to say, “nuclear power plants” to power US navy submarines) has nothing whatsoever to do with pollution per se.
I don't care much about nuclear waste one way or another. It's simply something that needs to be dealt with. In other words, I view nuclear waste as a cost, not a boogeyman. Nuclear waste is no big deal in my eyes. I don’t mind burying nuclear waste in some mountain somewhere until, say, we find some bacteria that will gobble it all up and render it harmless.
My problem with nuclear power plants has to do with cost: they are too expensive compared to solar and wind today. Furthermore, solar and wind look like they will keep dropping in price.
If nuclear were significantly cheaper than solar and wind, I'd very probably be advocating for nuclear. The dangers associated with nuclear are overblown by the general public, but they are real nonetheless. Therefore, at the same price point, I’d pick solar and wind over nuclear.
But these days, solar and wind are much cheaper than nuclear power plants. Therefore, building new nuclear power plants isn’t a feasible option for, say, providing electricity to a city.
These days any working engineer who generally advocates, say, constructing nuclear power plants to generate electricity for cities, is almost certainly a bad engineer. There might be some exceptions, but I don’t know of any.
Sure, in 10, or 20, or 30 years from now a new form of nuclear energy might produce electricity cheaper than wind and solar. I realize that. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me at all. Nuclear power has a lot of promise.
The main point you should focus regarding energy production in this: we are on the cusp of cheap, readily available electricity. That matters; that matters, a lot. As you might know, in 1850 steel was expensive; yet by 1870 it had become cheap. As a result skyscrapers started appearing in cities such as Chicago, New York, Rotterdam, and Turin. The Romans and the Japanese had steel. But it was super, super, super expensive compared to wood and bricks. (Oh, wait, what’s that you say? The Romans had famous concrete too? Huh. Well, I guess you learn something every day).
Cheap electricity is poised to change the world, much like cheap steel did about 150 or so years ago. How that electricity is produced doesn’t actually matter much for engineering projects. For example, when the Bessemer process was replaced by the Basic oxygen steelmaking process, I doubt many structural engineers at the time cared much about the technology. What they probably cared much about was obtaining cheap steel that met their requirements.
Finally, here is the most important point of all for you. (Yes, I saved the best for last). Engineers often become sooooo infatuated with “their toys” (their preferred technology) that they often become extremely biased and unscientific. I have excoriated many engineers for lying to me about their preferred technology.
No, I am not exaggerating. They lied to me; and I did indeed excoriate them. My tongue lashings were necessary because engineers often act like helpless drug addicts when they are enthralled with a piece of technology. They will “lie, cheat, and steal” to use what, to me, is a mere widget (tool).
Again, I am not exaggerating; I’ve lost a lot of time and money when working with engineers who have flat out lied to me in order to use their favorite technology, although it was obviously the wrong technology for the job.
I disagree.
This seems like a "great way" to damage the tourism industry in Venice. In other words, I think this is a terrible way to deal with tourists who are visiting Venice, yet aren't spending enough money in Venice.
I think it would be better to require every adult tourist to buy, say, €10 worth of "Venice Money" which they could spend at any restaurant or shop in Venice during the day they are visiting. Too many tourists? Then increase it to, say, €15. Too few tourists? Then decrease it to, say, €5.
Part of the goal is to require tourists to spend a minimum amount of money while visiting Venice. Charging an admission fee seems too heavy-handed. Sure, I realize that my suggestion is tantamount to an admission fee, but it's likely to be more palatable to tourists. The goal isn't merely to get tourists to spend a sufficient amount of money in Venice; part of the goal is to make tourists happy to do so.
Tourists are notoriously fickle. Furthermore, they have myriad places in and around Italy, Europe, and, well, the world where they can spend their money. The current problem of too many tourists could very quickly turn into a problem of a dearth of tourists.
"Killing the goose that lays the golden egg" would obviously be foolish. I presume the economy in Venice benefits immensely from tourism. This is precisely the sort of measure that people tend to look back at in hindsight and exclaim, "How could we have committed such a blunder! What were we thinking?!?"
Having opined all of that, sure, I can see why denizens of Venice would welcome a measure that would decrease the number of tourists generally, and particularly the number of skinflint tourists who visit Venice, yet don't spend a single euro in Venice.
Also, frankly, I think it would be perfectly reasonable for Venice to enforce dress codes and behavior codes. For example, nobody wants an endless "parade" of motley dressed drunkards wandering around their neighborhood.
Personally I happily shop at Costco, but haven’t set foot in a Walmart in perhaps 20 years. I detest Walmart. Why? Part of the reason is this: Costco has a “greeter” standing at the enterance. Ostensibly the greeter’s job is to verify that people entering are members. In fact, that greeter is also eyeballing each person who enters and is empowered to deny enterance to people who don’t meet Costco’s minimum standards (which aren’t very high, but are still much, much higher than Walmart’s standards).
Similarly, one of the "secrets" to the success of Las Vegas strip is this: although they allow a lot of rowdy behavior, frankly, they actually keep a tight lid on things: a very, very, tight lid, which I presume you would have noticed if you’ve ever actually been there and paid attention.
It's a delicate balance which requires discretion bordering on sophisticated and subtle diplomacy.
For example, when dealing with "drunk idiots" the Las Vegas police tend to use kid gloves as much as possible. Why? The powers that be in Las Vegas want "visitors" (tourists) to tell their family, friends, and associates they had a great time on the Las Vegas strip. They also want most of the tourists themselves to return over, and over, and over again.
The same is true for a myriad of tourist destinations around the world.