We had a sales pitch by a MS partner and they made it sound like provisioning/ migrating services to gov cloud was seamless. It makes sense there is overhead involved from compliance. Two years to pivot seems pretty crazy though.
As part of the settlement with the US over the emissions scandal, Volkswagen agreed to invest in developing Electrify America.
What they did was to subcontract with multiple vendors who could not agree on integrating their sloppy systems, so we ended up with unreliable EV charging stations running on different hardware and software managed by multiple companies with complete lack of oversight by the federal government who now wants to throw another $100M at it so the money can be stolen again.
Considering the hostile takeover of Twitter, the layoffs, lack of leadership and Elon pulling cables out of servers, the platform has been working exceptionally well, at least in my experience. Either it was built like a tank or some of the people working there are extremely competent. To be fair is not like Twitter has never been prone to issues. I'm an old enough user to remember the fail whale and many of the great outages of Twitter's first decade. It didn't became stable until maybe 5 years ago and even recently just prior to Elon coming in they had another hours-long downtime.
Lack of domain knowledge usually increases the amount of management you need too.
In software development for example your teams become much larger because you made the wrong decisions by not understanding the scope and requirements, selecting the wrong stack and tools and hiring the wrong people.
So now you need more management all the way from HR to procurement, engineering, support and legal to brute force your way into delivering.
And all these salaries and benefits need to be paid which means now there's less money to hire and retain qualified engineers and to invest in improving your products and services.
Once an organization falls in this cycle is very hard if not impossible to change, it becomes part of the culture.
"The right side version has extracted functions from an arguably worrisome implementation on the left"
Not amount of linearity and abstractions, or silly comments, can make bad code readable. I see this stuff at work all the time. To my team's defense I deal with a lot of chemists and physicists who like to write their own algorithms.
The way some diamonds (say a 2 carat round VSS1) refract light is pretty damn spectacular, no other rock or material can match it, so that may be a reason why some people want them.
As a once H1B holder I can confirm this is actually a common practice not only a FAANGs but pretty much any large and medium size tech corporation in America.
The visa is not the actual problem but the green card promise and process.
It took me 6 years to be "free" and that's considered pretty fast compared to my Indian colleagues many who are still waiting more than a decade later.
One of the teams I work with today is about 90% Indian, most from great schools like CMU, many overqualified for the job they do, all trapped in the green card promise making 1/3 of what they could be making somewhere else.
We already have very good therapies and drugs to successfully treat addiction. The problem is you need to force an addict to seek treatment and once in make sure in completes it, which can takes months and years. This is a monumental task for someone with the resources and caring, supportive family/friends. For someone sick, broke and living alone on the streets is just not possible and psychedelics is not going to change that.
This would only be possible if you are treated by professionals. An addict whose brain is soaked in nasty chemicals will never voluntarily seek treatment even if it was freely available, let alone come up with a plan by themselves to use psychedelics to sober up.
Growing up in a communist regime I'm all in for democracy and freedom. Having experienced drug addiction while having a graduate degree I also believe regulation of drugs and alcohol is necessary. You think you are in control until that one day when you take it too far. If you don't have a strong support system of relatives and friends and access to good health care, there's no coming back from that hole.
With China and India successfully launching space missions a permanent human presence in the moon and possibly Mars is a matter of time, likely happening in the next decade. This is critical for both science and national security, anything from future interplanetary exploration, mining and development/testing of new materials.