I certainly wouldn’t run to HR right away — but unfortunately, it’s true sometimes that people just aren’t a good fit for whatever reason. Deadweight that isn’t able to accomplish the tasks that need to be done doesn’t do you any favours — if you’re doing your job and their jobs because they just can’t handle the tasks that’s hardly fair to you, and isn’t doing the organization any good — eventually you’ll burn out, nobody will pickup the slack, and everyone will suffer for it.

My first instinct in your situation however would be that everyone has got used to the status quo, including the staff you have to constantly mentor. Hopefully if you can coach them into doing the work for themselves and keeping them accountable to tasks and completion dates will help change the dynamic.

I’m a tech manager with a 100% remote team of seven employees. We’re a very high performing team overall, and I give minimal hand-holding while still fostering a collaborative working environment.

First off, you need to make outcomes clear. Assign tasks, and expect them to get done in a reasonable timeframe. But beyond that, there should be no reason to micro-manage actual working hours. If some developer needs some time during the day to run an errand and wants to catch up in the evening, fine by me. I don’t need them to be glued to their desk 9-5/10-6 or for some set part of the day — so long as the tasks are getting done in reasonable time, I let me employees structure their working hours as they see fit.

Three times a week we have regular whole-team checkins (MWF), where everyone can give a status update on their tasks. This helps keep up accountability.

Once a month I reserve an hour for each employee to just have a general sync-up. I allow the employee to guide how this time is used — whether they want to talk about issues with outstanding tasks, problems they’re encountering, their personal lives, or just “shoot the shit”. I generally keep these meetings light and employee-directed, and it gives me a chance to stay connected with them on both a social level and understand what challenges they might be facing.

And that’s it. I’ve actually gone as far as having certain employees who were being threatened with back-to-office mandates to have them converted to “remote employee” in the HR database so they’d have to lay off threatening them — only 2 of my 7 employees are even in the same general area of the globe (my employees are spread in 3 different countries at the moment), and I don’t live somewhere with an office, so having some employees forced to report to an office doesn’t help me in the slightest (I can’t be in 6 places at once — I live far enough away I can’t be in any of those places on a regular basis!).

Your employees may have got used to you micro-managing them. Changing this won’t happen overnight. Change from a micro-manager into a coach, and set them free. And if they fail…then it’s time to talk to HR and to see about making some changes. HTH!

That if a racoon saw you swimming, it would swim out to you and sit on your head and drown you.

My fully adult mother actually feared this was something that could happen to her children, and she warned us of this “danger” every summer when we were young.

I know you weren’t directly questioning my assertion, but in case anyone else happens to think I’m just blowing smoke: Coloured Fuel | DriveSmart BC.

I can see Republicans going after Obama for things…

Please list these “things” and the laws they are in violation of.

All time, probably the Cinesphere at Ontario place — one of the very first IMAX screens ever built, inside a geodesic sphere.

Currently (and closer to home) the IMAX theatre at our local museum. They show all sorts of IMAX formatted films (they have a full 4K Laser IMAX projection system), and their snack bar is hard to beat: excellent popcorn and hot dogs, lots of snack options, and the prices for which don’t break the bank (especially when compared to all the other theatres in our area). Last time I went (to see Oppenheimer) I got a large popcorn, large Coke, and a cup of gummy treats — and I think I spent a whole $12 (CAD).

And while I don’t have one, they have an annual pass available.

That I’m a handsome sex machine, with charisma to spare.

No idea who started that one. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Does this pump also dispense marked fuels through the same hose?

In my province of residence gas stations near farming communities often sell “marked fuel” (fuel with an added red dye in it) that are taxed less, and which are intended for farming machinery, road work equipment, boats, and other non-highway use only. If you’re caught with red-dyed fuel being used for any other purpose you can be charged with an offence, and levied fines or other penalties.

If you dispense a small amount of regular gasoline after another purchaser had bought marked gasoline, the dye in the fuel remaining in the lines likely isn’t diluted enough to tell the difference — and you could (hypothetically) then be charged with possessing marked fuel without the proper paperwork.

(Anywhere I’ve ever seen marked fuels sold usually has a separate hose for the marked fuel to be dispensed from to prevent this from happening — but I don’t know your gas station or where you live, so maybe they rely on dilution rather than separation to differentiate?)

If the Soviets hadn’t cut corners and Chernobyl hadn’t happened in this first place, this is likely where we would already be.

Easy. Have nuclear power plants operate as government run and backed corporations (what we’d call a “Crown Corporation” here in Canada).

That way you can mandate safety and uptime as metrics over profit. It may be less efficient from an economic standpoint (overall cost might be higher), but you also don’t wind up with the nuclear version of Love Canal.

I started back in the Wild West BBS days on the 80s; graduated to USENET in the 90s, website forums in the Web 1.0 days, /., Reddit, and now Lemmy. Yeah, I’ve been around. Been “Yaztromo” all that time too.

I don’t mind that “Eternal September” hasn’t infected this space yet — that’s a feature, not a bug!

All coal from the Earth has a radioactive component to it. Burning coal releases more radiation into the atmosphere than a properly functioning nuclear reactor ever does. Fly ash from coal fired power plants contains 100 times more radiation than nuclear power plants emit.

The idiots on here apparently also think that burning coal somehow doesn’t create waste that will last for longer than humanity has existed.

I’m not sure what’s keeping Microsoft and ibm from Open Sourcing all the rest of the DOS versions as well — the 3.x series was very influential, 5 added disk compression, and 6 was the most modern of them all. I can’t remember if Stac’s lawsuit against Microsoft would require them to take out the disk compression parts (although AFAIK the relevant patents are probably long expired now), but even if that’s the case having these available as OSS would also be useful — even if only for a historical context.

To put things into context, IBM didn’t get ripped off in any way (at least not from DOS - the whole IBM/Microsoft OS/2 debacle is a different story). The earliest PCs (IBM PC, IBM PC XT, IBM PC Jr., and associated clones) didn’t really have the hardware capabilities needed to permit a more advanced operating system. There was no flat memory model, no protection rings, and no Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB). The low maximum unpaged memory addressing limit (1MB) made it difficult to run more than one process at a time, and really limits how much OS you can have active on the machine (modern Windows by way of example reserves 1GB of virtual RAM per process just for kernel memory mapping).

These things did exist on mainframe and mini computers of the day — so the ideas and techniques weren’t unknown — but the cheaper IBM PCs had so many limitations that those techniques were mostly detrimental (there were some pre-emptive OSs for 8086/8088 based PCs, but they had a lot of limitations, particularly around memory management and protection), if not outright impossible. Hence the popularity of DOS in its day — it was simple, cheap, didn’t require a lot of resources, and mostly stayed out of the way of application development. It worked reasonably well given the limitations of the platforms it ran on, and the expectations of users.

So IBM did just fine from that deal — it was when they went in with Microsoft to replace DOS with a new OS that did feature pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, and other modern techniques that they got royally screwed over by Microsoft (vis: the history of OS/2 development).

As someone who has done some OS dev, it’s not likely to be of much help. DOS didn’t have much of any of the defining features of most modern OS’s — it barely had a kernel, there was no multitasking, no memory management, no memory protection, no networking, and everything ran at the same privilege level. What little bit of an API was there was purely through a handful of software interrupts — otherwise, it was up to your code to communicate with nearly all the hardware directly (or to communicate with whatever bespoke device driver your hardware required).

This is great for anyone that wants to provide old-school DOS compatibility, and could be useful in the far future to aid in “digital archaeology” (i.e.: being able to run old 80’s and early 90’s software for research and archival purposes on “real DOS”) — but that’s about it. DOS wasn’t even all that modern for its time — we have much better tools to use and learn from for designing OS’s today.

As a sort of historical perspective this is useful, but not likely for anything else.

AWS already had to effectively do this. AWS only exists in two regions in China because they licensed much of the AWS software to be run by a pair of Chinese-government affiliated ISPs inside China (that is, Amazon doesn’t run AWS in either of its China zones — it’s run by a pair of Chinese companies who license AWS’s software).

This is why the China AWS regions are often quite far behind in terms of functionality from every other region (they either haven’t licensed all the functionality, they don’t keep up-to-date at the same cadence as Amazon, or Amazon is holding certain functions back), and why you can’t really access them from the standard AWS console.

So in effect, Amazon did have to give their software to Chinese-government affiliated companies in order to continue operating in China.

Likely well deserved — but still unfortunate. The EV space only benefits from more options and more competition.

An honest review isn’t what’s going to kill their business. Even a bad product in and of itself isn’t necessarily what could cause the death of their business — it’s their not adequately tempering consumer expectations. From the sounds of it, they’ve oversold what the product can actually do, and are charging a price based on this fantasy.

If you’re honest in your marketing as to what your product can actually do, and charge a corresponding price then consumers and reviewers may be more forgiving. Where companies like this one which are doing fairly experimental stuff fail is when they over-promise and under-deliver. And reviewers will always take them to task when they do that.

Image for a moment how we Computer Scientists feel. We invented the most brilliant tools humanity has ever conceived of, bringing the entire world to nearly anyone’s fingertips — and people use it to design and perpetuate pathetic brain-rot garbage like Gab.ai and anti-science conspiracy theories.

Fucking Eternal September…

A big reason for that programme was to try to take some of the most polluting vehicles off the road (either due to age or being in poor repair). There is no need for such a programme in a world of electric vehicles, so I doubt there would be any incentive for a government to run some a programme again.