They surely haven't. The 2000s and 2010s spoiled employers because every other kid joining the labor pool spent hours a day on their computer, developing an aptitude for technology in general. For them it was a short leap from their home computer to running a retail or fast food POS.
That party is now over but most businesses still depend on desktop and laptop computing for much of their business operations and expectations haven't caught up.
Considering 1 in 3 companies have reached the point where they are dropping the need for college altogether for most roles offered; despite the percentage of college graduates having never been higher, should be enough of a sign that college is slowly becoming a training charade.
Meanwhile, we’re also at the point where 52% of graduates are underemployed within a year of graduation, and 45% still are after a decade. Employers don’t care nearly as much anymore. Tell your children their odds of it working out are literally flip a coin, and it changes the conversation.
I’m encouraging my kids to be entrepreneurs or go into the trades. College is a joke to extract fiat from unsophisticated consumers via non dischargeable government backed debt. If they end up unemployed or underemployed, cheaper to do it without the paper credential.
If you look at the graphs there is nothing like an 'inflection point' or qualitative change in the graph behaviour.
The Allied line goes slowly down and the Axis line goes slowly up. At one point they cross, but there's nothing particularly significant about that crossing point. Nothing happened in the month that they crossed other than the two numbers were equal momentarily.
But you're now talking about a much smaller group within the US Air Force. Obviously if you zoom in on any small unit of any force, you can find units with extremely high casualty rates.
See my comment above. Total air crew and merchant-marine sailor contingents were likely somewhat comparable.
The US built ~35k bombers during WWII, generally with large crew sizes: 8 for the B-24 Liberator (18,118 built), 10 for the B-17 Flying Fortress (12,731), 11 for the B-29 (3,970). That's ~35k aircraft, which would have required at least 3,500 crew members, and probably a multiple of that (presuming several crews per aircraft to sustain multiple missions).
That does make the bomber crew contingent itself smaller than the merchant marine, and air losses seemed to be concentrated among bomber crews, which were larger, slower, and generally more vulnerable than fighters or fighter-bombers.
> presuming several crews per aircraft to sustain multiple missions
Everything I have ever read suggests crews “owned” their bombers. This is how you see nose art.
There weren’t multiple crews per aircraft although sometimes crews would share planes if their aircraft was damaged and the other crew suffered casualties but that wasn’t a daily thing. Certainly there weren’t multiple crews per aircraft.
Wikipedia says 350,000 Americans served in the 8th air force alone. That’s larger than the 215,000 of the maritime service.
Wiki says 3.4 million total in the Air force but most of that is not air crews. You need a literal army of mechanics, ground crews, and mission planners.
I can’t find numbers to answer the “most dangerous job” question but everyone suffered greatly.
Everything I have ever read suggests crews “owned” their bombers.
If you could turn up any information either way, I'd be interested to see it.
I can't find any clear statement. I'm familiar with nose art and pilot-specific names (e.g., "Bockscar", named after Captain Frederick C. Bock, which dropped the atomic bomb over Nagasaki). Wikipedia states that the practice varied by country and force, e.g., the US Army Air Forces permitted the practice, it was uncommon for the UK RAF and Royal Canadian Air Force, and the US Navy prohibited the practice.
What nose art says about specific crew-aircraft assignments and their specificity or exclusivity isn't clear.
Multiple sources note that crews would rotate out after 25 missions, though heavy casualties meant that both crews and aircraft faced challenges surviving that long.
And I still find it implausible that aircraft would be idled between individual crew missions, though overhauls and repairs might well account for that.
[1] says they rotated and only flew every third day:
> So began Fitzpatrick’s life as an air warrior. At first, bomber crews had to fly 25 missions to earn the right to rotate home. Because of high casualties, the Army Air Forces leadership increased the number to 30. The crews rotated, and as a result Fitzpatrick flew every third day. “I got 25 missions in before the end of the war,” he said. “I did most of my flying in the winter of ‘45 and the spring.”
They often flew 20+ hour missions. I have no idea how they'd operate like that without switching crews or underutilizing the plane.
They're not F22s either, they didn't need to go in for major maintenance every sortie. They had inspections after every flight and daily/25/50/100 hour inspections [1] but most of the time they went hundreds of hours before needing major work that would take a plane out of rotation for extended periods of time.
How long did those regular services take? 20 hour missions means they’re going in for service every mission. The 50 hour is every other mission.
Between the B-17 and B-24 we built about 30,000 strategic bombers in WWII. They don’t all have to be in the air regularly to maintain constant 1000+ bomber formations.
If you can find any account of how crews sharing aircraft regularly I’d love to see it because I have never heard anything like that.
> What nose art says about specific crew-aircraft assignments and their specificity or exclusivity isn't clear.
The B-17 was named “Ye Olde Pub”. There’s a chapter describing the crew meeting each other and naming their airplane. I don’t recall any mention of another crew being involved. But I did get a strong sense of connection and ownership between the crew and plane.
I believe after their return they fly another B-17 that lost much of its crew, maybe combining crews to fill in losses. It has been a while since I read the book.
I don’t recall ever reading anything to suggest B-17s were regularly flown by multiple crews.
> And I still find it implausible that aircraft would be idled between individual crew missions, though overhauls and repairs might well account for that.
Isn't it possible that such a system will over-produce 99% of the year and that therefore, the marginal cost will almost always be $0?
'Take my energy and allow me to stop accelerating my flywheels which regulate production' seems more plausible than 'someone would always like more heat for something' (what?)
Or possibly 'take my energy and I'll cut off some of the people using spare energy to do low priority, low value computation for free'?
I think electricity use is far more elastic than you're imagining. Plenty of big users can turn up/down production and already do so based on prices. If wide price swings got more frequent, more stuff would get dynamic.
You can imagine home appliances having an 'eco' setting which runs the appliance like the washing or the dishwasher at the cheapest time in the next 12 hours.
Or the water heating systems which heat more water when prices are cheap.
Or heaters which switch between natural gas and heat pump based on price.
Or electric car chargers which charge during the cheapest hours.
(all of these already exist, but none are yet common).
Over the long term there is also plenty of elasticity. If electric heating is expensive, people will install gas/oil heaters when they renovate. If electricity is cheap, more people buy electric cars. With cheap electricity, maybe fewer people decide to add more insulation to their houses. Businesses don't upgrade energy inefficient equipment to be more energy efficient, etc.
Plenty of demand elasticity in both the short and long term. End result: As long as the market is unconstrained, prices won't hit zero more than say ~5% of the time.
I disagree that this argument makes it less likely to have very low prices much of the time. I think it makes it more likely.
If peak to trough is a large gap, say 60% of peak, this tends to make it less likely that peak will be met by overproduction, since that would involve very large capital costs.
The picture you paint above would suggest a very small gap between peak and trough, say 2% of peak. This means that almost certainly there would be enough over capacity to more than meet peak demand. Therefore the total daily demand would be more than met by capacity, leading to some energy being thrown away. So at all times except the peak, the marginal cost would be zero.
You have given an accurate argument for why demand would be elastic at trough. But you haven't given any reason why overall demand would be very elastic.
Yes, but remembering the multiples of 10 is vastly easier: they are 10, 20, 30, 40, etc. Remembering the multiples of 16 is quite a lot easier: 16, 32, 48, 64 etc. You probably already know them.
Now to convert from miles to km replace a multiple of 10 by a multiple of 16. 70 mph becomes 112 km/h.
To convert in the opposite direction do the opposite. 130km/h is 128 km/h + 2 km/h = 80mph + 1 mph (rounding down since you don't want to have to justify this calculation at the side of the road, to a gendarme, in a foreign language).
1.6 km = 1 mile is just as accurate as using 1.618.., the golden ratio. (Enough for driving, not enough for space travel.) And using the Fibonacci method is less accurate than the golden ratio since small Fibonacci numbers are only approximately the golden ratio apart.
The only possible justifications for the Fibonacci method are:
1. You want people to know that you know what the Fibonacci sequence is.
2. You enjoy overengineering.
3. You're one of quite a few people who believe, for whatever reason, that the golden ratio appears all over the place like in measurements of people's belly buttons, the Great Pyramids, and so on, and that this has some spiritual or mathematical significance.
This is literally what open source is. If you don't support this, you don't support open source.
There isn't a 'purer' form of open source which does exactly what you want with respect to big companies using the code.
You can be in favour of licensing that restricts Amazon or Microsoft's right to use your work. But that position is detrimental to, not supportive of, open source, since such a license would not be open source.
Whatever you think of those companies in a wider sense, it's totally inaccurate to suggest that Microsoft, Google or Amazon haven't given anything back to open source.
Hyperbole aside, they certainly haven't given as much as they've gotten, though.
E.g., remember when Heartbleed hit, and the world learned that OpenSSL was maintained by one person getting only $2000/year for it? Fixing Heartbleed was estimated to cost half a billion dollars world-wide.
But specifically, those two are examples of companies who started off FOSS, then got exploited by AWS.
Every FS-focused person gives them sh!7, but leaves Amazon off the hook because they exploited under the FS rules, which is an inversion of who actually does harm in the world.
Yes, except that since Amazon have infinite resources, the friction didn't stop them doing anything, and the fork was always going to be perfectly viable.
It’s very clear in the post ZIRP era that none of the hyperscalers have infinite resources. AWS just discontinued, er, de-emphasized Cloud9 and CodeCommit. Neither of these were free, and both were substitutes for paid products that AWS customers can get elsewhere.
