That's a supermarket though where they hope you buy other stuff. Though already colored pages cost 55 cents. In dedicated print shops it usually will be significantly more expensive.
Maybe. That drugstore chain mainly sells hygiene products. Their "main" side-business is printing photos, both digital and on film. (Yes, even in 2024 in Germany it's still possible to hand in your film in a small drugstore and have the photos developed and ready for pick-up a week later.)
So I guess printing on normal paper is just a side-side business that developed naturally.
Anyway, the 10c/page (A4 b/w) is still a good estimate, at least when I looked pre-pandemic (it might've increased slightly to 12 or 15c by now).
A lot of cities, especially those with a University, have dedicated small "Copyshops" where you can walk in and get your 100+ pages thesis printed and bound within 20min. So the prices and service are aimed mostly at Students. It's true colored pages are significantly more expensive than b/w, but overall that's still cheaper.
> That's a supermarket though where they hope you buy other stuff.
And why does that matter? If there is a shop (idc how it's called) that lets me print for 10c then I chose that.
> Though already colored pages cost 55 cents.
The GP was about documents that you may have to send in / bring physically. I've never seen such institutions demanding the forms being printed on premium paper in color.
Looked at one local print shop. It's 5 cents per page plus 1€ per order. Of course this is in an area with multiple competing print shops but your assertion is at least not true everywhere.
While dm might hope you buy other stuff from them you definitely don't have to. If you are suggesting that their print service is a loss leader then please show some evidence backing that up.
Do you have an alternative? Genuine question. We‘re also using OKRs and I’m dreading it, but it’s better than nothing. Hoping for everybody to magically on their own align with company goals doesn’t work either.
Yes. OKRs for us (a mid-size? company, 150ish people) have been a disaster. They pit teams against each other, instead of aligning them with the business, by making them focused on their targets and nothing else. It's been a lot of "this isn't in my OKRs, why should I work on it?", making it both hard to adjust course ("why would I work on this important thing when it's not an OKR?"), and to get the teams to help each other ("why would I work on their target when I have mine?")
Right now we're trying a combination of company-level objectives (not KRs) and Kanban, where the teams just work on the next most important objective they can.
> They pit teams against each other, instead of aligning them with the business, by making them focused on their targets and nothing else.
Don't you have higher level umbrella targets that everyone can contribute to? OKRs are a tree, working on targets that aren't your teams but helps the bigger picture above you is also a feature of OKRs, you aren't meant to just look at your local OKRs.
If the company need those team to help other teams, then those teams should have OKRs to help other teams. A good OKR is that they need to respond and/or fix things in X hours etc, depending on what kind of support they are expected to give.
OKR shows you the state of the current organization, if the OKR are dysfunctional the organization is dysfunctional, it would be even if you didn't see the OKRs. The fix isn't to remove the OKRs, it is to align the OKRs with what each team is really expected to do as I said above.
If the team you need help from had an OKR to help you quickly, so they focused on that, do you really believe that would be a bad thing? That is the only way to do it, such teams are slow to respond and provide help everywhere that doesn't give them OKRs to reduce latency on responses, they always have their own things to work in regardless if they are visible or not.
Such OKR also makes life easier for that team, now they get rewarded for what they are supposed to do: provide support. And, if they don't have enough people to provide that support, now they have a good case to get more resources to enable them to provide that support.
You're saying that OKRs should be SLAs, instead of hitting specific objectives? Our OKRs tend to be "release these features/fixes", not things like "hit team metrics".
Depends on the team, but yeah often time that is the most important you can work on, improving SLA metrics are excellent OKRs since they are easily measurable and are grease to the orgs cogs.
If your small company (150 is small!) has groups that need to work together but have OKRs so orthogonal that they don’t, something is seriously wrong with the OKR implementation or the culture.
That kind of “not my OKR” nonsense shouldn’t happen in a 15,000 person company, let alone a company where everyone’s OKR’s are, what, two steps from the corporate ones?
Some feedback: Telling people "that's wrong" and leaving it at that isn't very useful. These days I try to either say something constructive, or nothing at all.
While I appreciate the feedback, I also subscribe to not trying to diagnose without enough information.
I believe it is accurate and constructive to say a 150 person company with OKRs producing counter-productive outcomes is doing it wrong, at least when replying to someone who seems to believe the problem is with the OKR model.
> Right now we're trying a combination of company-level objectives (not KRs) and Kanban, where the teams just work on the next most important objective they can.
Aha. That’s an interesting take I never would’ve thought of. Thx…
We currently use JIRA for tracking practically everything, including objectives.
Whilst I don't really like JIRA, I think this kind of tracking of objectives, initiatives and delivered results is a good way to capture OKRs based on reality rather than mission statements.
For me personally (I spoke to others and they mostly agree) the biggest downside is that for "public" charging I pay a 100% premium. My costs at home (I live in a rented apartment with no possibility of charging an EV) for 1kw/h are 0.30€. The average price for charging publicly here are 0.59€. Plus the hassle of having a quadrillion providers for which I would have to check first what the cheapest one at a given charger would be. I have enough inconveniences in my life, won't add another one (especially one that could be easily resolved).
Perhaps it would make sense if electricity contracts came with a "roaming" option for a certain region. As in, get the same electricity price as at home when using a charging station on the go. After all, I think it shouldn't make much difference to the electricity company whether I use electricity at home or elsewhere, as long as I stay within the region where the company offers the contract.
This would also help people with dynamically priced contracts (the ones that vary hour by hour based on the day-ahead electricity market) to make optimal use of cheap or even negatively priced power, e.g. during the daily solar peak, even when at work. That would also help with grid balancing and reduce carbon intensity.
There would still have to be a roaming surcharge to pay the operator of the charging station of course. But perhaps it wouldn't have to be as expensive as a 100% premium, at least for AC chargers on parking lots. (For DC fast chargers the premium would probably still be substantial, because you're paying for the ROI on the high power infrastructure.)
I think that double cost is about the right price if you want market operators to offer AC charging. I don’t know exactly what we paid to install 8 Chargepoints at our office (and we offered market-rate electricity, no markup, but I’m also pretty sure we got grants to install the chargers), but it had to be $10K per 2 charging spots (and likely more, as the GW1 itself is $7200).
Making about a break-even return on that upfront expense means making $40 in markup per spot in a typical month. Thats $2 per workday per spot, meaning around a 100% markup on 10kWh of electricity or ~40 miles of range every day every spot.
That seems doable, but doing 80 miles of range every day every spot (to cut the markup in half) does not.
I don't own an EV so I don't understand... when I go to a gas station, I just tap my debit card and fill up. The price and running total is shown on a display on the pump. Why don't EV charging stations work that way?
In the UK at least, they mostly do. You park up, plug the car in, tap your contactless card and that starts the charge. Once the charge completes (or you unplug the car), the charger works out how much electricity you used and your card gets charged accordingly. In my experience there aren't too many charging points that don't accept contactless payments in this way.
Sometimes having memberships, RFID cards or apps for the different charging networks unlocks cheaper rates though, so contactless payments don't always end up being the most economical in the long run and that can make it harder to compare charging providers, hence why things like Zap-Map and Electroverse were born.
Because we live in a post-internet, post-social media, post-smartphone world. Seems like everything new requires me to sign up and pay for a subscription now.
I have no reason to believe gas stations that wouldn’t require an app if they were invented today.
Same feeling here. Given enough cars, thus given enough pressure, I'm convinced we will see some regulation coming into place. I just hope it won't become like the actual regional energy monopoly...
I used to have a bmw i3 then a model y while I lived in an apartment building. In my experience although public charging is more expensive the amount you pay overall is cheaper than an equivalent gas vehicle such that it’s probably not worth trying to find the cheapest station more than once.
For example to go “500km” in the model y charging at home with the cheapest electricity it’s about $6. At a super charger I pay about $30. 5x more expensive but for my f150 I pay $120-150 for the same distance. Between the two options charging at the super charger every time is still 4x cheaper than gas even though I could save even more charging at home
Over 10,000 miles, my EV saves me roughly £1300/year compared to my previous petrol car on the basis of being able to charge the EV overnight at home for £0.09/kW and the petrol costing around £1.40/L before. If I were relying on public charging in the UK, that story would be quite different.
A typical public 7kW AC charger here would start at around £0.45/kWh, at which point the savings would only be £300/year and that is assuming there is somewhere close by that I could leave the car charging for hours at that speed.
If I had to rely on a typical 50kW+ DC charger here in order to get charged up more quickly, that would start at a much higher £0.79/kWh, at which point driving the EV would be £700/year more expensive than the petrol car.
Quite a bit (can't find a reliable number, but looks like 300-1000kg and yes, I realize that's a wide range)
The fuel economy is actually quite reasonable unloaded - I'm getting 11L/100km vs 13 on my 370z.
The point I'm trying to make though is that it's probably not worth it to look at saving cents/kw when you're likely to come out ahead either way.
And yes, maybe more to the point of the original article - yes, if you have no car and you're only concerned with the cheapest to operate vehicle I'm confident something like a Prius driven gingerly and only filled up while gas is historically low (over a week window or whatever) you could beat an EV. On the other hand, that doesn't describe most people with cars already so for most people even living in an apartment they'd likely save money.
We had a manager joining last year which, on their first days, created MRs for existing code bases, wrote documents on new processes and gave advice on current problems we were facing. Everything was created by LLMs and plain bullshit. Fortunately were able to convince the higher ups that this person was an imposter and we got rid of them.
I really hope that these type of situations won't increase because the mental strain that put on some people in the org is not sustainable in the long run.
> I work at a cloud provider an I'm told that a big slice of our revenue comes from customers who are already load-balancing across multiple clouds, so if we degrade perf/dollar they just turn a dial to shift load to our competitors.
It's only anecdata but I'd highly question that. All companies I worked in (startup, midsize, megacorps) went with one cloud provider and stick to it. That is also not only my experience but also from friends who work in the same field. There might be a slight difference with megacorps where I saw them using multiple cloud providers but more like: Team A is using AWS, Team B is using GCP. But never: Team A is using AWS and has a copy running, ready to go, on GCP.
I tend to agree with the GP, to a degree. Chose an cloud provider and stick with it, the probability that the company changes the provider is very low (in the end all cloud provider offer the same with similar prices, no need to switch) but don't fully buy in. Like if you're on AWS, of course use RDS for DB and S3 for object storage but don't use Code Pipelines to build. So don't go "fully" proprietary.
i think it’s likely to be a certain class of customer, rendering or high power batch processing. These are relatively simple, pull a task off a stack and crunch for 90 mins, then dump the results in a bucket workloads. Large volume customers that will represent a disproportionate bottom line value to a cloud provider. Probably not the customers you are talking about above
> Recently I had to set up a zero-downtime system for my app, I spent a week seriously considering a move to k3s, but the entire kubernetes ecosystem of churn frustrated me so much I simply wrote a custom script based on Caddy, regular container health checks and container cloning. Easier to understand, 20 lines of code and I don't have to sell my soul to the k8s devil just yet.
I'd say it depends where you're coming from. For me, setting up a Kubernetes cluster (no matter which flavor) with external-dns and cert-manager will most likely take 30m-1h and that is the basic stuff that you need for running an app with the topics you mentioned. To navigate through k8s just use k9s and you're golden.
I never get where all the "k8s is the devil" comments come from. There is nothing really complex about it. It's a well defined API with some controllers, that's it. As soon as I need to have more than one server running my workloads I would always default to k8s.
> I never get where all the "k8s is the devil" comments come from. There is nothing really complex about it. It's a well defined API with some controllers, that's it.
And Linux is just a kernel with some tools, which are all well defined, that's it!. But if you need to debug a complex interaction "that's it" and "it's well defined" isn't enough.
Kubernetes is quite complex, with a lot of interactions between different components. Upgrades are a pain because all those interactions need to be verified to be compatible with one another, and the versioned APIs, as cool as a concept they are on paper, mean that there's constantly moving targets that need constant supervision. You can't just jump a version, you need to check all your admission controllers, CNI and CSI drivers, Ingress controller, cert-manager and all other things are compatible with the new version and with each other. This is not trivial at any scale, which is why many orgs adapt the approach of just deploying a new cluster, redeploying everything to it and switching over, which is indicative of exactly how much of a pain it is.
Even Google themselves that created it admit it's complex and have 3 managed services with different levels of abstraction to make it less complicated to use and maintain.
k8s is fine. It's the ecosystem around it that I dread.
I understand how it works, it makes sense, but then you're faced with Helm, kustomize, jsonnet and a lot of bullshit just to have minimal and reproducible templating around YAML. Or maybe you should use Ansible to set it up. Maybe instead try ArgoCD. Everybody and their dog is an AWS or GCP evangelists and keep trying to discourage you from running it outside of the blessed clouds. If anything breaks you're told you're stupid and that's what you get, and I should've paid someone else to manage it.
It feels like everybody is selling you something to just manage the complexity they have created. This is what keeps me away. It's insane.
