> Earlier in the article the author mentions alexander's perfect track record of logistical balancing. Surely that, if nothing else, is far better attributed to his officer corps then him? They'd been doing this successfully for 20 years before he took over, they had lots of practice at it and all Alexander had to do was not upset the apple cart.
Alexander's officers had experience campaigning in Greece. It's logistically incomparable to conquering even Asia Minor, forget the whole of Persia.
Japan also consciously entered on a relatively lower-energy path than the US, largely through energy and vehicle taxation and licencing practices, though there were others. That's not to say Japan doesn't have a large number of automobiles, or a strong automobile sector. It does.
But domestic autos tend to be smaller than those made for export elsewhere, there's a tremendous domestic transit system (famously the Shinkansen), and Japan's electronics industry (with hits and misses) was the result of a deliberate government-directed policy toward more efficient resource utilisation over simply mass consumption.
Not perfectly achieved, by any means, but a contrast to policies elsewhere.
This couldn't possibly be more wrong – we need fewer engineers, not more. We face two inescapable realities:
1. Hardware engineers should be located near manufacturing facilities, and should speak the same language as factory workers.
2. The economy in its infinite wisdom is signaling that Software engineers are more valuable than hardware engineers. Assembling and optimizing the logic of human society is an extremely productive task, and results in huge profits for companies. For unit of time it is more productive to write backend software which controls the behavior of physical objects, than to re-design physical objects to be marginally more efficient.
There are lots of engineering grads getting jobs – in East Asia, earning a fraction of the salaries here, and working 12 hour days 6 days per week. US engineering graduates are retraining en-masse to be software engineers. The average newly minted hardware engineer graduate has a very low chance of finding a job, and will likely end up earning less than a skilled laborer. The lives of talented Americans are valuable, and should not be wasted learning unneeded skills.
There is a severe oversupply of engineering graduates in the US, that's all there is to it. All hardware engineering jobs have been colocated with the actual manufacturing facilities they are designing for – i.e., Asia-Pacific. Even the reduced number of graduates is too many, because the demand is virtually zero. People are not dying and retiring as fast as the industry itself is.
Anecdotally I would say that standards are going down for Amazon hires. Recently I've seen some average and below-average people move there. They also seem to be expanding their hiring locations geographically. IMO the reason for all this is because they have grown to such a size that they are exhausting the supply of talented developers in the world.
A Russian or Chinese charter city would be viewed negatively because these are hostile states. A charter city in the US composed of people from Canada would not be viewed in this way. Charter cities will not work in hostile cultural environments. I understand that from your perspective, Americans are hostile foreigners rather than friendly foreigners, and many people obviously share that view. Charter cities are an interesting concept, but the cultural environment is a critical factor in the viability of real-world cases.
So should we just pretend to think that it's suspicious even though it doesn't seem suspicious, or do we really need to soak our minds in the void until we actually believe that it is? How many IQ points do I need to lose before I am no longer normalizing totalitarianism?
It's easy to be productive in that context. People pinging you to get help with something, that's a "positive distraction." You'll write a block of code super fast and send it back to them.
