Some doubt the potential for growth with satellite internet. It’s still expensive for developing countries. It doesn’t have enough capacity for handling cities so that leaves rural customers in western countries and they’re not the biggest or richest customer base to build on.

Garbage in, garbage out. These logos represent the latter.

Well, often they know it´s hard to estimate, but the entire corporate system is built around having things done by a certain date, your time costs money and payments are usually linked to those dates. They don´t really have a choice but to make a planning based on the estimates you give and monitor the progress so they can give the proper level of panic to their bosses. Of course, software has always been a disaster with estimates and attempts to tame the chaos haven´t been that successful.

I usually make a ridiculously detailed list of all tasks. ¨Add button A on screen. Discuss details: 2 hours. Interface work: 0.5 hour. Code work: 2 hours. Database work: 2 hours. Testing: 2 hours. FAT: 2 hours. Changes after FAT: 1 hour. SAT: 2 hour. Test script: 1 hour. Update documentation: 2 hours. Add button B … ¨ Put it all in an excel sheet and summarize. Most PMs don´t even want to start arguing a list like that, and it seems to make a reasonably good estimate for me.

It’s an attempt to get a handle on things and trying to avoid situations such as:

“Oh, I was struck on that point for the last 3 months. I reinvented the wheel 2 times and now it works.”

“And now we’re 3 months behind schedule. Why didn’t you ask anybody?”

“Yeah, I didn’t want to bother anyone. But I did put in on the timesheets.”

“It says ‘working on project’.”

And that’s how regular project update meetings get scheduled, and a bunch of messages asking for updates.

If it involves an issue you can’t just Google, it’s something AI can’t do.

So because normal urges are repressed, people feel guilty, angry and start doing more if it.

Reminds me of how some of the most rabid anti-gay activists are caught pants down with another boy.

Even the Little Ice Age had bad consequences, and that was 1-2 °C cooling.

“Your survival is politically and economically non viable”