deathmtn

…to be able to make sound management decisions and form executive strategy – you need to understand what the EU is. More specifically, you need to understand the European Single Market.

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The EU ban on roaming charges is a good example. European mobile phone companies generally aren’t allow to inflict surcharges for using their service across the EU.
Or, another way to put it would be that the EU does not let private parties turn the single market into multiple subdivided markets under private control. It doesn’t matter that most of these companies were European, their practices threatened the very concept of a single market, so the practice had to be eased out.
Private parties are not allowed to divide or fragment the single market, allowing that in the long term is an existential threat to the EU, because the single market is what the EU is for.

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Much like roaming, App Stores let private companies subdivide and control the single market to their own financial gain. When much of the digital economy is taking place on phones, tablets, and various other devices that are largely limited to App Stores, this is effectively ceding the single market to a fragmented market that’s entirely under corporate control.
This is against the core operating theory behind the EU. They would be institutionally against this even if the companies in question were European. Many, if not most, of the mobile phone operators affected by the roaming regulations were European. That didn’t earn them a pass on compliance.

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If Apple had faced reality and tried to understand the facts as they are, they would have used the talks to clarify all of these issues and more well in advance of the DMA taking effect.
But they didn’t because they have caught the tech industry management disease of demanding that reality bend to their ideas and wishes.

While Below offers useful ways to cheat the inconvenience of death, the reality is one where I spend a lot of time scouring the places I’ve plundered many times before. It’s true that an element of procedural generation is built into environmental design — meaning that rooms change from one playthrough to the next — but these variations are only of marginal consequence.

A room on Level 3 will always be a collection of mossy, stony lanes and crevices, dotted with pools and spike-traps. It will always have one, two or three doors.

Likewise, the maps on each level change every time, but the important rooms, which lead to extra resources or to lower levels, are, so far as a I can glean, always found in roughly the same place.

This random generation relieves the boredom of repetition only slightly.

A bridge is a carefully calculated thing. One of the major assumptions is that where I put the support points, I’m going to give it support. If I take that away, there’s not a design that’s going to allow the bridge to span anyway.

You literally just see it all erased, and then the bridge is moving vertically down as a rigid body.... It’s gravity. Its support has been removed. The places that you see it fail and then finally fail into the water are directly correlated to the loss of the support. It’s not some propagation of: one thing happens, and then that fails this member, and then that member that failed fails this member.... The whole bridge, every piece of steel, goes vertically down. There’s not a twist or bend or anything like that. Support’s gone; down it goes.

Are there any engineering lessons from this disaster?

So maybe we treat it as a full infrastructure problem, as opposed to a bridge problem, right? We need the Port of Baltimore. It’s a major shipping port for the entire Northeast Corridor. It has significant shipping traffic. If you look at the size of the ships from the 1970s, when the bridge was built, to now, it’s radically changed. When you look at the failure in the video, the container ship is as wide as the bridge is tall. It’s hard to get your mind around how big it really is! A lot has changed in terms of the environment in which that bridge operates and what we need it to do.