Oh yes, he was. Read about the Nimrod, furthest south, and Mount Erabus expeditions.

Shackleton is a god father of Polar travel.

I worked in oil / gas on international projects for 10ish years.

I think the dollar will still be the de-facto reserve currency in 20 years, but it will be more as a medium of exchange rather than a true "reserve" currency for central banks. Central banks are buying gold like crazy.

Comparatively speaking, the dollar is pretty stable. But, the inflation genie is out of the bottle. The USA keeps deficit spending like there's no tomorrow, and is on an unsustainable path. If tax receipts don't increase, we will have to print our way to debt servicing.

Also, the western global hegemony is shifting. Many non aligned countries frankly don't care about the wests causes; they simply want cheap energy and to grow themselves out of poverty. The middle east is facilitating all this for southeast asia and the like.

TL;DR the dollar will remain, but it will be an intermediary exchange between currencies and not a real "reserve" store of wealth.

My all time favorite is HPSTR waypoint outside PDX.

This is so spot on. We (assuming you live in the US) live in a country where the purpose is to work for as little as possible, "grind," then throw money into an index fund and have it support us the rest of our lives. Own property, while having the bottom 50% of society continually support us in the gig and service economy.

Look, I'm no Bernie Sanders, but you have to be honest about the morality of it, and the feasibility of it. I don't see the current system lasting.

Pandoc saved my ass so many times when I worked in research. I would write a beautiful typeset paper in latex and then have to send a colleague a word doc.

You can turn any file into anything. PDF to rtf, latex to .doc, etc. It does a great job. Written in Haskell, too!

I'm not a techie, but I love lurking on this website.

My only comments from someone who found Linux in high school, used to love computers, the old internet, and used to do scientific computing in Fortran and matlab.

I read through some of these posts and feel like I'm on a different planet when it comes to computers. So many packages, podmans, stand ups, etc etc. seems like there's a package, library, git runner whatever for everything. Micro services, web apps, the word app in general. Virtualize everything.

When did software design / engineering change so much? Are things really getting better, or is computing power allowing the industry to duck tape a billion things together instead of writing in low level languages and using standard packages and compilers?

What are recruiters and companies looking for?

> When did software design / engineering change so much?

We need to do more complex things, and if you want to do these things efficiently without reinventing things from scratch, you need to rely on different tooling and work on various level of abstraction.

> Are things really getting better

No but they aren't getting worse either, they're just different (except for the parts that aren't).

> or is computing power allowing the industry to duck tape a billion things together instead of writing in low level languages and using standard packages and compilers?

Lower level languages aren't better than higher level languages, they serve a different purpose. As a professional, you need to pick the right tools to do your job.

It's not getting better in my opinion and I resent most of the stuff I come across on HN because it really is crazy and needlessly complex. Never mind the recruitment and rituals employed by companies which is another soul-sucking aspect.

I honestly resent a lot of the stuff on HN these days. It's become an echo chamber.

In fairness it always was.

When the Clinton administration forced the downsizing of the military industrial complex (https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2015/12/2/f...), the USA lost all competition in the larger than regional aircraft. To compete with Airbus (subsidized by the EU), Boeing turned from manufacturing their own airplanes (and using suppliers in America) to assembling planes in Washington and forcing procurement of their products internationally through contracted parts. (https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-rctom/submission/its-complic...). Nippon airways would buy x number of 737s, etc. as long as they were making the brakes. Hell, even Airbus assembles in the USA now to force procurement in America.

> To compete with Airbus (subsidized by the EU), Boeing turned from manufacturing their own airplanes (and using suppliers in America) to assembling planes in Washington and forcing procurement of their products internationally through contracted parts.

Yes, this is one of the more common alternative fact on what happened to Boeing. Going beyond the nonsensical take of the evil subsidized foreign company unfairly competing against the hardworking non-subsidized domestic aircraft builder, as various independent pundits have reported in the light of recent events, Boeing's woes are mostly self-inflicted, starting even before the infamous MD takeover.

But it's true that it is more flattering to paint yourself as the victim of unfair globalization as opposed to acknowledging that the ruthless search of short-term gains came at the cost of product quality and passengers lives.

It's not an alternative fact, and I'm not defending Boeing. I could give a shit about Boeing.

The fact is there's no competition in the American commercial part 121 airline world. No competition makes you lazy and incompetent.

And there will never be competition. It cost Cirrus (small, single engine GA aircraft) $100 million to get a type certificate. The Boeing 737 max is still on its original type certificate.

Boeing and airbus is what the (western) world has for big jets. It's a duopoly and has no signs of not being one. Boeing probably shouldn't be a public company either.

The rest of world's aircraft manufacturers are quasi majority state owned enterprises.

I liked your office / partner comment; I think there's a lot of truth in that.

I think a lot of people are really worn out. We have endless scrolling, tons of wars in the world, people are indebted, and realistically it doesn't matter how much you work; it's all unaffordable and many are losing hope.

I think the first world needs a large structural change. Government, capitalism, the whole nine yards. I think a lot of people are seeing the bullshit from the left and right and saying to themselves "surely I'm not the only one who thinks something is wrong."

This probably won't resonate to the HN crowd, but I was in NC last week visiting a pump company that I distribute two of their lines.

The office was a ghost town. Completely empty, eerie, creepy. I think the applications engineers, accountants, office folks, etc. work from home 3-4 days a week. Meanwhile, there were 80 some employees in the factory on the lower level milling and lapping away, and fabricating pump skids.

I don't see this ending well. I know a lot of young folks and admins are singing the work from home praise, but it does create a lot of animosity when machinists are grinding away on 8 hour shifts and HAVE to be there. On the other hand, it's really fresh for someone like me to state any opinion since I'm a sales engineer and work alone out of an aircraft hangar and only see people when I go see clients at their own facilities or travel to see my vendors.

I don't think humans are meant to be in isolation, though. But, the modern American life is full of shitty commutes, long hours in traffic, and mental drain. With the rising cost of homes, fuel, life in general, who the hell wants to sit in an hour traffic each way to work? And at the end of the day, who the fuck cares? Any extra profit you generate is going to some boomer shareholder. Might as well sit at home and create what little sanity you can.

I think consultants, programmers, sales, and some technical folks and the like are safe. They could do their jobs from home in 1990, and usually frequently travel. Programmers have had svn and git for a long time. Consulting / professional engineers tend to sit on software packages and conference calls much of the day, etc. etc.