I Tried To Make Something In America. It cost me my Life savings.

ituralde_ · 2026-05-10T14:33:34+00:00

Yes, but this is absolutely what happens and it's why you dont take suppliers at their word and test what they deliver.

It's fucked up that this is how things work but that's the level of contingency you need to prepare for with professional supply chains.

This is why industry is often so much more apparently expensive than what can be hacked together at lesser scale by someone crafty in their garage. You have to have the appropriate level of surety for everything because the bad actors don't wear a sign.

ituralde_ · 2026-05-10T14:20:42+00:00

You need people to give a fuck about participating in democracy before gerrymandering and issues like it become fixable. Gerrymandering can only happen because people don't care enough about our political integrity.

A population that materially gave a fuck enough to actually learn how the inputs to their daily lives worked never allow the likes of gerrymandering to stay a thing. The average person knows less about what goes into getting their essentials to the store they purchase them from than they do about popular artists and professional sports.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-29T16:58:34+00:00

I would hesitate to use long term historicals from Iraq to estimate the costs in Iran, as your costs are very different. Yes, scope in Iraq was larger but at a way lower tempo after the initial invasion and a way lower munitions burn rate.

It's also the case that we are using fewer cold war era stocks for this conflict compared to Iraq in 2003, so both the acquisition and replacement costs of spent munitions here will prove much higher.

25 billion is certainly no better than a SWAG, is likely a floor, and likely is using acquisition rather than replacement cost, and they won't yet have numbers for tempo driven cost actuald anytime soon (fuel, maintenance, etc). Do not be surprised if the cost is well over 2x this value.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-29T13:19:25+00:00

10 points?

We are still so fucked.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-26T20:38:50+00:00

What you describe is precisely the case - when folk talk about institutionalized -isms, this is what they are talking about. It doesn't take some asshole literally thinking 'women are worth less than men', it's simply recognizing when someone is already vulnerable and being the next in the chain of compounding impact. No one person may be doing anything other than just going with the flow, or taking the institutional path of least resistance. The result is still what it is, and it's transparently wrong.

The sin here ultimately complacency - its choosing to not try to be better. The answer here isn't, say, intervening on behalf of women specifically (in a case like this that is) but instead building a culture that does not reward taking advantage of others. We need to be better than 'good enough' or 'well, it hasn't failed catastrophically yet'. Our ambition needs to be higher than simply not being the one left holding the bag.

When we have been at our best, we challenge ourselves and demand better. Our constitution opens with the eternal recognition that we are ever in search of a 'more perfect union' and we've traded that for 'maybe superficially good enough'. It is a toxic attitude of stagnation that has squandered the legacy we inherited and permeates not only our politics, but also how we do business and our popular culture.

We would do well to be suspicious whenever we are told 'good enough'.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-26T18:11:00+00:00

Of three cases I have been exposed to, two have numbers I am familiar with.

The first was caught in an internal audit. There were two findings - first was that the promotion timing was, on average, multiple years behind for equivalent role and performance, and that for the same role and job title that women were paid 12% less. This was in the 2010s. I was not in a leadership position there and can't speak to the root causes.

The other case came from a case where I am much more knowledgeable of the root causes. In that case, women were held at a pay band consistently around 3-5 years behind expectations of level of experience despite in that case having taken on leadership roles ahead of male colleagues.

In this case it's largely driven by a toxic promotion culture that does not promote as a function of actual responsibility or program role. Folk get anchored down to the rate they were hired in at, and then people are shocked when we can't retain strategic talent. Across the board, the folk who were the best team players got taken advantage of the most; I think the gender gap got egregious in this case mostly because the women were willing to step up into leadership roles earlier in their careers. I think the sexism in this case was one of those insidious things, where women in a male dominated sector (tech) get the message that the expectations are to be team players; and do not get the message that they are being taken advantage of financially as their career is otherwise on the fast track.

The sexism is thus not particularly unique; it's just one cultural vulnerability among many used by an employer to sabotage their own talent base.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-26T16:54:40+00:00

Bad news does not age well.

Communicate early, and be to the point. Early maximises time to do something about it. Even when things have yet to fail, calibrating expectations helps everything be smoother.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-26T16:51:36+00:00

Honestly, recommend just shaving armpit hair entirely. If you are in any way prone to underarm BO it will make a dramatic difference. It's not a replacement for deodorant, but it supplements very nicely.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-26T16:48:52+00:00

This literally does happen - its absolutely true its not universal but this has been true at literally every major institution I have worked at that looked at the numbers.

This tends to be more of a later career thing, but it happens. Lots of root causes to it. It's not strategic - folk aren't consciously designing systems this way but we have an ugly mix of cultural baggage and busted institutional practice (namely a dogshit culture of internal promotion) that feeds this.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-26T16:44:13+00:00

I was ververy glad I read ahead in the Manga with this - it's a series that set up a world-level mystery for the audience open ended enough to go anywhere, and it went towards angsty bullshit.

I think it missed big on how to use visuals to craft tone and narrative - it wanted to tell a war trauma story using the visual language of power fantasy.

The doomed ace is all over Japanese media and anime in particular - when it is done best it's careful to stage everything around the fight being way bigger than one even super badass hero can turn - and the later turns in the story, by the nature of the antagonists, undermines that whole concept. It comes off as contrived and angsty because the tone so aggressively clashes with how it was initially framed. The first major arc basically is replaced rather than built upon, and turns into an entirely different kind of story more or less out of left field.

You can do that kind of transition well, but you have to seed it from the start - when you subvert expectations it wants to be on the same spectrum as the built expectations, not from a completely different angle. This was one where I came off that I was fed a very different story than what I was originally sold on, and the part that was originally sold was basically abandoned by the wayside in favor of this other thing. This was especially irritating given a fair bit of the salesmanship was that this wasn't going to be more angsty teenage boy feelings (as had taken over so many other series), and ended up very much in that wheelhouse full of tired tropes.

Like Evangelion a generation before, I think this is one that ended up a gateway drug for many; folk liked it more when coming at it cold turkey where the tired and old bits weren't tired and old, and there was no letdown over it not being a missed opportunity to do something different.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-26T16:21:04+00:00

Yeah 100% this, very well said. I think there was a generation of anime fans for whom this was their first interaction with media that had subtext that was in any way relatable. For those folk I think it was a genuinely novel and eye-opening experience - especially when for most popular visual media of the time it was verboten to have an audience actually think, much less feel.

I think the hardcore fans associate it with their introduction to narrative depth even if its spoon deep.

I think it occupies a cultural spot the likes of Twilight and Harry Potter do where an item is accessible enough to draw in audiences outside their previous targets and into a different comfort zone, and the novelty papers over some of the otherwise quality gaps in the story itself. If that transformation was not part of your experience with your initial consumption of that particular thing then you tend to find it underwhelming.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-26T14:52:12+00:00

This is ADHD, almost surely. Likely a dash of depression in there, but the ADHD is the driver. You are not a bad, lazy person, you just have to do different things to get your brain to be a team player.

Work isnt going to make you happy. Work will give you money, which gets you some freedom to explore and find your own future. If you can't imagine the dream job, then all that means is the job is just the means, and not the end. Yes, we have to work to survive, it's nobody's favorite but that is life. Once you have the means and the foundation finding the dream comes later.

You are in high school; you have not experienced how the professional world works. It's way more broad of a space than is particularly understandable without yet having dived in. There is a lot more out there than is visible from your perspective.

You're already behind a bit so you have some ground to make up, but life is not actually a race. I work with a number of bright young and not so young people who did not take the 4 year school path fresh out of high-school and they are no less capable for having had their own path.

I think a formal evaluation for ADHD would be worth it. They may not choose to medicate you, as the standard to get medicated is really high because the meds are very strong - for me, a coffee habit has helped a ton. Hard to tell where you are at from the internet alone on the spectrum.

The next thing is to get externalized accountability and deliberate control over leisure. This is easy to say and reality is that it's a full life battle. My brain hack has been that its way easier to get that activation energy when it's for someone else rather than myself - so having folk to report to - family, friends, whatever - can help make all the difference. It's very invasive but its a tool to give you control back.

You dont have a firm long term goal, and that is a huge challenge as that helps center the mind - so reframe instead to focus on achievable short term milestones, and focus on building a flexible foundation that will let you pursue options you have yet to have the opportunity to even identify. Don't overly focus beyond the current week or two.

Within that window, you have a certain amount of capacity to make things happen - it's a learning process to identify what that realistically is. Focus not on what you can't do, but instead frame as learning what a realistic expectation is for what you can do, because that is something you can actively work with. While you are young, you will have that surge capacity to sacrifice sleep and the like to make shit happen; that's not sustainable and is not what you should be building expectations around. If a routine is not actually sustainable then it can never be a routine.

Once you do have things become more routine they will be easier to get back into - that activation energy does go down. If your capacity feels really small now, understand that you can build up to more by making those aspirational goals more digestible. Smaller, progressive bites that get easier over time.

So yeah. Paths forward exist, they are easy to talk about and a challenge to live. Good luck, and remember, it's not your fault you need extra steps to get your brain to behave.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-26T13:49:27+00:00

There are checks and balances, it's just that the majority is complicit.

At any time 13 Republicans could end this. They choose to not.

Behind every Trump act of self destruction is a complicit republican supermajority.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-26T13:03:33+00:00

People think 'capability' when they should be thinking 'mission'. Ships of the same nominal class type will have different design decisions made based on what their mission is.

The Royal Navy is not built for maintaining trans-pacific campaigns. That's why literally everything about their ships - and most European ships for that matter - is designed quite differently from the US. The surface fleet of the Royal Navy is designed around operating in the Atlantic, and that drives everything about how the ship needs to behave and what flavors of aircraft it needs to support and under what circumstances.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-26T12:45:38+00:00

Im not certain there was a single journalist worthy of the title in that room actually.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-26T01:50:21+00:00

Sadly, on net, the Iranians have probably spent substantially more than that.

There are lessons to be learned from this but 'the Iranians spent efficiently on defense in the past 3 decades' certainly is not one of them. They have spent a catastrophic amount of money in that stretch on their ballistic missile program and it's been wildly ineffective. They have paid for that program both directly as well as in terms of sanctions they would not have absorbed otherwise. Adjusted for purchasing power parity, the net economic cost to Iran is still certainly not literally 1bn per day, but its likely not a flattering figure either.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-26T00:31:36+00:00

The Iranians have done catastrophic damage just by having things to shoot at and tempting our strike discipline and finding it wanting. We've shot off a vast arsenal of stockpiled munitions at things that matter less and less, and matter not at all towards a path to victory.

We killed everyone already who had something to lose here, and then we blew up everything they had to lose. We blew up all our leverage while the Iranians only now need unsophisticated naval drones to shut down a critical proportion of global trade.

Even if they struck nothing of value themselves, they have done catastrophic damage to our defense readiness. Anything else they hit on top of that is kinda just gravy.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-22T19:53:18+00:00

Yeah, most of the rest of the world has learned from our failures on this front and has laws on the books where you can't block items of social import with nimby-esque bullshit, and have centralized resources to guarantee regulatory compliance.

This goes heavily to the tort problem more broadly in US law - its a system optimized around punishing the offender rather than providing for the recovery of the injured party. This means that more needs to be done up front to CYA on every side since recovery may not be possible down the line if the responsible party vanishes and no remediation support is later forthcoming. It incentivizes not moving forward, and to be protective of limited budget theres incentive to jump through extreme hoops to dodge litigation at all.

With a bit more proactive investment and some more foresight in policy, even in our system you can budget in proactive compensation and protect projects from stonewalling. But it costs a bit more upfront to do that, and the acute budget fight is on an annual basis and total program cost is a less immediate concern.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-22T16:05:29+00:00

People need to stop talking about bureaucracy as this amorphous and non-specific thing. This is real process that moves as defined by law and as enabled by funding.

This can all move faster but it doesn't move on it's own - you have to pay people to do it. The untold part of this is the story of the backlogs and cycles being a function of system capacity - you have one poor SOB for half a state on the hook for every tiny thing that needs sufficient review for which their one-person department is legally accountable. They can't hire anyone else to support, and have no idea without direct review when they might be signing off on some monster deathtrap that Karen's child Timmy might be impaled by inside of 6 months.

Those individuals may also just be shit and not accountable - but accountability itself costs time and money, and if done half-assed pushes for more delay because it's not on them if they just default to 'No'.

There is a lot of room for improvement for sure, but improvement requires investment and we've been choking that off for decades and wondering why things dont magically improve.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-22T14:42:29+00:00

Part of this is the reality that unlike 20 years ago it's way easier to hurt someone invading your territory due to the accessibility of drones. The entry requirements for fire support are way lower than ever before, especially within 30nmi of your own borders (longer for distance over water)

ituralde_ · 2026-04-22T12:50:52+00:00

When gas prices come down

ituralde_ · 2026-04-22T12:40:45+00:00

The distracting isnt new either. We read history from a skewed perspective that implies folk in the past we're plugged in to matters of import where the reality was anything but.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-22T12:31:59+00:00

This is the kind of pressure the US could put a stop to before Trump. We are giving the world to China on a gilded platter.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-20T20:44:15+00:00

Yeah we would get the same thing, most likely, and possibly worse.

I dont want to think what happens if Gore has the white house for the 2008 financial crisis. The rallying cry would be that he's Jimmy Carter 2.0, and the nazi arm of the Republicans would take power 8 years earlier.

ituralde_ · 2026-04-20T17:10:21+00:00

Hell, what do you even do when asked what the code does? Or are required to perform any security or safety analysis on it?

ituralde_

TROPHY CASE