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>be working on a profit center rather than a cost center.

I automate jobs. But my company sells products. Is that profit?

It seems like a cost, but we eliminate head count.

Hmm saying it out loud. We make profit, just not revenue.


Does this apply to hitting trees/poles? That's a lot of extra force you need to stop.


The extra force is mostly a problem for the tree, not for you. You get injured either because something squishes you (modern cars are good at avoiding that), or because you are decelerated too quickly, which is a function of speed and stopping distance.

With movable/deformable obstacles, heavier car = obstacle gets moved/deformed more = higher stopping distance.

A heavier car doesn't reduce stopping distance with heavier obstacles (a bigger car increases it though).


No. In single vehicle crashes heavier weight is deadlier. Increased weight means longer stopping distance and higher rollover risk,


Your own weight has to decelerate to a stop, and the force it takes for your head to go 60 to 0 doesn't change based on what's around you. What does change its that a heavy car may resist the obstacle more -> longer distance until stop -> longer time to stop -> your head has more time to stop -> lower deceleration force on your head.


For whom? Heavier cars are safer because they slow down less when you hit something. If you hit something sturdy enough to stop you dead anyway you’ll probably cop a similar amount of damage as a smaller car.


Disagree. Microsoft sells these as "unskilled", but at the end of the day, you still need skill but also perseverance.

At least SQL is old enough to get plenty of relevant search results. You can be a copy-paste DJ if you really can't figure it out.


I agree! the bar's so low that I've seen a lot of people just click around till they get a pretty graph without knowing what/why they did!


After getting one of these short domains/urls and it not working on my browser, I'll be a late adopter. I think I spent like $30/yr on whatever I bought too.


>Cost cutting measures to entire company functions

Isn't that obviously what op is asking?

Me and 18k people were let go in 2018. I was contract, so I knew what was going to happen.

I was hired by a different company who was confident in their ability to not fire contractors during recessions. Before 2020 they let go of the contractors.

I wasn't concerned because I had a ton of money + skills. But I'm pretty sure op is going to be dealing with a similar situation to me.


I hope to have one of these articles about FreeCAD one day. Maybe the stakes are lower for movies than engineering and that's why it hasn't happened yet.


Some blockers I've encountered after spending a lot of time in FreeCAD:

- No built-in assembly workbench. If you create more than 1 object, there is no way to align/attach them together. There are several competing, incompatible, and buggy plugins.

- Topological naming problem is way worse than in paid CAD software. It's very difficult to edit old constraints without breaking new actions as they're replayed: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Topological_naming_problem

- Software dependencies are not included. Essential features like viewing the dependency graph (to unbreak your model; See above) are broken out of the box. You have to manually install specific versions of tools like graphviz (no, not the same version used by all the other software on your system) to unbreak these features first. Same goes for rendering images, exporting to some formats, using some mesh generators, etc. You really get the full "linux desktop" experience even if you are not on linux ;)


> Topological naming problem is way worse than in paid CAD software. It's very difficult to edit old constraints without breaking new actions as they're replayed: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Topological_naming_problem

This is the single, number one, absolute must fix problem in FreeCAD. All other FreeCAD work should stop until this gets fixed. Period.

Broken constraints were bad enough, but as an amateur I could live with them. However, every now and then the system would renumber and reconnect constraints wrongly. That's just not acceptable and should never happen.

Until FreeCAD fixes this not only can't I recommend it but I have to give anti-recommendations to stay far, far away from it. That pains me greatly as FreeCAD is the only piece of open-source software I have ever had to chase people away from.


I agree that this is the biggest blocker, though I wouldn't go so far as to say stay away from it. Rather it is one of the most important things one needs to understand (trust me, you will after you've run into it a few times) when using this tool and design around it. Unfortunately, this limitation renders the tool far less powerful than it could be otherwise.


> All other FreeCAD work should stop until this gets fixed. Period.

Ha ha that's exactly what would happen if FreeCAD was a company and had a product manager, but it's very unlikely that would happen organically.

Maybe some day a megacorp will get so pissed off by solidworks licensing that they fork FreeCAD, rewrite opencascade, fix the high priority bugs, and release code+binaries out of spite. A man can dream.


Why? We have several open source file-systems and if they started to corrupt your harddrive, people would run away from them.


About that... https://danluu.com/filesystem-errors/

Things have gotten better, but filesystems still drop errors.


> Maybe the stakes are lower for movies than engineering and that’s why it hasn’t happened yet.

I really doubt that has much to do with it. The Blender team has been working the hardest on creating sustainable funding, that is the major difference. Blender’s “Get Involved” link takes you to the Blender Foundation page, which is a business entity setup and devoted to funding Blender. FreeCAD’s “Get Involved” link takes you to GitHub. The Blender site lists paid jobs, and has a one-click donate button highlighted with monthly corporate level sponsorships listed, where FreeCAD’s has only a single $5 suggestion behind a menu. There’s a further link to a list on a wiki of a couple more ways to sponsor FreeCAD, but you can feel the difference in scale just browsing the two sites. Blender got started ~8 years ahead of FreeCAD, so yeah maybe if FreeCAD focuses on growing a business model they can get there too. The Blender Foundation was launched about 20 years ago though, and it seems like it look a looong time to get the real traction they seem to have now.


I spent a solid month trying to switch from Fusion 360 to FreeCAD (as a hobbyist maker) and while I got to the point where I could pretty much make anything I needed… it never stopped being a struggle, and taking twice as long.

I really really want an OSS alternative to Fusion/etc but FreeCAD needs a lot of work before it’ll even come close.


I can't thinking that the struggles of an experienced Fusion 360 user such as yourself would be a very valuable thing to contribute to the FreeCAD project.

It's only a few years since we used to hear regular reports of people really struggling with the Blender UI too. It's great to see the improvements to Blender now paying off.

I think there's a fairly good chance that the devs aren't aware of all the rough edges or quirky choices in the same way that a power user of another CAD system would be.

(My own personal CAD experience is so dated at this point as to be pretty useless. I learnt on Unigraphics on a Sun workstation way back in the mists of time but have forget almost everything about it.)


Agreed, FreeCAD is painful to use when you’ve been spoiled by Fusion or OnShape. I’ve tried using SALOME as an OSS alternative, it’s somewhat reminiscent of FreeCAD but something of an improvement. CadQuery is another possibility, but I would miss some of the drawing tools - full parametric CAD seems too limiting.


FreeCAD's user experience is incoherent or perhaps more like chaotic for a newcomer - to FreeCAD, but experienced in CAD -. Like there was no coherent way of thinking or common approaches in it, like if hundreds of people added pieces to it here and there the way they pleased.

At least this is what I seen 5-7 years ago, gave up very quickly struggling with it - a software supposed to make things easier, not more complex, and FreeCAD made things unnecessarily difficult and complicated. Maybe I should look at it again now, hopefully things improved.


I’ve been trying to get to grips with FreeCAD for a few months and it reminds me a lot of pre-2.8 Blender - the UX is very opinionated and clunky, needs some serious re-thinking…

(I am trying to avoid using Fusion 360, which has a much more streamlined experience)


Maybe it's the perfect time to rebuild it.


Why start from known bad point? Just build something else.


it's always good to consider the existing before throwing it all away


Especially because FreeCAD is a reasonably good cross-platform desktop application, and rebuilding a CAD program from scratch tends to be interpreted as “let’s build a half-assed web service/Electron app” these days.


FreeCAD needs a drastic UI/UX overhaul and then some serious funding to get at the same level of todays CAD software.


I agree the FreeCAD UX could use some improvements, but I think even more important would be improving reliability and feature coverage in the OpenCascade CAD geometry library it uses. Slightly more complex things like fillets, lofts, nurbs surfaces are very limited and unreliable today. Mixing any of these with booleans tends to create more trouble.

Blender on the other hand is very solid in the modeling department, in my experience. The mesh based approach certainly helps, but not depending on an external organization for the core geometry functionality does not hurt either.


>> but I think even more important would be improving reliability and feature coverage in the OpenCascade CAD geometry library it uses

I've been wondering what portion of the FreeCAD "problems" people report are actually issues with OpenCascade. I don't have time to deal with any of it, just a question that pops into my head when I see complaints about FreeCAD. When I have time I spend it in Solvespace, which is decades behind commercial CAD but is so much more fun.


Completely agree with this, OpenCascade is just not a good enough foundation to build a CAD package at the same level as SolidWorks or Fusion360. The unfortunate thing is that the level of investment to build a kernel of that quality is in the 10s or millions dollars. Without a corporate backer who wants it, it won't happen.

The only way I could see it happening is if a consortium of large companies decided that they wanted to drop the big players and build an open source one. It needs a visionary in the position to decide to do it.


I've been using various CAD programs, and IMO, FreeCAD UI/UX is quite ok. If you are Inventor or Solidworks user and try to switch to SolidEdge for example, it won't be easy. Not to mention some others like VariCAD (~30 years old professional MCAD)

There are many issues with FreeCAD being OSS alternative to professional MCAD software, but UI/UX is not one of them


I can't think of another OSS desktop app that comes close to the success of blender and firefox. How did blender do what Gimp etc couldn't?


I'd like to throw in OBS Studio as well. There's absolutely no software even close to the quality and functionality of it.


What's the android security flaw? As far as I've read pegasus has 0 click exploits on iOS that has successfully infiltrated hundreds of people. I couldn't find documented android examples.

I've read android has some malware that you need to click "allow from web" and manually install.

I have some sensitive stuff on my phone so security is my number 1 reason for getting an Android.


I don't really need another reason to doubt democracy.... Hahahaha

Just keep your head down, the crowd is often wrong.


Is technical limited to the publically available numbers?

Or reading a vision statement, watching commercials, etc.... Because that is getting less technical and more feely.

With some exception (Tesla), technical analysis has major limitations. I don't really have time to figure out if a CEO has new back pain and started taking opioids.

There's a reason index funds are so popular. You hold a belief that growth will continue. You basically need that belief anyway when investing in individual companies.


Technical analysis is a pattern and geometric-based form of financial divination typically starting with candlestick charts. It's not that the haruspices of technical analysis couldn't incorporate other instruments, but the vast majority don't. While it would be fun to see a numerologic or arithmancic approach to 10-Ks for example, it might be pulling back the veil a bit too much.


Financial divination is a good way to put it.


I'm having our third kid in December and we need a bigger car.

No idea what to do. Wait? Used are the same price as new.


Be patient. There's about to be a glut of available vehicles [1] in the near future. The boat market is also showing the same signs.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/gen-z-millennials-...


US new car sales are still more than 2,000,000 fewer per year than pre-pandemic (about a 12% drop) [1], mostly because of restricted supply. A less than .5 percentage point change in default rates is not nearly enough to close this gap.

[1] https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/usa-auto-industry-total-sales-...


Another article about glut of available boats.

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2022/09/worlds-largest-cruise-shi...


Cast a wide net using the dealerships' Internet Sales desk ONLY and expect your search to take longer than pre-COVID times. You might be able to find the car you want at a reasonable price... a few hundred miles away. And don't be afraid to walk if the dealership tries any shenanigans when you show up. If they know you drove X hours to get there, they may try to leverage that information.


I bought a new car recently that there was very little haggle room on but at least no markup (other than the doc fee, etc.) Also took 6 weeks. But I did get a $15K trade-in on a 75K mile, 11 yo car with visible body damage. I was shocked. That must suggest something about used car prices.


The dealer I bought my 2018 Toyota from has been hassling me for the last couple of years trying to buy it back. Only recently have they backed off.


Used car prices have been dropping a lot recently. Like almost 1% each week in the wholesale market over the last 6-8 weeks.

This YouTube channel discusses it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb8H8sTNiRc

Prices are still too expensive on used cars, but the prices are getting better and likely will continue.


Is there a reasonable chance that the vehicle you want will be ready by then? In your shoes I'd try to place the order. Otherwise I'd get something a few years old (2018+). In 24 months it'll be ridiculously messy anyways, and I think a 20k mile difference is negligible these days.


> In 24 months it'll be ridiculously messy anyways, and I think a 20k mile difference is negligible these days.

Is something predicted to happen in 24 months, or do you just mean that we don't know and can't reasonably predict it?


I think they're referring to 3 kids making a mess of any car given 24 months.


I'm saying that children are very messy, so no need to worry about a car looking new.


> I'm saying that children are very messy, so no need to worry about a car looking new.

Oh, that makes more sense. I thought that, in "In 24 months it will be ridiculously messy", 'it' referred to the state of the car-buying market, rather than to a car itself.


If you can afford to risk $250 (non-refundable order fee), then put in an order for a Model Y. At least to have the option. Then go test drive one. Don’t brush this idea off without doing an actual test drive. Not a ride. A drive. Orders put in now have delivery as soon as December.


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