We're a development team of about 20 working on applications for small and big companies such as the Deutsche Bahn. We develop using Django and React, striving for a clean API between backend and frontend. On the backend, we've been using Django exclusively since starting out in 2007. Needless to say, we know our way around Django...
Currently we're looking for a backend developer at an intermediate level. See the jobs description here: https://www.jonasundderwolf.de/jobs/) or send me an email directly at "jvp" on our domain.
One note, however: our language around the office is German so you would need basic fluency or a willingness to learn.
> Don’t say anything about someone in email you would not be comfortable saying to them directly, because eventually they will read it.
Absolutely - I've learned this the hard way and it's giving me new appreciation for phone calls.
It's amazing how many people do _not_ remember that an email chain of several hundred pages _will_ contain something incriminating or embassaring if forwarded to someone outside the original circle of recipients.
Sometimes even that isn't enough. You have to read it twice.
I was having a text exchange with a manager on the road. Hard to come to a consensus that way. So I wanted to talk when he got back to the shop.
I texted "We can talk some more when you get it."
One letter. The issues it caused lasted for years.
Edit: To clarify. If you just cut the chord to someone, negating any chance of a constructive resolvement of the conflict, than that is bullying. It is not the same as to terminate communication, you can do choose to agree on that.
You're making a big assumption that simply doesn't hold: it's not a matter of "let's switch to renewables and keep everything else the same". Fossil fues have an energy density that's unparalleled anywhere else in nature and most renewables are simply riding off of that (the machines, factories, trucks and ships producing and transporting wind towers and solar cells are not and won't be running on electricity). Read up on EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) if you're interested in the topic.
I just read a calculation how automatic milking machines will turn a tidy profit on milk into a loss with energy costs per kwh just 10 cents higher. Milking by hand will be _more_ profitable with that small a difference.
So it's controversial because doing something about climate change involves massive changes to our way of life. Not simply switching your SUV for a Tesla, we're talking up to and including economic collapse and deindustrialization.
A 1GW coal plant requires a 100-car trainload of coal every three days.
A 1GW conventional nuclear plant is refueled by a single 18-wheeler truck, every year and a half.
A 1GW fast reactor or thorium reactor would require only one ton of fuel, about the size of a beachball, once a year. A lump of fuel smaller than a golfball would provide all the energy you need for your entire life, transportation included.
Fossil fuels still have the best energy density for cars and airplanes, but for large ships or anything stationary, nuclear is far superior. And not just for electricity; several GenIV designs run hot enough for process heat.
Retooling would be a better word. Saul Griffit (via Bret Victor[0]), calls switching to clean energy "more like retooling for World War II, except with everyone playing on the same team". The scale of expenditure and impact on the economy seems appropriate.
Not to forget that WWII was a war won by oil. Whoever was able to mobilize the most energy (in the form of oil) could win (a great book about that: Oil, Power and War[0]). Retooling in the face of declining energy availability will be a different matter.
We're not going to face declining energy availability for the next few decades. Fighting climate change is in big part a retooling of the energy production, which makes it tricky, but we still have enough dirty sources to burn to replace them with clean ones. Also, at least for now, we're not bombing each other's oil stores too much, so there's that.
Fossil fuels have an energy density that’s peanuts to Uranium. And lucky for us, there’s enough of it in the oceans to power humanity for centuries. If oil does get expensive enough and the ROI flips for economies of scale to apply to nuclear generation, we will have enough energy for SUV-sized flying Teslas in a century, no problem.
By the way, the EROEI of fossil fuel is terrible. Do you know how much energy was required to turn all that organic matter into oil? A single gallon of gas requires 98 tons of plants to grow, then be buried, and then pressured and heated until they become oil, then finally be dug out and refined.
Diesel, fuel oil and coal. Admittedly, the latter mostly goes through a power plant to turn into electricity first - with the concomitant losses on the way.
EROEI of fossil fuels is pretty pathetic. It has been going down over time for the last 100 years. It won't take more than 30 years until oil hits an EROEI of 1. If you had followed any of the trends of renewable technology then you should be aware that economic collapse and deindustrialization are easily avoidable. Maybe there will be 10 days in a year that the most energy intensive factories will have to shut down due to a combination of low wind and solar but this also means on 10 other days in the year there will be an excess of energy.
Also, realistically, do you need to transport these things on a daily basis? Can you not rent a (electric) truck whenever you need this kind of things?
Heck, a car in the netherlands is also very, very expensive. Especially if you live in the inner core of a relatively old city, which are not designed for cars and where parking space is at a premium.
I'm fairly sure most people working normal office kind of jobs could easily live without a car, especially if cities use that money to make public transport available to more "remote" regions easily.
My employer actually used this reasoning and has an office next to the train station, which makes traveling with public transport from other cities a breeze and prevents the company from having to pay massive fees for parking space.
Western-European capital city here. I can indeed absolutely get-by without a car, as I have for literally all my life.
There are certainly instances where a car is necessary, or sufficiently convenient. For example, I rent a truck when I move homes or get new furniture, and I get a taxi after surgery or a night out, and rent a car when doing something time/convenience-sensitive like hopping between locations on elaborate wedding days that involve a ceremony, food, drinks and after-party all around the city. But all in all, about 5% of my trips need to happen by personal vehicle, at most. Everything else is can be done via public transport or bicycles.
Nowadays we have ride-sharing and electric 'public transportation' mini-cars available that you can rent for 15 minutes or a few days. The costs are about twice that of a normal car, but as I only use it in 5% of my trips my total expenses are barely affected, while giving me the convenience of a car when necessary.
There's no real reason to keep a personal car myself. Actually I've never owned one, but it's become easier and more convenient over time. Borrowing a car from a friend or traveling far to a car rental, or expenses of renting aren't problems anymore.
Having kids or working very far from home changes the incentives quite a bit. But I think there's a lot of value in optimising for distance. As a species we spend way too much time on mundane travel, even to the point of inefficiency. I've seen people chase a job that pays $300 more for $250 in self-paid traveling costs per month. These are people who will pay $10 for delivery of groceries instead of spending 30 minutes to go to the store, but are willing to travel 20 hours more each month for a $50 net benefit.
> But I think there's a lot of value in optimising for distance.
i definetly agree to this, spending time on travel is pure waste. One of the best decisions for my personal health and my career was getting a job which is located 10 minutes from my home by bicycle. The amount of free time you have left because you spend a lot less time traveling should not be understated. Also, i find commuting very boring and stressfull, and living close to work has done wonders for my mental health aswell.
Yes, actually. All of those things can be transported by cargo bike.
There is a place for automobiles, and vans, in cities (ambulances come to mind) - just like there is a place for helicopters, but what we have now is a gross distortion that came as a result of more or less legalizing killing people with your car (as long as it was an accident) and giving people ample free asphalt and parking.
Haha I've done it, the Dutch are a bit crazy but yeah... we transport furniture on what essentially is a (frontloaded) trailer-bike.
That having been said, I think it's a silly solution to expect bicycles to take over logistics. I think we can all agree however that if the only vehicles on the roads were for logistics and public benefit (e.g. ambulance) that'd be a massive improvement already.
Honestly trying to convince people that a full life can be lived with a bicycle feels a lot like the problem of the cave.
There's a whole world outside the parking lots, but too many people have never even seen it; just pictures of it on travel blogs about Amsterdam, and don't really think it's real.
Edit:
In addition to gears, batteries and motors are a thing.
Speak for yourself. I'm referring to both, having spent most of my life in California and half a decade in Europe (ish - Ireland is peripheral in more than one sense).
There are some differences wrt property taxes, etc. but for the most part, roads are an all you can drive buffet, if you're in a car that is, so of course people use them without regard to cost. My taxes pay for roads but I only get a sliver of them as a bike lane on some of the thoroughfares in the city. Even the motorway tolls are laughably low; a few Euro at most barring one tunnel.
As always you can find exceptions. French motorways begin to cost enough to matter. Demand-priced parking and Express lanes in California have brought something resembling sanity to space allocation where it was obviously desperately needed. But for the most part my point stands.
I mean free at point of delivery. People using them don't necessarily pay for them (if I drive from SF to San Diego, I pay nothing to LA for the use of their roads, which doesn't really seem fair, though admittedly most of that drive would be on Interstate) I'd have no problem with tolled roads. Funny enough I would _love_ tolled bike paths - I'd pay several grand a year for them willingly - if I could even get them.
But I can't because we give roads to cars for free and that can't be questioned.
For that matter I'd love to lease some of the park and ride spots near transit so I could build an apartment on them (they're nearly free) but apparently I'm not allowed to do that. I can't even use them to park a mobile home permanently. How is that fair?
I disagree with the concept of toll roads, at least insomuch as they're effectively double-taxing us: we pay taxes for roads already. Now you want me to pay again to use the road?
But really, if roads were not free in the first place, toll roads would basically stop being a thing and the roads themselves would become the toll.
It's a double tax because you're not paying enough for the road in the first place. I understand that there's this huge resistance to paying tolls for roads, but there's a valid reason for them for a variety of policy reasons (decongestion of city centers, insufficient funding to build out the road without private participation/tolls) that make it a valid tool for governments to lean on. In fact, the tolls allow for a more focused alignment of price vs usage (insofar as non-users of the toll road aren't tolled), which is a reasonable approach to take as a mixed pricing (taxes + tolls) model.
I think most roads should be paid for by tolls and taxes reduced accordingly. This is because roads tend to have a huge number of negative externalities.
In some cases the very act of having to pay increases the utility of the road to the user - see congestion charging. This ensures people who gain the most economic benefit from using the road are the ones using this precious resource.
Of course, your point could be applied to any government-provided service where there is a fee. The tram receives public funding but I still have to buy a ticket, after all.
Most of these could be transported on bike trailers. The bed will probably need to be shipped in disassembled form, but then again, I've never seen beds shipped in one piece.
That said, there are certainly things that you absolutely have to transport with some sort of automobile. But there's no problem with exempting such transports from a possible car ban.
So let's take a different approach: Let's find a better solution for individual transportation that doesn't require human labor (e.g. pedaling) and offers the same benefits (ability to comfortably make 500 km per working day, for example - that's average daily mileage of a taxi driver).
You seem very much in favour of cars, but also imagining that cities without cars would look much like cities with cars. Huge amounts of land are given over to roads and parking. Get rid of these and you have much denser cities without decreasing usable space per inhabitant.
But if you make cities even densier, you'll have to restrict their height. People on the first floor still want sunlight for a reasonable time :) Meanwhile wide streets allow tall buildings..
I distinctly remember the first time I looked at a overly long and complicated model class and thought: "OMG, this is a state machine!" - a shortish refactor later and it was much simpler to read and debug.
However, now I'm at a loss on how to teach the junior programmers at my company how to recognize which patterns scream "turn me into a state machine!" Several booleans triggering certain code paths in several methods is a pretty sure sign. Are there more?
This is exactly what I need - but I signed up, closed the window and now I get an endless redirect loop after clicking on "Login" on the main page. Please fix so I can try it out!
> so you need to wait until they leave until you can move into your own property.
That's simply false. You can cancel a lease with a renter because of "Eigenbedarf" (personal need) if you want to move into your own property. There's some limitations around it when you buy a property with a renter in it but in general that's how it works.
In Germany, the "basic law" (rougly: constitution) says:
> (2) Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good.
The state protects your property but this obliges you to also use it for the public good. It's not an absolute right.
> You can cancel a lease with a renter because of "Eigenbedarf"
Which has a 10 year "Sperrfrist" (freeze period) and you need to go to court if the renter refuses to honor and make your claim. Even in that case you need to prove your personal need and "living in your own property" does not satisfy that requirement.
On the flip side, this means that there is absolutely no need to buy the flat you are living in, because your landlord can't easily throw you out anyway. If you are after the savings in rent, you can still buy a flat and rent it out to pay your own rent.
We're a development team of about 20 working on applications for small and big companies such as the Deutsche Bahn. We develop using Django and React, striving for a clean API between backend and frontend. On the backend, we've been using Django exclusively since starting out in 2007. Needless to say, we know our way around Django...
Currently we're looking for a backend developer at an intermediate level. See the jobs description here: https://www.jonasundderwolf.de/jobs/) or send me an email directly at "jvp" on our domain.
One note, however: our language around the office is German so you would need basic fluency or a willingness to learn.