I wasn't familiar with the PIP acronym so I asked $AI:
> A PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) is a formal document a company uses when they believe an employee isn’t meeting expectations. It’s framed as “support,” but depending on the environment, it can be anything from a genuine improvement tool to a pre-termination protocol.
Eclipse Collections also comes with an API that seems nicer than the one provided by the standard library - so it might be worth checking out even if you're not interested in primitives.
I will make any excuse to use Streams but understand the negativity. They are difficult to debug and I feel the support for parallelism complicated, and in some cases even crippled, the API for many common use cases.
Rocksmith+ recently got a piano mode. The default interface is similar to Guitar Hero but you can also toggle to a sheet music view. I haven't tried it.
I have tried Playground Sessions and recommend it.
It's pretty much their one and only chance to warn the authorities that there's a risk, so if they choose to ignore it, well, nobody can claim they weren't informed.
There can't be a competitive market. The entity that operates the grid has a monopoly on all customers in the area. So I would say entities that govern grids fall in a can't-be-allowed-to-fail-category while entities that govern generators do not (unless they buy enough generators in a region to effectively become a monopoly).
If you had a monopoly generating company and it failed then the power goes out even if the grid is up. It's just as important as the grid, but it's amenable to competition.
"Operating" the grid isn't the natural monopoly either. The natural monopoly is actually the physical space beneath the grid, i.e. the roads. If a storm knocks down a pole or some transmission lines need to be upgraded you could put out bids to any number of companies to come and do the work. If customers want to buy power from a generator, the grid is used to deliver it, but that doesn't mean the grid operator has to be an intermediary between the supplier and the customer instead of a vendor of the supplier paid to deliver power. It's not even obvious that they should be paying per kWh instead of funding distribution through taxes in the same way as the roads, since a well-functioning grid should never exceed peak capacity but using otherwise-idle transmission capacity has no variable cost.
And then what's the natural monopoly? Just physical ownership of the infrastructure, and some accountants to predict when demand is about to outstrip supply and bids should be put out to expand capacity.
> A PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) is a formal document a company uses when they believe an employee isn’t meeting expectations. It’s framed as “support,” but depending on the environment, it can be anything from a genuine improvement tool to a pre-termination protocol.