I realize this is a joke, and that you're jokingly elevating Jira's user-unfriendliness to the "evil" level of active environmental destruction.
But given how many genuinely evil SaaS companies there are, I think it bears clarification that Jira does not do anything more evil than being a shitty product that people are forced to use by their bosses. They are not, for example, potentially responsible for the eventual collapse of civilization (which cannot be said of the Facebooks and Googles of the world).
I think the difference is just a matter of opportunity, not merit.
If Atlassian had the opportunity to become a Google-like company, threatening humanity's existence, as you suggest, Cannon-Brookes wouldn't have stopped it. He would in fact pursue it, become a trillionaire and then use a good portion of the money to do charity or green stuff to make it up for the evil he's done.
It's what our culture tells people to do since Roman Christianity values were imposed mainstream. You don't have to do it right, just regret, donate your wealth and ask for forgiveness.
The actors in the story have changed. There's no confessionals anymore, for instance, but the underlying story is the same...
> If Atlassian had the opportunity to become a Google-like company, threatening humanity's existence, as you suggest, Cannon-Brookes wouldn't have stopped it.
This is tantamount to saying, "All companies of equal size are equally evil." Or maybe it's: "No one has morals, given enough opportunity to become wealthy."
While I think there is some sort of trend there, you have no justification to speculate that Cannon-Brookes is not an outlier. There are lots of people who are more moral than other, less-wealthy people.
Well, let's clarify two things. One is a fact. The other is an opinion.
He wouldn't be able to stop it. That's a fact. Diluting himself by taking loads of VC, subjecting himself to a money-driven Board. He just wouldn't be able to stop it.
You can argue he would have not pursued it, that he'd step out before his company became sort of an evil Facebook. My opinion is that the moment he accepted the fact above, it tells me he wouldn't step down. He'd profit from it. And later use the money for good causes to "compensate" and look good to society.
I accept he could have been an outlier, just don't think it's remotely likely.
How do you figure that? Jira is absolutely the kind of slow drag that destroys civilisation. Facebook and Google make things that empower people, for good or ill; Jira makes it impossible for anyone to do anything. Personally I believe in the positive side of human agency.
> Jira makes it impossible for anyone to do anything
This is like arguing that pencils and paper are evil because Trello (or whatever) exists.
Jira is slow, but it's faster than what people did before it.
And I have efficiently built and shipped ~10 projects on Jira, so I know it's not that bad.
I use ClickUp now, and Jira is maybe 5-30 seconds slower per action than Jira. It adds up to, maybe, 30 min of saved time per day across my whole team.
> Jira is slow, but it's faster than what people did before it.
That's not my experience. Most of what people do on Jira is stuff they just didn't do before; there's no benefit, only cost.
> And I have efficiently built and shipped ~10 projects on Jira, so I know it's not that bad.
Hmm, did you have access to edit workflows or something? It can be "not that bad", but the defaults and the way it nudges people mean it's bad unless you - or rather, all too often, the person above you - is making a serious effort to ensure it's not bad.
We've just switched from Jira to Azure DevOps. We run a global BI team and we're all really liking it. If you haven't seen it, it could be something worth checking out as it includes the board/wall, wiki, estimation, repos, build pipeline and lots of other stuff in one place.
We went from a working Azure DevOps to Jira, now we have an absolute mess but upper management loves it despite it being less productive and causing more problems than it solves.
Yep, JIRA is successful because The Boss Wants It. I’ve seen this repeatedly. No idea how Atlassian pulled that off.
It’s not that JIRA is awful. It’s just that it’s not that good, and I don’t understand why it became popular, let alone Unicorn popular.
But good luck to them. They got an outcome most of us only get to dream about. And MCB is at least (apparently) doing good with that money, instead of spending his fun time stealing land in Hawaii.
No, not by a some orders of magnitude. AGL reported carbon emissions of 42Mtpa in 2019-20. According to [1], the combined carbon emissions attributed to all the datacenters in the US is 31.5Mtpa, so 75% of AGL's emissions.
So even if Atlassian tools around the world used as much processing power as all the datacenters in the US (of course in reality it's orders of magnitude less), the carbon saving of a 20% reduction would only be 6.3Mtpa, or 15% of AGL's emissions.
Early days in a longterm plan. AGL board rejected the takeover. I think shareholders know its a net negative longterm asset and the proposed (by AGL board) dismemberment is an attempt to get stranded assets ring-fenced.
An observation I've read online is that MCB can wait 6 months and rebid for less, the future for AGL is very rocky. If the liberal government lose power in the coming federal election their assumptions about price support are toast.
Coal powered electricity has been in decline since the 5 minute bidding came into law, and before. It's also horrendously unreliable now.
> An observation I've read online is that MCB can wait 6 months and rebid for less
Problem is then the company may have split (as they are planning), or locked in that process. He doesn't want to buy half of AGL is my understanding, he wants it as a whole.
They can take a controlling stake, stop the split, then issue a takeover for the rest, but they're unlikely to need to, the shareholders have already voted with their feet.
The coal price [0] is completely out of control. When there is that much money on the table, it is impossible to have any impact by buying a company and shutting down coal fired plants early.
AGL is more at risk of shutting their coal plants down because they can't afford the coal than because of any boardroom activism by M C-B.
Although I would be buying coal mines if I had that sort of money. Not to shut them down, but to get rich.
I don't understand what you are suggesting, doesnt high input prices for coal-fired electricity and an energy company using less of it both move in the same direction?
Cheap coal would seem to be more of an issue for his takeover plan.
Coal plants are indeed doing a great job of making themselves extinct around the world. The problem is countries like Australia where they manage to defer that inevitability through government handouts, protectionist legislation, and overtly anti renewables policies. High prices help. Unstable prices help more. Coal mines are going to have a tough time dealing with rapidly dropping demand and making the necessary investments to keep on operating. Though prices are high, that's mostly because of competing mines not managing to survive. Nice for the ones that remain; but opening a new coal mine would probably be an investment that would be problematic mid to long term.
Either way, Atlassian speeding things up a little might have a positive impact. Either way, the Australians could do more to nudge their country towards being a bit less dependent on burning stuff to keep their ACs going. It's not that hard. Most of their cities are close to oceans (with lots of wind power) and the continent is well known for having a lot of exposure to sun light throughout the year. Also, it does not have much of a winter even in places like Melbourne and Adelaide on its South coast, which have a latitude (37 degrees South) that is comparable to that of places like California (Santa Cruz), Northern Africa, etc. in terms of amount of sun light.
coal prices in s/New Castle/newcastle/ -- what is this?? can someone say why the price of coal in bulk appears to have raised 3x in 2021? bonus for why that chart shows numbers in the future without apparent change in typesetting from current (real?) numbers
Odd side note but i see they’re spelling it “NewCastle” which prompted you to make it two words. I assume it’s in reference to the Newcastle coal port? Can anyone confirm. I grew up in the town, so the spelling caught my eye.
China's electricity consumption surged in 2021. There has been 14% more electricity produced by coal plants. Domestic coal supply has not kept up, so imports of coal and gas into China went up and prices increased.
> bonus for why that chart shows numbers in the future without apparent change in typesetting from current (real?) numbers
These are the current prices for "futures". The date is when the coal will be delivered.
As the delivery date nears, the price for the contract will converge to the spot price (assuming there is a spot market). For the dates in the past, the price shown is the last price before trading of that futures contract was halted.
The large thermal coal producers in Australia eg Whitehaven or Yancoal probably have a nett negative worth at this moment. Yes, they are currently selling coal for a high price but that will not last more than 2-3 years. Then the mines are worthless and you have a huge clean up bill.
Using most DCF models the mines are worth nothing or less.
The coal price being out of hand is what kills demand long term. It isn't like prohibition where taking it off the market is a subsidy to drug smugglers.
Controlling stakes in large public companies typically go for at least 25% above the trailing 52 week average. This wasn’t a serious offer, instead they are probably aiming to get media attention and traction for a long boardroom battle ahead.
Bear in mind though that this is a company whose share price has dropped 66% in value over the last 5 years and is down 21% in the last 12 months. They're trying to re-structure at the moment, so this presented another option to shareholders.
You may call me sceptical, if my face gets wrinkles, when I think of the combination of Atlassian, one of the worst offenders in terms of CPU load when loading any page of their platform, be it Bitbucket, Jira or the Atlassian wiki, and therefore energy waster, is to buy a big polluter, to "make it green". Perhaps Atlassian should focus on actually getting their software in order first, and become greener that way.
AGL is responsible for 42Mtpa of carbon emissions (2019-20). That is more by a decent margin than the combined GHG attributed to all the datacenters in the United States (31.5Mtpa according to [1]).
> Better to build an entirely new product from scratch.
We had bugzilla and a variety of others and they were pretty horrible back in the 00s. Then Jira came along and it was modern and fast (-ish), then I guess they followed the route of multi-b(m)illion clients that wanted X, and got it, at the cost of speed and simplicity for the rest of us.
Perhaps we're at another inflexion point for another better, faster, bug tracker (or maybe github's built in one has eaten that market). Just like IM, IRC -> YahooIM/MSN Msger -> Slack/Discord/Teams, or editors notepad/vim -> emacs/notepad++/sublime -> vs code.
> Do we really need “funny” comments like this on HN?
I am not sure, where you got the impression, that my comment was supposed to be funny in any way. Maybe you are over-interpreting a little. It is rather supposed to express sadness about the state of things. I think it is our right to hint at such things, whenever an offender like Atlassian is mentioned. Their bad practices need to be exposed and talked about.
> Do you genuinely believe that Atlassian could be a significant polluter at the scale of AGL?
I never said anything about "on the scale of". Where did you read that? I am saying, that Atlassian is a big offender and energy waster through their bad software.
OK, you are really interpreting words in the worst way possible. So I will write it less ambiguously:
Atlassian is a big offender in terms of page load times and energy consumption associated with that and therefore energy waster through their bad software. In the realms of how much energy you can waste with a bad website, they are probably somewhere close to crypto currency miners while loading any of their pages, since they give multiple cores a 100% usage at page load time.
Just because you put something into relation with something even bigger, it does not suddenly become no longer a problem or irrelevant. If we went by that methodology, we would never fix the tail of not-the-biggest offenders. We need to fix things on all ends. Offenders stay offenders, even when there are much bigger offenders. It is only right to also call them out for what they do and what I witness day by day. It is as well a hint at others, who also waste lots of energy with their bad websites. It is not only Atlassian. There are many examples of basically rendering a static page with a few words, but loading multiple seconds for that.
Well, they've got serious investors and serious money at stake. Why is the concept of long distance HVDC cables, large energy storage and reusing flat, sunny land to generate power seem to be "pie in the sky"?
There were a bunch of projects like this (Xlinks in the UK, a big German one and a few others) based around the idea of generating solar electricity in northern Africa and selling into Europe via HVDC cables under the Mediterranean.
What has killed these projects (although Xlinks are seemingly still releasing press releases on a regular basis) is the radical shift in the relative prices of the components. Laying HDVC cables under the sea was and remains expensive while the price of solar PV panels has dropped by nearly 90% in a decade.
As a result, the economics don't really add up any more. The capacity factor for a typical solar PV panel in northern Africa is about double that of one sited in northern Europe. But this increased efficiency cannot be exploited. It's now significantly cheaper to simply install twice as many PV panels in the north of Germany than install half the number of panels in the Sahara AND build 1000km of transmission to get the electricity to the markets in northern Europe.
There are other disadvantages also; the energy security is much worse - having transmission lines passing through a bunch of other countries - some of which are politically unstable. Also sub-sea interconnectors take years to provision - you might be looking at a decade long project while siting the panels locally means a year or couple of years project at most.
As a lay-person, I wondered about using solar power in Africa and then shipping ammonia to Europe (or wherever). https://www.ammoniaenergy.org/articles/round-trip-efficiency... says that using fuel cells as transport yields only about 19% efficiency ... but that's comparable to 20% efficiency for fossil fuels. It's much better for stationary projects, up to twice as much.
But as you say, it seems much better to build much more solar power capacity locally. If the local utility makes ammonia (or some other form of storage) to store for the winter, that seems to make more economic sense.
Singapore for example, is a small dense industrialized island, and they dont have any good alternatives.
You end up importing power over 2000km from the cheapest solar resource in the world (~20% power loss panel-to-home), or maybe import green ammonia to burn in generators (same panels, installed in Australia, ~70% efficiency loss).
Of course both alternatives are more expensive than cheap coal. And if you are are a grumpy old man, go ahead and vote to delay and defer and deceive.
This sounds good but probably isn’t. Let me explain.
The demand for power in Australia doesn’t get any lower by shutting down a power plant. The only thing that will happen is that the other power plants will ramp up to keep up with the demand. A true solution would be to provide new installed capacity to the grid that would price out the existing assets. And if the new capacity is less CO2 intensive than you lowered the emissions.
Question is what is that other source? If generation of the renewables is lower than peak load (times a reasonable factor like 1.5) than you build renewables. Otherwise you focus on bringing power from hours with lots of renewable generation to the rest of the day aka you build energy accumulation. If the accumulation solution is too expensive (either CAPEX or OPEX) than you have to invest in lowering that down. If you lower that down with your money, it will become more favorable for others to build this solution around the world. Others will come and build this solution of yours. This way you effectively lowered way more emission for the same money (assuming you will come up with something reasonable).
I don't know if this is the case as I don't understand these nuances but a company can be bought by an investor and then have the purchasing cost issued as company debt.
The infrastructure in place at the old - soon to be decommissioned - power stations are to be re-developed for storage of the every increasing supply of renewables. Australia has one of the highest uptake of residential PV and its massive potential in solar and wind generation for the generation of hydrogen and ammonia has triggered a significant investment in renewables. FFI https://ffi.com.au/ a subsidiary of Fortescue, Australia's third largest iron miner, is investing billions in renewables in Australia today.
An admirable project, and it's great to see a tech billionaire trying to do something like this. A major barrier can be seen in the infamous "lump of coal in parliament" video. Scott Morrison is Australia's current Prime Minister. https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2017/feb/09/scott-m...
It would be more admirable if Atlassian weren't a $5B company with a history of paying zero tax.
I consider this at best a decent attempt at making amends (assuming tax dollars go towards the greater good, which they largely do in Australia), and at worst just virtue signalling for something which was never going to happen in the first place.
Taxing revenue is silly. Atlassian has made no annual profit, losing money every year by investing gross profit into the Australian economy. This is Australias chance to have power in the global tech environment and you’d be foolish to gimp them by penalizing their investments into hiring employees. Do you want a dollar now or ten dollars in a decade when you’re taxing their big tech profits?
Or you could just tax people buying a used car for 9k, fixing it up, selling for 10k, at 10% of revenue…
78 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadOne the other hand, he helped create JIRA.
But given how many genuinely evil SaaS companies there are, I think it bears clarification that Jira does not do anything more evil than being a shitty product that people are forced to use by their bosses. They are not, for example, potentially responsible for the eventual collapse of civilization (which cannot be said of the Facebooks and Googles of the world).
If Atlassian had the opportunity to become a Google-like company, threatening humanity's existence, as you suggest, Cannon-Brookes wouldn't have stopped it. He would in fact pursue it, become a trillionaire and then use a good portion of the money to do charity or green stuff to make it up for the evil he's done.
It's what our culture tells people to do since Roman Christianity values were imposed mainstream. You don't have to do it right, just regret, donate your wealth and ask for forgiveness.
The actors in the story have changed. There's no confessionals anymore, for instance, but the underlying story is the same...
This is tantamount to saying, "All companies of equal size are equally evil." Or maybe it's: "No one has morals, given enough opportunity to become wealthy."
While I think there is some sort of trend there, you have no justification to speculate that Cannon-Brookes is not an outlier. There are lots of people who are more moral than other, less-wealthy people.
He wouldn't be able to stop it. That's a fact. Diluting himself by taking loads of VC, subjecting himself to a money-driven Board. He just wouldn't be able to stop it.
You can argue he would have not pursued it, that he'd step out before his company became sort of an evil Facebook. My opinion is that the moment he accepted the fact above, it tells me he wouldn't step down. He'd profit from it. And later use the money for good causes to "compensate" and look good to society.
I accept he could have been an outlier, just don't think it's remotely likely.
This is like arguing that pencils and paper are evil because Trello (or whatever) exists.
Jira is slow, but it's faster than what people did before it.
And I have efficiently built and shipped ~10 projects on Jira, so I know it's not that bad.
I use ClickUp now, and Jira is maybe 5-30 seconds slower per action than Jira. It adds up to, maybe, 30 min of saved time per day across my whole team.
That's not my experience. Most of what people do on Jira is stuff they just didn't do before; there's no benefit, only cost.
> And I have efficiently built and shipped ~10 projects on Jira, so I know it's not that bad.
Hmm, did you have access to edit workflows or something? It can be "not that bad", but the defaults and the way it nudges people mean it's bad unless you - or rather, all too often, the person above you - is making a serious effort to ensure it's not bad.
It’s not that JIRA is awful. It’s just that it’s not that good, and I don’t understand why it became popular, let alone Unicorn popular.
But good luck to them. They got an outcome most of us only get to dream about. And MCB is at least (apparently) doing good with that money, instead of spending his fun time stealing land in Hawaii.
IIRC one of the motivations Paul-Henning Kemp said to be having is to optimise software so that the world is greener.
While Bitbucket has some good reasons to be a performance hog (better diffs), I can not say the same about JIRA nor Confluence.
So even if Atlassian tools around the world used as much processing power as all the datacenters in the US (of course in reality it's orders of magnitude less), the carbon saving of a 20% reduction would only be 6.3Mtpa, or 15% of AGL's emissions.
1. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1
An observation I've read online is that MCB can wait 6 months and rebid for less, the future for AGL is very rocky. If the liberal government lose power in the coming federal election their assumptions about price support are toast.
Coal powered electricity has been in decline since the 5 minute bidding came into law, and before. It's also horrendously unreliable now.
Problem is then the company may have split (as they are planning), or locked in that process. He doesn't want to buy half of AGL is my understanding, he wants it as a whole.
The price has been on the decline for some time though who knows where it goes next: https://www.marketindex.com.au/asx/agl
AGL is more at risk of shutting their coal plants down because they can't afford the coal than because of any boardroom activism by M C-B.
Although I would be buying coal mines if I had that sort of money. Not to shut them down, but to get rich.
[0] https://www.barchart.com/futures/quotes/LQ*0/historical-pric...
…If you're rich enough to be buying coal mines, aren't you already rich?
Can’t burn coal if nobody sells it to you.
Cheap coal would seem to be more of an issue for his takeover plan.
Either way, Atlassian speeding things up a little might have a positive impact. Either way, the Australians could do more to nudge their country towards being a bit less dependent on burning stuff to keep their ACs going. It's not that hard. Most of their cities are close to oceans (with lots of wind power) and the continent is well known for having a lot of exposure to sun light throughout the year. Also, it does not have much of a winter even in places like Melbourne and Adelaide on its South coast, which have a latitude (37 degrees South) that is comparable to that of places like California (Santa Cruz), Northern Africa, etc. in terms of amount of sun light.
AGL is responsible for about 8% of Australia's greenhouse emissions.
The buyer's claim is that AGL is unable to make the transition quickly because they lack capital and say they'll be investing 20 billion.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/q-and-a-can-mike-can...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-27/why-china...
These are the current prices for "futures". The date is when the coal will be delivered.
As the delivery date nears, the price for the contract will converge to the spot price (assuming there is a spot market). For the dates in the past, the price shown is the last price before trading of that futures contract was halted.
The large thermal coal producers in Australia eg Whitehaven or Yancoal probably have a nett negative worth at this moment. Yes, they are currently selling coal for a high price but that will not last more than 2-3 years. Then the mines are worthless and you have a huge clean up bill.
Using most DCF models the mines are worth nothing or less.
1. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1
Better to build an entirely new product from scratch.
We had bugzilla and a variety of others and they were pretty horrible back in the 00s. Then Jira came along and it was modern and fast (-ish), then I guess they followed the route of multi-b(m)illion clients that wanted X, and got it, at the cost of speed and simplicity for the rest of us.
Perhaps we're at another inflexion point for another better, faster, bug tracker (or maybe github's built in one has eaten that market). Just like IM, IRC -> YahooIM/MSN Msger -> Slack/Discord/Teams, or editors notepad/vim -> emacs/notepad++/sublime -> vs code.
Confluence search for me is one of the worst offenders: takes forever to load and can't find anything I want. Confluence is where data goes to die.
Do you genuinely believe that Atlassian could be a significant polluter at the scale of AGL?
This article isn’t about Atlassian at all, feels like the wrong place to complain about JIRA.
I am not sure, where you got the impression, that my comment was supposed to be funny in any way. Maybe you are over-interpreting a little. It is rather supposed to express sadness about the state of things. I think it is our right to hint at such things, whenever an offender like Atlassian is mentioned. Their bad practices need to be exposed and talked about.
> Do you genuinely believe that Atlassian could be a significant polluter at the scale of AGL?
I never said anything about "on the scale of". Where did you read that? I am saying, that Atlassian is a big offender and energy waster through their bad software.
But they really aren’t. It’s companies like AGL that are the big (or perhaps mid-size) offenders.
Suggesting that Atlassian is a big offender in this context is simply ridiculous. They’re a submicroscopic offender.
Atlassian is a big offender in terms of page load times and energy consumption associated with that and therefore energy waster through their bad software. In the realms of how much energy you can waste with a bad website, they are probably somewhere close to crypto currency miners while loading any of their pages, since they give multiple cores a 100% usage at page load time.
Just because you put something into relation with something even bigger, it does not suddenly become no longer a problem or irrelevant. If we went by that methodology, we would never fix the tail of not-the-biggest offenders. We need to fix things on all ends. Offenders stay offenders, even when there are much bigger offenders. It is only right to also call them out for what they do and what I witness day by day. It is as well a hint at others, who also waste lots of energy with their bad websites. It is not only Atlassian. There are many examples of basically rendering a static page with a few words, but loading multiple seconds for that.
What has killed these projects (although Xlinks are seemingly still releasing press releases on a regular basis) is the radical shift in the relative prices of the components. Laying HDVC cables under the sea was and remains expensive while the price of solar PV panels has dropped by nearly 90% in a decade.
As a result, the economics don't really add up any more. The capacity factor for a typical solar PV panel in northern Africa is about double that of one sited in northern Europe. But this increased efficiency cannot be exploited. It's now significantly cheaper to simply install twice as many PV panels in the north of Germany than install half the number of panels in the Sahara AND build 1000km of transmission to get the electricity to the markets in northern Europe.
There are other disadvantages also; the energy security is much worse - having transmission lines passing through a bunch of other countries - some of which are politically unstable. Also sub-sea interconnectors take years to provision - you might be looking at a decade long project while siting the panels locally means a year or couple of years project at most.
But as you say, it seems much better to build much more solar power capacity locally. If the local utility makes ammonia (or some other form of storage) to store for the winter, that seems to make more economic sense.
You end up importing power over 2000km from the cheapest solar resource in the world (~20% power loss panel-to-home), or maybe import green ammonia to burn in generators (same panels, installed in Australia, ~70% efficiency loss).
Of course both alternatives are more expensive than cheap coal. And if you are are a grumpy old man, go ahead and vote to delay and defer and deceive.
The demand for power in Australia doesn’t get any lower by shutting down a power plant. The only thing that will happen is that the other power plants will ramp up to keep up with the demand. A true solution would be to provide new installed capacity to the grid that would price out the existing assets. And if the new capacity is less CO2 intensive than you lowered the emissions.
Question is what is that other source? If generation of the renewables is lower than peak load (times a reasonable factor like 1.5) than you build renewables. Otherwise you focus on bringing power from hours with lots of renewable generation to the rest of the day aka you build energy accumulation. If the accumulation solution is too expensive (either CAPEX or OPEX) than you have to invest in lowering that down. If you lower that down with your money, it will become more favorable for others to build this solution around the world. Others will come and build this solution of yours. This way you effectively lowered way more emission for the same money (assuming you will come up with something reasonable).
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/brookfield-cannon-...
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/agl-rejects-cannon...
I consider this at best a decent attempt at making amends (assuming tax dollars go towards the greater good, which they largely do in Australia), and at worst just virtue signalling for something which was never going to happen in the first place.
I couldn't agree more. I've always paid my taxes, not that I had a choice.
Or you could just tax people buying a used car for 9k, fixing it up, selling for 10k, at 10% of revenue…