Mining has changed over the last two decades, and not always for the better. I asked a group of about 50 mine managers to recall a time when they couldn't wait to get back to work after a holiday. In other words, when work was fun. One attendee raised a hand. The why: two forces stacked over a generation. Force one. Balanced capacity production chains. Cheaper cloud and computing made far more data available, which was used to balance capacity across the production chain. The