Arizhel

You could just not get drunk...

Professional musicians these days earn their living by going on tour and selling concert tickets and merchandise (esp. T-shirts). The biggest ones are quite profitable, and the concert ticket prices I've seen lately are rather high ($50 to sit on the lawn, $200+ for seats, for one big concert in my area).

The problem is getting to that level where you have so many fans that you can fill an arena or even a smaller venue.

Taken as a whole, sure, but all those things you refer to in a browser are components, probably developed by different teams or even reused by entirely separate projects. By that measure, a modern Linux distribution is far more complicated than a web browser, since it includes a kernel, compilers, multiple web browsers, codecs, etc. The Firefox browser, for instance, I believe uses the SQLite database, so you can't claim that the Mozilla devs created that complexity, they just included it.

I think a compiler is different because you can't break it apart into separate projects like that. All the parts that go into a compiler are really only useful for that compiler, not as common pieces of "infrastructure" that can be used by many disparate larger projects.

It's absolutely possible to have kids and a happy relationship, just as...

Oh, I completely agree it's possible. Plenty of people do. But what are the odds that you'll achieve this? IMO, not very good. Considering the divorce rate, and how many kids grow up with divorced parents these days, I think the odds are actually against you. I think it makes perfect sense to avoid a situation that has a greater-than-50% chance of horrible failure (and given the struggles I see my single-parent friends going through, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I use the word 'horrible').

Living in the middle states of the US, with an in-demand skillset relative to the area you live in, and a semi-frugal mindset- it's absolutely possible. In San Francisco or DC? Not so much.

Yeah, as with anything, YMMV. But if you're a software engineer or similar (as is probably rather common here), you're not going to do well in the middle states of the US; there just aren't many jobs there, and they don't pay that well, and you have the problem that if that job doesn't work out, you now have to pack up and move because that was the only such job within commutable distance. So we're mainly stuck in high cost-of-living locales (and to be honest, I've lived in both, and the lost CoL places have their own problems, such as lots of very conservative people and policies, making them not a lot of fun to live in).

It's not going to be enough, that's why. Sure, you can work more right now to try to save up money, but making 30% more money now isn't remotely enough to make up for how much those kids are going to cost.

On top of that, you have to remember that you can't have kids by yourself (at least not easily, if you're male): you need a willing partner. If you're working your ass off to save money for kids, that means you're either letting your relationship suffer because you're at work all the time, or you're missing out on opportunities to find a partner. And the older you get, the harder it is to find a good partner (really, you need to find her in college; if you haven't found her by age 25, you probably won't).

All in all, our society simply isn't set up to have an enjoyable middle-class lifestyle and have kids. You need to pick one or the other: either be poor and have kids and struggle financially, or enjoy a more financially comfortable lifestyle and forgo having kids. Also, having a happy relationship and having kids are at odds with each other, so again you have to pick one. Either have kids and look forward to divorce and child support or at least a miserable marriage where you dread coming home from work, or find a partner who doesn't want kids and enjoy spending time with her.

It's little wonder that the birth rates in developed nations have fallen so low.

I fail to see what the problem is. If you don't like their service, then switch to a competitor, or just set up your own git server. It's like this for any vendor: if you don't like the product or service you're getting, you can either bitch and complain endlessly, or you can look for alternatives. One of these choices is more productive than the other.

But there are a lot of people who build their own special purpose devices,

Those are called "hobbyists".

and all the alpha/beta testing happens with manually soldered hardware, since prepping a machine for just 10 boards is way too expensive

This is absolutely wrong. You can't manually place BGAs with any accuracy. I work in an R&D environment; our electronics are custom-built in-house at very low volumes, and they do use machines even for a one-off. Some parts can be fixed manually if they didn't get reflowed right, but BGAs cannot.

Even if you're doing boards with nothing smaller than SOICs, even there it's simpler and easier to just get a Kapton stencil and use solder paste, though you can of course pick-and-place with tweezers.

In the days of the Slant-6, cars never got to 300k miles unless they had ridiculously meticulous maintenance. Detroit cars were lucky to get to 100k without falling apart. These days, cars are barely broken-in at that age, and 200k is nothing remarkable. If you're not getting that kind of lifetime, then you need to stop buying a crappy brand.

OK, but that still doesn't explain why it's a "spectacularly bad idea" for police/DA to not bother prosecuting in cases like this. What exactly are they supposed to do when they don't have a cooperative victim? Why is it not-stupid for the victim to avoid the costs of an adversarial court case, but it's stupid for the DA to avoid a case that he or she is guaranteed to lose?

So yeah, it happens; it's just a spectacularly bad idea for the police to do it. If they hadn't declined to file charges, my friend and another murder victim would probably still be alive today

Sorry about your friend, but why is it a "spectacularly bad idea" for police to do so? What alternative do they have? If the sole victim is unwilling to cooperate with the investigation and subsequent trial, their chances of actually succeeding in imprisoning that scumbag are approximately zero. If you want to blame someone, go find the stupid, selfish woman who wanted to "let it drop" 5 years ago. Remember that old saying about evil flourishing because good people do nothing.

Soldering? Soldering for electronics is almost all automated now, and with most electronics being surface-mount it's mostly done by stenciled solder paste and reflow. The exception is for the few remaining items that can't be done that way, such as when wires need to be soldered to PCBs (though here for high-volume stuff they usually use connectors because the wires can be assembled with connectors elsewhere, and then the wire harnesses simply plugged in during final assembly).

Are you talking about some other kind of soldering, such as for stained glass or plumbing? Stained glass with real lead and real glass is pretty rare these days, much more rare than high-quality woodwork, and mainly for hobbyists. Plumbing soldering is done with a blowtorch and isn't all that difficult, but worse, copper in plumbing is being replaced by plastic which doesn't use soldering, but rather press-fit connectors. So don't count on that as a long-lived profession either (the soldering part I mean; plumbing itself will be around as long as humans have biological bodies and need to use water for cooking, hand-washing, toilets, and bathing, it'll just be easier as new technologies replace legacy ones).

Commercial construction sustainably employs a lot of people (and commercial buildings last a minimum of 50 years). HVAC installation and repair sustainably employs a lot of people. Roofing sustainably employs a lot of people (and shingle roofs typically last 20-30 years).

I can name lots of other industries just like this. You're just spouting nonsense, or you have unreasonable expectations. If you're expecting solar to employ gigantic swaths of people in this country, you're being unreasonable; you don't expect that of HVAC or shingle roofs or just about any other industry, so why would you expect this of solar?

Most of the jobs you're talking about are absolutely useless to people in foreign nations. People in China don't care about your child protection case workers, health care workers, utility workers, construction workers, and teachers, because they have zero effect on their economy. What incentive is there for people in China to manufacture stuff and send it to your country if you have absolutely nothing to offer in return for trade? International trade only works when you have stuff to trade; you can't run an economy based on consumption only, and have the rest of the world working hard to provide you stuff to consume. That "buying power" comes from your nation exporting something, whether it's manufactured goods, specialized services, etc. Otherwise, it's eventually going to fall apart. What does the US export?

Building houses is a "more-or-less one-time event" too by your logic. I don't see the construction industry evaporating any time soon.

In addition, as someone else said, there's a LOT of roofs left to install solar on.

On top of those factors, these systems will surely need some amount of maintenance and repair; the installation companies can do that too, since they're already experts on that particular hardware.

On top of that, solar panels degrade with age, and newer panels are technically superior, so just like people replace cars after using them a certain amount of time, people are going to replace their solar panels eventually (though it may be 25 years), so there's also going to be business in upgrades.

Me too; this is the first I've heard of it. I guess I never scrolled down enough to see it.

In Europe or Canada, they don't have the insanely-high healthcare insurance costs that Americans have.

All the jackets I've ever had have a zipper in front. You zip them up, and wind doesn't get in. It's far more protection than a silly little piece of silk cloth tied around your neck.

I have a terrible time with work because of distractions, but the noise pollution in a city doesn't bother me much at all. Loud motorcyclists are a pain, but it helps to live in places where there aren't too many of those (i.e. places with culture). Sirens are the main thing that you can't get away from, but those really aren't that common unless you live in a really dangerous place perhaps.

Even working in a cafe using WiFi is a nice experience for me. Cafes I've sat in don't have people yakking on their phones; I've never seen that as it seems to be quite forbidden by the unspoken social code of such places. There might be some phone beeps, but it's not that big a deal, and I don't have much trouble shutting it out.

The problem I see, and have personally, isn't noise in a city, it's noise in the workplace, because of the open-plan office. I could concentrate far better in a city park or a coffee shop than I can in those stupid open-plan offices, where I'm constantly overhearing (whether I want to or not) the conversations of coworkers, and constantly worrying about coworkers sneaking up behind me. Honestly, I would do far better having a remote-only job where I'm required to work in a coffee shop all day long than I do in open-plan offices.

If a car is approved in one EU country, it’s approved in all. If a car is denied in one EU country, it is denied in all.

Huh? How does that work? What happens if Germany denies the Model 3, but France approves it? The EU collapses?

USB-C can only handle 60W, and maybe 100W with certain cables, according to the spec. That's not enough for high-end workstation laptops. And honestly, pumping 5A through those tiny little contacts and cables seems like a bad idea.

Unlike IE and FireFox and Safari it comes from a company that is notorious for wanting to know everything about you.

That's not true. Microsoft has now gotten into the spying business, and is infamous for the Windows 10 telemetry. They're basically copying Google.

Firefox and Safari are the only ones that come from companies that aren't notorious for wanting to know everything about you. And Firefox doesn't try to get you to spend scads of money on massively overpriced but mediocre hardware that locks you into their ecosystem.

Firefox has its warts, but it's the only choice that really makes sense if you care about privacy and freedom and avoiding vendor lock-in.

The way they are now, I'm not sure. High NOx emissions I'm guessing, plus a warning light on the dashboard. But my proposal is to make the car stop operating if the tank is empty, just like it stops operating if your fuel tank is empty, and just make sure the dashboard light (or better yet some alphanumeric display or infotainment system display) gives ample warning to the driver that they need to refill it. I see Blue DEF sold in gas stations all the time, so it's not like it's hard to acquire.

And again, I'm not even sure I'm that well informed, I could very well be mistaken and over-simplifying things. If that's the case, I hope someone will correct me, but so far no one's said anything, but that's why I put that disclaimer in there several times.

My understanding (again, someone please correct me if I'm wrong or missing something) is that NOx emissions are mostly eliminated by injecting DEF (urea) into the exhaust stream, and also that NOx emissions are the big issue with dieselgate. And again, from what I read, the whole reason they didn't want to do it right was that consumers would have to refill the DEF tank too frequently, and that automakers thought people are too stupid for that and would run it dry, so they wanted it so that the dealership would refill it for them at their regular service interval, which is 10-20k miles. So as I said before, the fix should be easy, inject a lot more DEF, enough to actually eliminate the NOx per the standards, and just force consumers to refill the DEF far more frequently.

What I want to know is: why did they need to lose any performance or fuel economy at all?

Am I missing something? My understanding is that this was all because they couldn't meet emissions targets without using a certain amount of DEF. They calculated that to do that, the customer would have to refill the DEF tank "too soon" (meaning sooner than every regular service interval at the dealership, which is at least 10,000 miles).

So the simple fix is, in my mind: make the car use a lot more DEF so that it can generate the power and economy advertised, but the DEF tank will have to be refilled far more frequently (perhaps every 1000 miles, guessing). The driver will have to do it themselves obviously. And add some software code so that the car refuses to operate if the tank goes empty. If drivers can figure out that they need to put fuel (gas or diesel) in their car to make it go, and that it's going to die on the side of the road if they run that tank out, then they can do the same with a 2nd tank of fluid too.

No, you have no proof that everyone else is doing the same thing. Read the article: this is about diesel engines. Many automakers do not make diesel engines at all. Even if it's physically impossible for anyone to meet the diesel emissions laws without cheating, that still means many automakers don't have to cheat because they don't sell diesel-powered vehicles.

Does anyone have any history on what motivated the industry to commoditize PC hardware? The current trend is in the opposite direction

Exactly, this article is naive silliness in the extreme that fails to understand what drove standardization in the first place, and also fails to recognize the current state in the PC industry.

As you said, the current trend is in the opposite direction. Open-architecture computers are mostly dead; you only still see them with hobbyist-built desktop PCs with ATX, miniITX etc. motherboards, which are a small fraction of the market now. SFF computers from places like Dell are mostly proprietary (the motherboards and chassis and power supplies are, the hard drives and memory are not). You can't swap a power supply from a SFF Dell to a SFF HP; even if the electrical connection is the same (doubtful, but it could be rigged up), the physical size just isn't compatible. Desktops are a niche industry now; most PCs sold these days are laptops, and those are highly proprietary, though they may use some standardized components like memory and WiFi cards.

What drove standardization in the early 90s was the "rise of the clones": the IBM PC and its successors proved to be a good design that ran a lot of desirable software and had easily copied BIOS plus handy expansion slots, and a bunch of copycats jumped in, making compatible versions. IBM tried to kill them but failed, thankfully, and suddenly all kinds of companies were making parts for them and whole IBM-compatible computers. All the interfaces that IBM chose became standards. It didn't last though: for example, the standard floppy disks were the ones IBM chose (360k & 1.2MB 5.25", 720k & 1.44MB 3.5" later), however by the early-mid 90s when IBM tried to push to 2.88MB, no one jumped on board because they had stopped following IBM, and the industry couldn't agree on a single standard for the now-too-small 1.44MB floppies, and that's why were were stuck with those through the mid-2000s until MS finally stopped requiring them for drivers. There were a bunch of attempts at making replacements: 21MB "flopticals", 100MB Zip disks, LS-120, etc., but they were all proprietary and the industry couldn't or wouldn't choose one as an actual standard, so none of them became really ubiquitous to the point where you could expect any random recent PC to have a drive for it. Eventually the matter was settled by CD-Rs, which had their own problems (large size, and not re-writeable, until the CD-RWs).

What drives standardization these days is separation of component makers from their customers, and also sheer inertia, and sometimes efforts by large companies (like Intel) to drive standardization to improve the industry which benefits themselves. Intel drove the standardization of USB and also SATA, for instance, as well as the now-decrepit ATX standard (they also tried to push the BTX standard which didn't go anywhere). But this doesn't extend to things like the form factors of power supplies, which are different once you leave ATX-land, or worse things like laptop power supplies, which are completely all over the map (different connectors, different voltages, etc.). So where you have a small number of vendors selling a component to a large number of vendors, you get standards, as we see with hard drives (both mechanical and SSD), because that makes it easier for the component makers, but for many other things (like laptop power supplies) you don't.

The idea that an electric car would have interchangeable, industry-standard parts is a pipe dream. EVs aren't that different from ICE cars; it's only the powertrain that's really different. And we haven't seen much standarization in ICE cars between automakers, only within automaker lines. So you can frequently exchange brake parts between different models from a make (because it's easier for their engineering staff to reuse designs, and easier for their suppliers too), but you can't exchange them between brands that much unless maybe they're sharing suppliers.

From what I've seen from several decades observing the PC industry, standardization is hard: competing companies rarely want to sit down together and choose standards, so they don't unless they have a really good reason, such as a critical component maker forces it on them because the component maker doesn't want to have dozens of different versions for all their customers, unless the customers are willing to pay extra for that (which they usually aren't).

Yes, of course, but the problem is power: how are you going to store enough energy in the spacesuit to provide both heat and pressurized air? You'd need to be tethered to a good-size generator or something.

You'd also need a LOT more power than used for real spacesuits, because of the heating requirement. In space, you don't need much heat to stay warm, because there's no way for the heat to leave your spacesuit other than by radiation, which is horribly ineffective (and that's a good thing for keeping astronauts warm; it's not such a good thing for keeping your electronics cool though). Climbing a mountain, there's still plenty of air, even if it's thinner than what you're used to, and that means you'll have convective cooling, which is extremely effective (notice how it's used in convection ovens, where they blow a fan to improve the effectiveness of the heating). So your spacesuit will need some really serious insulation, and still will need to generate a lot of heat to replace the heat that's continually being lost to the the ambient air.

On top of that, you're not floating around in space, you're climbing a mountain, so the spacesuit needs to be very rugged. Of course, tearing it won't cause immediate doom like in a spacesuit, but it's going to make it much worse to have cold air streaming in, and losing your pressurization.

IMO, the whole idea of climbing one of these mountains seems unnecessarily risky and just plain foolhardy to me. If you want to see nature, go hike a nice mountain trail in a temperate climate, where you'll see greenery, trees, maybe wildlife, etc. There's nothing to see on Mount Everest except a lot of snow, rocks, and corpses, and there's a significant chance your corpse will be added to those. AFAICT, the main reason people do this is for pure ego, nothing else. That's why they walk right by people who are dying on the slope instead of stopping to help. Utterly disgusting.

Yeah, it really sounds like you have a bad situation because of shipping. It's the opposite for me, and I'm not exactly in a big metropolis here either (just a small town). It couldn't be any easier: stuff is sitting on my doorstep when I come home. Sometimes I meet the mail lady on Saturdays when she drives through my driveway to drop a box off at the door.

I have heard some horror stories from other Americans though in other regions, where they live in someplace so rural that Fedex/UPS don't even deliver without an extra charge (or at all) and they have to pick up their USPS mail at some other town's post office. But that's what you get when you live in an extremely remote place. For people living in or even remotely near any city of any size, receiving packages doesn't seem to be a huge problem here in general. People do complain about getting packages requiring a signature when they're at work, but IME most deliveries from online sellers do not require this, only particularly high-dollar ones.

If you're interviewing at several different places within a short timespan, that could arouse suspicion.

And for the practicality I find myself half freezing to death this time a year when I walk to work without a tie (around 45°F/8°C with brisk winds).

That's why they invented this thing called a "jacket".