LeonB

Om shared with me some very personal thoughts and I think I’m not alone in considering his loss immeasurable.

That doesn’t seem right - off the top of my head I think it’s more like 4 years? maybe it should be “103*4/2/52” (not “/12”) ?

… hopefully the effective wait time is considerably shorter if a long line is taken as a demand signal, leading them to buy more.

That definition hinges on their definition for “economical” - adding a qualifier like “excessively economical” would’ve been good I think.

Herodotus wouldn’t have written it quite the same — no Jupyter notebook for example, Jupiter being a Roman term; the nearest equivalent for the Ancient Greeks was Zeus.

Finally C# will have a more idiomatic way to represent this classic code example from “The Daily WTF” in 2005 —

    enum Bool 
    { 
        True, 
        False, 
        FileNotFound 
    };

…months after it began.

You must be referring to the abridged Strnk n Wyt

In Superman III, the eponymous man straightens the leaning tower of Pisa, and in Superman II he spins the earth backwards to reverse time.

A better idea would be to un-tilt the earth’s axis, thus getting rid of variable day lengths, annual seasons, the need for DST etc, just one enjoyable spring day, every where, all year round.

Yurchick was one of 21 people that had been indicted for conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute kilogram quantities of methamphetamine in Texas and elsewhere from August 2019 to March 2021 … Yurchick subsequently pleaded guilty to that charge on February 1, 2022

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icy_Blu

Feel free to dig deeper, I’ve only taken a shallow look.

Interesting point.

It’s a kind of reframing (or consequence of) the bullshit asymmetry principle.

Yes, absolutely.

The survey could say, “given that the existence of corporate monopolies demonstrates weak and non functional governments, should governments a) cede more power to the monopolies, or b) pretend to claw power back from the monopolies?”

Absolutely.

They hand-wave tremendously complex questions, in such a way that the respondent is free to interpret them any way you wish.

A similar survey question might be:

I am thinking of a number. Is it, a) too high or b) too low?

A “ministry of truth” would (I assume) be a part of the executive branch of government.

Whereas the creation of laws and the interpretation of laws are powers that the executive branch does not have, and are held separately by the legislative and judicial branches.

In a, well, y’know “functioning” democracy. Apparently.

These days, American meat is absolutely overflowing with antibiotics. I don’t know if there’s any kind of serious effort to address that

There’s several clearly wrong claims in that paragraph alone.

Here’s one counter claim with sources:

https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/antibioticresistance...

“Less than 0.5% of all meat samples tested in 2018 contained detectable antibiotics (U.S. Residue Program). Farmers, processors, and regulatory agencies work together to get this number to zero.”

Please challenge the thoughts you carry around. Sometimes it’s isn’t so.

Recently I had the screen replaced on my child’s iPad. The tech asked for passcode, and I refused to provide it. The tech complained and said when I came to pick it up he’d need to guide me through some things.

Indeed, there were some settings that needed to be set, to ”help” the new screen.

Having said that — I’ve previously documented a case (well over 10 years ago) where I caught a local PC repair company who used their access to a machine of mine they were repairing - to quickly scan through the thumbnails of our personal photos, and look closer at any image which showed any flesh.

People expect to be trusted but don’t act in a trustworthy manner.

There’s never a train when you want one, but when you don’t they’re everywhere!

He’s not that popular, but Billy Pilgrim keeps wandering back and forth in time, buying up all the Vonnegut books, juicing the figures.

What Billy really wants is a good Kilgore Trout book, but the supply of those seems to be dead. So it goes.

Take a slow and steady look through every second-hand book store within travelling distance.

You might find it or you might not. But the search will be far more interesting than browsing any website.

Chance of Iran launching a nuclear strike on the US has gone from 0% to 0%.

Chance of terrorist activity on US soil in the next 10 years has increased.

I don’t think it’s improved things for the US.

A community where every household does not have guns is safer than one that does: but not for a simple reason like “because we have the police which is meant to give security to people”

A safe community isn’t one where people are held in check by police. People are not roving around thinking “oh I’d break and enter and murder and rape but for the fact a police officer might shoot me.”

People in such a community lack guns but they do have things like a working public health system, decent education, daily encounters with other people that are positive and so on.

The threat of police shootings is not what makes a safe society safe.

Constructive, open and fair trade is the equivalent at an international level. Cooperative and trusting. Not staring down the barrel of each other’s guns.

Washing machines created a revolution where we could now expend 1/10th of the human labour to wash the same amount of clothes as before. We now have more than 10 times as much clothes to wash.

I don’t know if it’s induced demand, revealed preference or Jevon’s paradox, maybe all 3.

If the King — without the support of the general populace or of the parliament, but acting in his own interests, like a king of old — dissolved the Parliament, he could and very swiftly would be ousted, legally.

The line of succession would be followed until an individual was found who was willing to support the democracy. This was proven in 1685.

They swear allegiance to the King (or Queen) — but it’s understood that a new King or Queen can be swapped in. The extremely stilted and socially restrained manner in which Queen Elizabeth (for example) behaves is because they entirely know that their family does not hold the nation hostage, it’s quite the opposite.

The parliament can (and has previously) kick out the king and put in another king.

The king has very limited power.

My Google skills are failing me here — can you provide a link, and/or some more search terms, regarding these citizen councils? Is it specific to Melbourne municipal council or other Victorian LGA’s?

I spent a little time writing software for a plastic injection moulding company who supplied parts for a range of different automotive suppliers.

You could say that they were all made the same way — they were all moulded from tiny little plastic balls that are melted down — but the reality is that there was a huge difference in the products produced for each vehicle.

The vent for an A/C is one example. To produce that piece for a Ford might be one piece of plastic, which falls off the conveyor at about 1 every 20 seconds. The same piece for an Audi would take 3 different types of plastic, and some rubbery material, and would take about two minutes per unit - as well as some assembly, by a human, before it is done.

This isn’t the factory of the future.

The factory of the future will have only two employees, one human and one dog.

- The human feeds the dog.

- The dog makes sure no one touches the equipment.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/30/future-factory/

Same here.

I’m not saying my first website was impressive — but as a programmer there’s no way I was copying and pasting the same header / footer stuff into each page and quickly found “shtml” and used that as much as possible.

Then used the integrated FTP support in whatever editor it was (“HTML-kit” I think it was called?) - to upload it straight to prod. Like a true professional cowboy.

Bertie Wooster

“I never actually knew I had an unconscious mind, but I suppose I must have done all along, without realising it.”

Kiwis also have a larger brain than other birds their size.

The causes and consequences of this are worth investigating.

A lot of animals have an architecture where they can’t carry a large brain, so a slightly larger brain is more of a hindrance than a help.

Bipedal animals can balance a heavier brain on their upright frame. But flying animals can’t afford too much extra weight.

I’m not sure what they do with the extra brain cells, but I suspect that their specially evolved nostrils would benefit from a powerful processing unit.

(Pigs for example have a large brain both in comparison to their body and in comparison to all other animals. I think the extra processing there is largely to support their incredible proboscis. Eg their legendary truffle hunting skills.)

I think our early human ancestor’s big brain was particularly useful for visual processing to assist with bipedal running/hunting.

An “average” (whether a mean/ median etc) is a very lossy compression algorithm.

You’re attempting to describe a whole series of numbers with just one (or two) numbers.

Trying to come up with a good general purpose way to reduce/compress/aggregate data via a lossy algorithm is intractable.

While that all might sound obvious, it can be very hard to internalise this.

(And that’s before getting into the motivated reasoning that biased actors [aka normal people] will use to preference one lossy algorithm over another)