_dp9d

I do exactly the same with Apple laptops. Just replaced a 2015 MBP (that I bought used in 2019) with a 2021 MBA. Before that I had a 2011 MBA. New one is 16GB/2TB and was $700. It’s the fastest computer i have ever used by a wide margin - editing tens of thousands of raw files in Lightroom, editing 4K footage (which previous machines could not even do). I sold the old MBP for $200, so I’m spending around $500 every 4-5 years and getting thousands of hours of use.

The NY stock exchange will be successful right up until it isn’t, the only difference is that it’s backed by a very powerful military.

The last telco I worked at had a project manager like this.

She would take on a dozen small-ish projects (~6 months / $1M), and just jam them through by buying some off the shelf managed solution and using an external contractor who would write spaghetti to run tentacles to everything. She would routinely deliver projects early and under budget, which made her a stand out STAR. No other projects in the entire company were remotely close - normal was double time and budget. Green ticks next to her name, promotions, bonuses, etc.

Once I was invited to a conference call with a dozen people I didn't really know.

Her: We've tapped you as the main support person for this new system we've just deployed into production as part of this new project. I has customers live now.

Me: OK, great. Where's the documentation (there is none). What server does it run on? (Huh?). What credentials do I use to login (what?). Who is managing this SSL certificate? (What?). And so on.

I was told later that was a Career Limiting Move (CLM) on my part, because I wasn't being a team player, and I was adding friction to The Greatest Project Manager(TM).

She did this for at least 50 projects, always getting accolades while creating an absolute shit-storm for support to deal with. As the years rolled on I learned this is perfectly normal for a telco.

It would be incredible if you could write a book someday about all those experiences. I would very happily buy that book.

Thanks for all that incredible work and your insights here.

The US is turning into Russia where anyone about to testify magically falls out a window

Americans have been convinced to vote against their own best interests by decades of lobbying and propaganda.

As just one example, they deeply believe Socialism is evil, never mind the very vast majority of their daily services are dependant on it.

You mean like the police in America? Or elementary and high school? Or fire brigades, interstate highways, border security or the thousands of other things you rely on every single day that are 100% socialism.

Every time this story comes up I ask.

How did they light fire, and what vessels did they use to boil water?

I ask this after years of adventure is the Yukon wilderness, where we play the game “if the canoe flipped and we lost everything, could we survive?”. Often the answer is “not unless we luckily rescue our rifles or lighters or gps beacon. Maybe we could walk out in a month. Maybe.

I loved my 2015 MBP too.

I recently replaced it with a used MBA M1, 16GB, 2TB.

It's insane how much faster it is, how long the battery lasts and how cool and silent it is. Completely different worlds.

You’d be surprised…

The last place I worked on a system that billed $5-$10 million a month, all pure profit. I was the only one with any knowledge.

When the server was built the guy who did so never documented the root password, and nobody knows it. I was in the sudoers file, and I have no idea what they do since I left. I tried to explain it to multiple levels of management, but I lost them all the second I opened a terminal and ssh’d in.

I can tell it’s still running…

I'm currently sitting in a GDPR region, though just visiting.

The setting is visible and settable for me (it was ON, now it's OFF)

I’ve self published three books now, with another in the works. Amazon print on demand makes it incredibly easy. They’re about my adventures around the world, with some lessons I learned and observations about whatever part of the world I’m in sprinkled throughout.

The process was immensely satisfying, and I’ll never forget the feeling the first time I held the printed book in my hands. “Holy shit, I wrote a book!” My name was on the spine and everything.

I write them in LaTeX to have ultimate control over the layout and formatting, then run it through Pandoc to get a compliant epub file. Details here [1].

I have them for sale on Amazon printed and book, and kobo and apple as ebooks. I’ll never get rich, but ~$500 a month forever is really nice when I’m on the road in a foreign country where costs are not high.

If you have the desire, I highly recommend it. The learning and immense satisfaction are great. It doesn’t cost a cent, and you will have it forever.

[1] http://theroadchoseme.com/how-i-self-published-a-professiona...

FWIW I’ve published a few of my own books. I write them in latex to get perfect print ready pdfs, then pan doc gives me flawless epub files, all from the same source.

It works really well

Normal glasses are recyclable

That may be, but rem ember of the three things you should be doing - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - Recycling is the worst and should be avoided anytime the other two are doable.

He was extremely careful not to touch much, and after meeting his parents they lived in constant terror

Would love to see at least one other provider get into reusability

China have basically a clone of the Falcon 9 in testing now. Nine engines, landing legs, etc. etc.

It's famous for accidentally taking off during an engine test recently - https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/chinese-space-firm-uni...

All of the quotes and interactions I had with the local solar installers were reminiscent of the used car lot if not outright fraud.

I had exactly the same experience. They absolutely would not tell me the actual system cost, only how much I would save on my current bill per month. It felt exactly like a car salesman only talking about monthly payments, and it was horrible.

As a young driver I was given the advice that if you see a lot of oncoming cars using their sunshade or squinting into the sun as they come towards you, it's time to pull over and wait it out.

Driving with the sun at your back is never a good time to be on the road.

While the odds are he's wrong, it's always worth remembering that everything that was ever discovered seemed wildly wrong and "impossible" before it was eventually accepted as obviously the truth. Copernicus comes to mind.

If we hope to advance as a civilization, we need to discover new stuff and new ways of doing things. So in my mind we shouldn't focus on him being "WrOnG", because that will only deter others from trying. We should encourage out of the box thinking and experimentation, and celebrate people who are willing to try new things and look at things with a fresh perspective.

Does step 1 mean I can't rent my apartment from a company anymore?

Why should a company own a residential property for the purposes of renting it out and spinning a profit? I'm saying we must remove that if we want housing to be affordable.

I'd prefer if step 1 was something like "remove government subsidies to people who buy or own real estate".

This is such a classic misunderstanding of the problem. Government subsidies are not the core problem here, and they have extremely minimal impact on the cost of housing, or the availability of housing for sale.

And step 2: Build publicly owned apartments.

As we know projects like this take forever and go through literally decades of red tape and bureaucracy. There is a much simpler and faster way that will address the crisis NOW. Let humans who need a house to live in buy the houses that already exist but are being horded by companies and other people whose sole purpose to own the house in the first place is to spin a profit.

We absolutely should not let companies like Nestlé buy all the available drinking water on the planet so they can sell it for high profits, so why the hell are we letting companies (and people) buy all the available housing for the purpose of renting it at a profit?

or you strongly incentivize a lot of people to not go for this.

By very definition if we do literally anything that makes housing more affordable, we make it less of a good invetment, which means a lot of people will not go for it. We already covered that in my first comment.

Old people that own houses want them to be a good invesment.

Young people that do not own houses want them to be affordable.

Pick one group to make happy.

We can use the money they pay to fund building more housing

Now you're complicating the issue and getting away from the core issue/problem here. Yes, building more houses would be great, but that is NOT the fundamental problem here.

The fundamental problem that has to be addressed first, is that housing can not simultaneously be a good investment AND be affordable. We MUST fix that first.

Step 1 is good in my opinion, though you might need some carveouts... like say a property being held in a trust to be passed onto a descendant.

What you're saying makes logical sense, though I think as soon as you make a carveout, it will get exploited.

Many countries around the world have a housing crisis. There is no reason for a house to be held for some decendant to have it later. People need houses to live in NOW, not for them to be tied up waiting for some person to have it sometime in the future.

It's ruthless, but I would just as soon force them to sell it so someone else can use it. Like drinking water or food, it is not reasonable to horde a limited resource which then means others miss out.

For Step 2, what about progressively punitive property taxes on additional properties. That gives those with really large amounts of fuck-you money the chance to still have those sorts of houses, but they operate at a pure loss, and we all get the benefit of that tax money.

Still doesn't fix the problem.

We don't want more tax money, we want houses for people to live in. A billionaire could still own 100 houses and just run them all at a loss and not care. That's 99 people that now don't have a home because one person is greedy.

as there will probably be significant legal challenges to that

Well, yes. We're talking about changing the LAW to make this thing explicitly illegal. That means there will be people that won't like it, and interestingly enough it will only be the greedy people who are hording and stopping other people having houses that will be upset. That is what we want. If those people are not upset, we're not doing enough to stop them ruining society for everyone else.

Housing can not simultaneously be affordable and a good investment.

So the politicians either keep housing as a good investment (un-affordable) and piss off the younger people who can't afford to buy, or they make housing affordable (bad investment) and piss off the older people who already have houses.

They can't win either way.

I personally think housing should never have been made an "investment", and we should start taking steps to move it away from that. It's a basic human nessessity, and like water or food, everyone should have access, and it shouldn't be something that people make wild profit from.

Go make wild profit from commercial real estate or cars or golf clubs. Not houses people need to live in.

We need to take these steps:

Step 1: Only humans can own houses (no corporations, no business, no hedge funds or whatever else)

Step 2: Limit the number of houses any one human can own, until it's eventually only one per person (a rich couple could still have one each, but not more)

These steps may take 10 years to phase in, but they will make a big difference and be worthwhile.

Yep, climate change is coming very fast across the North. It's already very noticeably different up there since I lived there from 2011-2015. Way, way warmer temperatures in the winter, the glaciers have retreated and shrunk drastically to the point I don't recognize photos of places I've spent a lot of time.

Heck, I live 2000 miles south now, and we can see our local glacier retreating yearly with our own eyes. Also it's raining today. In the middle of winter. Not good.

I would be very shocked to learn those polls were funded by the makers of large SUVs and trucks. /s

How can any company be a competitor to Starlink when they have to pay ~$67M per launch and SpaceX's internal price is something less than half that (likely a third or quarter).

Furthermore, how can they compete when Starlink already has 5,289 sats in orbit, and their current launch cadence is faster than anything any competitor can possibly hope to even equal in the next decade.

I simply can't see how anyone can realistically be considered anything less than a very, very distant has-run.

I would argue that anecdotally it's been well over 15% at various times.

Nearly every second post on /r/movies for a few years was "Checkout this amazing old classic that's way better than I remembered, it's streaming on Netflix now!"

Also really hilarious when a new movie drops and you read the comments in /r/movies. It's so, so simple to spot the generated "I found this refreshingly hilarious and fresh" comments. "I found the character development very engaging" or "the Director did such a great job on this".

These are always in among the real comments where people sound like actual people, and often say the movie was crap.

Without the US gov as a early customer taking lots of risk, they company wouldn't exist

OK, it's like early Apple customers buying the Apple I.

Without those customers taking the risk Apple wouldn't exist today.

Still just a customer buying something, not "funding" in the way you make it sound.

Sounds like you've read up on your capitalism.

If your little tale was true, the USA would have cheaper and better healthcare than developed countries that have free healthcare.

That is not the case. Your little tale doesn't have to always be true, there are other ways of doing things in this world.

surely you mean a new Twilight book/movie. /s