alistairSH

And on the flip side, I live in Fairfax County, VA and there are data centers EVERYWHERE. Especially if I cross into Ashburn (home of AOL and stuff) - literally mixed in with large townhome developments.

And the current plan - building a data center in Canaan Valley - is a whopper... 785 MW natural gas power plant on site with diesel generator backups (solely for the data center, not sold back to grid), 500+ acres of land, 2 million sqft initial building space, air quality impact assessment by the state is heavily redacted, $4 billion price tag.

All right next to one of DC's most popular outdoor/skiing recreation areas. The DC would loom over the two towns that support the entire region.

Might depend on the target reader of the doc... if it's another engineer consuming APIs or libraries, yeah, they can just use Copilot or other to answer in real-time, no published doc needed.

But if it's a customer? They might not have access to Copilot at all, or whatever AI tool they use might not have access to the source code or other material used to gen the doc.

We absolutely have the same problem here in the US. There have been a few (small number) of cases that hit the national or regional news where teens were sharing nudes of classmates, etc.

I'm questioning the parent post's contention that the "vast majority" of CSAM falls into this bucket.

Do you have a citation for that? Sounds plausible, but I'm not sure I've ever seen it stated that way in any of the related media reports on CSAM efforts.

Of course not, but many do - it generally doesn't make sense to buy if you won't stay for a longer period of time (used to be ~7 years, not sure if that's shifted) due to closing costs, interest on loans, etc.

Yeah, I'm leaning towards this new metric could actually be harmful (assuming the government goal is to increase it).

It makes sense for some families to cohabitate. Family with infants cohabitating with grandparents providing some care. Elderly parents being cared for my their middle-aged "kids". Etc.

We used the EES system in Italy, I think (cattle gates with passport scan and photo). The line was still pretty long and slow. Mostly because people couldn’t figure out how to get their passport scanned properly or they weren’t looking at the camera or any number of other things that there were signs explaining what to do and people just couldn’t be bothered doing it correctly

Sure, but we went down the same hallway as everybody who was stopping in Ireland. There was just a sign at passport check with an arrow that said go on by. If I had wanted to stay in Ireland, I could’ve just walked out of the airport.

I just visited Italy. We absolutely passed through biometric scans on arrival and departure from FCO (US passports, vacation so no paper visa).

And then again at DUB outbound (US pre-clearance, so the normal Global Entry kiosk).

All of this was expected. The only thing that surprise me was there was no passport check or any other custom/immigration at Dublin on the inbound leg. We just walked from the arrival gate to the departure gate and that was that.

Uh, you still need suspension on the tow vehicle capable of the tongue weight. And enough mass that a gust of wind doesn’t push you over a lane.

Sure, totally get that, but we're talking about a cohort that is mostly retirement age themselves... How many of those 70-80 year old Boomers have parents left alive from whom to receive those retirement funds? That's why I'm hesitant to believe the number.

Source: https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...

OK, now I'm questioning the whole thing... it also claims 17% of Boomers reliant on their parents. So, we have some substantial number of 62-80 years olds relying on their 90-100 year old parents? Seems unlikely.

33% of GenX is still depending on their parents? That's shocking... I'm at the young end of GenX at 49yo. So, a slice of the population that is fast approaching retirement age is still reliant on their septuagenarian or octogenarian parents for money? Wow.

Have you driven a Miata? Even if the ZDX is objectively better in every way (which I doubt, but I could be wrong), I suspect the Miata will be subjectively better when rated for "is it fun to drive".

Except Russell did change their rules in 2026. Yes, in theory to more closely represent the state of the market.

Sure, and that's mostly ok. I earn more than many people, some people earn more than me.

The problem is that extreme wealth imbalance leads to a power imbalance that tends to throw society into turmoil. The French Revolution being a canonical example.

Then they should buy a broad-market fund.

Like a Russell 1000 fund? Oh wait...

Pretty sure Adam Smith captured that in his writings.

Full laissez-faire, free market capitalism generally leads to wealth (and power) imbalance. Regulation is necessary to prevent that (assuming you want to maintain a "fair" democracy of sorts and not regress to oligarchy).

"People" in this instance aren't always informed buyers. Sometimes they're buying an index fund because they don't have the time to research individual stocks and sometimes it's their pension investing.

The normal seasoning period is there for a reason. There is a massive downside to premature inclusion of a stock that is initially overvalued and then settles to a reasonable/sustainable value.

Which was my point - 9-5 isn't really a thing, it's usually 8-5 or 9-6 or worse. If we're going to adjust time zone, we should at least agree on when most people are/are-not at the office/school/farm fields/etc.

Pretty sure there are studies that indicate the time shift is actually harmful - more car accidents, more heart attacks, all sorts of things.

Really, the question is which system (standard, DST, or both) causes the least damage?

Also worth noting we tried permanent DST a few decades ago and it was repealed within a year because people didn't like it. Approval in advance was north of 70% and in the aftermath below 40%, IIRC.

Does anybody actually work 9-5 (ie 7 hours assuming they take a break or two)?

https://www.ky3.com/2025/08/20/camden-county-presiding-commi...

This article seems to confirm what I stated above - he took the cameras, and was later confronted by law enforcement about it.

And even if your telling is correct, that's still theft. Similarly, I can't just take your car, drive it around, and call you later to tell you where it is.

Yeah, that sounds like the ideal solution.

Unfortunately, we can't even get states to commit to our RealID requirements[1] (which doesn't even add a chip/PIN, it only strengthens validation of documents submitted at the time of application for a driving license). And the notion of a national ID is anathema to large swaths of the population.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REAL_ID_Act

Fair questions and criticisms.

I would prefer to have colleges [elite or otherwise] be generally representative of the population by race, religion, socio-economic background, etc.

The problem, as I understand it, is "best qualified" is massively impacted by things like race, parental income, and other factors outside the control of college applicants. Society is far from a meritocracy.

You’re also deliberately ignoring the point that there might be no such thing as innocent third parties, but only people who aren’t aware they’re part of the problem, even if it’s subtle and unintended.

I was about to post the same and that's 100% my take... sure, I didn't own slaves and I don't intentionally do anything racist... but I can absolutely acknowledge that by virtue of genetic lottery (white, with educated parents, etc) I had it orders of magnitude easier than the kids who grew up on the other side of town (black, less educated parents, etc).

I said it in another comment - affirmative action may not be the best solution, but it's tiresome to see people trot out the "2 wrongs" argument without proffering a better solution to the problem.

What data do you have to support the assertion that affirmative action is no longer necessary to ensure proper representation of minorities on campus?

I'm open to arguments that there are better ways to achieve the goal of equitable access to higher eduction, but looking at enrollment numbers, the problem is far from solved.

I'm imagining something like recreation.gov in the US - it's the portal for booking campsites and other activities at national parks. It's run by BAH at great profit - most of the fees we pay aren't going to the national park service, it almost all goes to our corporate overlords.

ID chip? Is that something everybody in the EU (or whatever region) has? Is it just embedded in your driver license or passport?

[I'm in the US, we're very ID-averse here, weird, but is what it is]

You think most of the unsupervised internet time is happening at school? I mean, maybe it is, but that's an assertion I haven't seen before.