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bayareanative

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I know which is worse: it's not 737 NG's Ducommun's substandard critical structural parts, underpaid subcontractor software engineers in India or Boeing monetizing safety as optional extras... it's the systematic, systemic corruption of safety regulatory protections capture allowed this to happen. Planes didn't fall out of the sky 30 years ago because enforcement entities actually had resources and tried to do their jobs.

The inescapable problem is that all newer planes from Boeing and likely other manufacturers are suspect in uncountably tens of thousands of ways because they cannot be presently assured (without engineering reviews, inspections and documentation) to be fit for passenger travel due to the lackadaisical regulatory climate in which they were developed and manufactured. The 787, 737 NG (-600 and up) and 737 MAX are just the tips of the known problems. And now Boeing wants a folding wing plane too?

Spain and the south of France will be bad. And, Spain is already desertifying like crazy and climate models show it's screwed long-term. I would expect climate refugees leaving the Iberian peninsula in greater numbers soon, farmers in Spain are already leaving (I saw a docu by Journeyman Pictures on Spanish olive orchards dying and being abandoned).

Chips are different because it costs more to reverse/reengineer them, but once engineered (or copied) for manufacturing, it's trivial to make more. Software and physical design is more difficult to control.

Apple and Samsung already exploit slave labor indirectly throughout the entire supply chain from sulphur mining, rare earth elements mining in the ocean and final assembly. Depending on China might be a stupid move if it suddenly decides to enact sanctions to harm the US economically... it would be a huge hit domestically but it might be necessary for a pretext to war (if foreign relations policies change).

"Regulations" is a terrible word conflating and FUDing necessary protections with unfair restrictions. Deranged, all-or-nothing libertarians mindlessly cargo-cult refrain "regulations and government are evil becus government" is typical of bombastic, utopian drivel. Laws vary in harm, protection and/or benefit by degrees and by circumstances... nuance FTW. Most of the time, corporate capture of government's policy-making leads to inaction on major issues, corruption, military-industrial-complex self-dealing and capitalist-class-leaning grotesque inequality.

Remember that stable democracies always have the potential become authoritarian dictatorships. History is littered with examples: France, Germany, Japan, Chile, Turkey and to a lesser extent, the authoritarian strongmen who were elected in the US, India, Brazil, Venezuela and many more.

They will have to pull encryption from my cold, dead hands. And I'll strongly consider making a 80% lower legally-unregistered gun if things get any more insane, because stuff is going off a cliff 1930's-style.

[dead] 7 years ago

Yes. Exactly. I waited for a hour for it to stream to Youtube to skip their bombastic nonsense and Creepy Corporate Joe. They should've tested them down to 8 at the beginning to hold a series of debates every couple of weeks. This debate series was boring and low-signal, hurting civic participation in general.

[dead] 7 years ago

Yeap. The two part debates had a few great candidates weighed down and split with aspirational and corporate candidates. And the moderators were horrible, neoliberal corporate hack$.

Jimmy Dore, George Galloway, Ro Khanna and Noam Chomsky are some of the only people qualified to interview candidates for POTUS.

Evernote stumbled and failed to execute so many times. The got hacked, had a clunky/yucky UI forever and lost people's notes. Plus, like a meal kit service or taxi app, they didn't have anything that was inherently defensible. That's why they failed.

Yes, this. I'm surprised they're not labeled as scary "socialism" and replaced with public-private "partnerships" with commercial ads, membership fees and overpriced concessions. It seems the public commonwealth is being cannibalized for vampiric exploitation at every opportunity. You can't sit down anywhere, because it's been replaced with a sterile multi-use zoned commercial areas with a Code of Conduct* without buying something. Remember water fountains and public parks? Not anymore.

*I ate at this food truck in Austin that was in a mixed-use commercial area that had a 12 term CoC. These places typically have control-freak power-trip mall (wannabe) cops.

RPN FTW. Good ol' LISP. :)

In Haskell, you can turn any function into an infix operator with backquotes. As a qualitative, nonfunctional stylistic, ergonomic opinion, I find Haskell much more flexible and beautiful than the ugliness of most brace-, paren- and prolixity-heavy languages. It can present too many features for pragmatic use, orthogonal to something in another domain like Rust or Go for effective software production where features are intentionally constrained or disallowed.

R, SAS, Octave, Mathematica, MATLAB, Excel (lol), FORTRAN and many more come to mind. Julia seems more like flavor of the month.

As an example, I know of a Monte Carlo nuclear reactor simulator that was written in tens of millions of lines of Fortran over a period of 3+ decades by non-software engineer nuclear engineers.

Also, have you used an HP 48 calculator? You can snag an emulator app and a ROM to use it on most smartphones, and it does integration and derivation.

Everyone should watch the Louis Rossmann channel before lionizing, much less even saying anything good about modern MBP's they don't seem to understand what's been lost and what sucks. It's not been a long-lasting product for at least 5 years:

- the batteries are glued in, making them very difficult to change

- there's no locking slot

- GPU goes out

- the unencapsulated (motherboard) is very susceptible to any humidity, which leads to corrosion

- the JTAG shorts out traces

- the keyboards are crap: noisy, fragile and have to be ripped out violently with pliers

- display cable goes out

- no availability of official replacement parts

- no official component-level repair leading to unnecessary e-waste and unnecessary charges

- no longer has MagSafe

- thin, bendable and fragile

- extremely overpriced

- overcharged for repairs

- denied data recovery when it's possible

- community of unrealistic, brainwashed, tribalist fans who lack perspective and criticism

I have a Lenovo T480 which is 10x better than a T490. Snag one while you can, because it's totally ruined in the name of drinking Johnny's brand of Jonestown KoolAid.

At the time, no.

It depends on the lifecycles of the Soviets' assets because it was a bartering arrangement. Plus, gold could be stolen or skimmed, submarines were discrete units of barter that hopefully arrived in more or less one piece.

Six Flags' and Disney gets away with charging absurd ticket prices since parents will pony up because their kids will manipulate them into it. Especially if "all the other kids" are going or there is a school field trip. Most parents these days are too busy and too soft to disappoint.

And then there's concessions (IKEA and Costco do it).

Shopping as entertainment adventure rather than pushing a shopping cart down aisles of loud marketing boxes floor-to-ceiling.

And, they need to work with apps and games publishers to have the next Cabbage Patch or Transformers not just in iPhone-like limited supply, but as a whole launch event.